34 Exercises of Freedom
September 14–24, 2016 at Parko Eleftherias,
Athens Municipality Arts Center
You are invited to be part of the Parliament of Bodies documenta 14 public program, hosted in the Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias in September 2016. What will happen here during ten days of programming is neither a conference nor an exhibition.
We have avoided conventional museological names that establish distinctions between talk and performance, theory and action, criticism and art. Instead, we invited forty-five participants to “exercise freedom” within the building, which, not long ago, served as the headquarters of the military police during the dictatorship years. We understand freedom, with Foucault, as neither an individual property nor a natural right, but rather as a practice. We drift in history. There is a space. There are some bodies. There are some voices. But what does it mean to be together, here, now? What can be done? Who and what are made visible? Whose voices can be heard and which remain silent? How can the public sphere be reorganized?
In the Parliament of Bodies, you will find neither individual chairs within the building nor a fixed architecture. We avoid positioning the audience as aesthetic visitors or neoliberal consumers. We also reject the democratic fiction of the semicircular amphitheater. We claim—with Oskar Hansen—the political potential of the “open form.” Andreas Angelidakis’s soft architecture consisting of sixty-eight blocks of ruins (the ruins of a democratic parliament?) can be assembled and re-arranged in endless ways, creating multiple and transient architectures for the Parliament of Bodies. You are invited to actively construct this political theater every day, interrogating location, hierarchy, visibility, scale…
The 34 Exercises of Freedom aim to write a queer anticolonial symphony of Europe from the 1960s, scripting dialogue and giving visibility to dissident, heterogeneous, and minor narratives. We start by bringing together the radical left tradition with the anti-colonial fight for sovereignty of indigenous movements within Europe. The voice of Antonio Negri—one of the founders of the Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) group in 1969 and member of Autonomia Operaia in Italy—meets the voice of Niillas Somby—the political rights activist fighting for Sámi sovereignty in the north of Norway. Both were accused of different forms of terrorism during the 1970s.
Sidestepping the established opposition of dictatorship and democracy, we try to understand the failures of transitioning to democracy within neoliberal regimes, not only in the case of Greece but also in Spain, Argentina, or Chile: how freedom was misunderstood as the free market. Whereas the 1980s are often portrayed as a time of decline for social emancipation movements, one that heralded the arrival of a new democratic consensus within capitalism—replacing ideological opposition with economic growth—anticolonial, feminist, queer, and anti-AIDS fights started to point out the cracks within western hegemonic discourse. Might it be possible to think the Greek notion of eleftheria (freedom) against the capitalist notion of freedom? Progressively during this ten-day dialogue we aim to introduce contemporary languages of resistance, from the Kurdish revolution in Rojava to the queer, transgender, sex-workers’, and migrant voices in Turkey, Greece, Mexico, or Brazil, from contemporary indigenous fights for restitution to new political and artistic practices dedicated to invent new forms of affect, knowledge, and political subjectivity, such as ecosex, queer-indigenism, and radical performativity. Together they draw a different political and poetic map of Europe than the one designed by the European Union.
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34 EXERCISES OF FREEDOM
Extended Program, September 14–24, 2016
Wednesday September 14 (7–11 pm)
Introduction by
Adam Szymczyk, artistic director, documenta 14
Paul B. Preciado, curator of Public Programs, documenta 14
Andreas Angelidakis, architect/artist
DEMOCRACY IS NOT FREEDOM. FREEDOM IS A PRACTICE
Exercises:
#1. Linnea Dick, writer, painter, and ceremonialist of Kawakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a and Tsimshian heritage
#2. Antonio Negri, political theorist and philosopher
#3. Niillas Somby, Sámi political rights activist, journalist, videographer, and photographer
#4. Educación cívica / Civic Education
Sergio Zevallos, artist
Mimicking bodybuilding training sessions, Educación cívica / Civic Education attempts to “train” social coexistence between bodies. We are all civilians: Even the soldier maintains a civil identity, if only in his or her sleep. Conversely, even as civilians we all become soldiers. We become soldiers while we work, as part of a war economy.
Zevallos’s performance improvises a game of fighting and reconciling gestures, in an attempt to move back and forth between inhabiting a body with a single identity and a manifold body, a hybrid of several identities and contradictory behaviors. The performance is based on a previous work called Clase Media (Middle Class) by LOT Theatre, Carlos Cueva, Carlos Javier Vega, and Sergio Zevallos, 2005.
Thursday September 15 (7–11 pm)
DEMOCRATIC TRANSITIONS… INTO NEOLIBERALISM
Exercises:
#5. Freedom as Market Value. Freedom as Practice of Resistance
Judith Revel, philosophy professor, Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense and member of the scientific committee of the Centre Michel Foucault
What does it mean to be free when the market exceedingly places the demand on individuals to be free, creative, autonomous, and striving? What is the difference between what Foucault, since the end of the 1970s, coined as “homo economicus” and the ensemble of practices of freedom upon which we can perhaps attempt to project something like an act of resistance?
#6. Memory under Construction: Towards a Public Memory of Torture in Greece
Kostis Kornetis, UC3M CONEX-Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of History, Carlos III University, Madrid
After Argentina’s economic collapse in 2001, a discourse around body politics became strongly engaged in not only tackling but also actively working through the country’s painful dictatorial past. A project called Memory under Construction brought the taboo issue of torture within the notorious secret detention center at the Éscuela de Mécanica de la Armada (ESMA) into the public space, turning the building into a museum and offering educational tours through the torture chambers. In Greece, as well as Spain and Portugal, the recent great economic recessions have led to a gradual re-examination of post-authoritarian structures and processes—a second wave of historical inquiry. These changing socioeconomic models and political paradigms dictate a re-evaluation of social transitions and prompt questions regarding the quality of democracy itself. Furthermore, social movements from below often act as carriers of memory of a painful past. Kornetis’s comparative lecture focuses on the ways in which a violent past is treated in the case of present-day Greece, focusing on the particular ways in which the private history of torture and suffering turns into public knowledge.
#7. Your Neighbor’s Son: The Making of a Torturer, Jørgen Flindt Pedersen and Erik Stephensen, Denmark, 1981, 52 min
Film screening
#8. This is not the Place. Four Visits to Villa Grimaldi: A Chilean Center for Torture and Detention
Diana Taylor, professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University
Over the past ten years, Taylor has visited Chile’s notorious Villa Grimaldi with survivors of torture as well as alone, using an audio tour. What does it mean to be in a place of torture and disappearance? To accompany the survivors? To incorporate and translate their words? What are the survivors doing there? What was Taylor doing there? Is this an example of death tourism or does the camp perform a vital strategy against forgetting? This talk uses visual and audio material to recall her four visits to Villa Grimaldi.
#9. Between Terror and Revelry. Collective Strategies of Resistance during Dictatorships in Argentina and Brazil
Ana Longoni, writer, curator, and professor of Art History, Universidad de Buenos Aires
Both the Brazilian (1964–85) and the Argentine (1976–83) dictatorships were part of the Operación Condor, an illegal repression plan coordinated by different governments of Latin America, conceived with the aim of carrying out a policy of state terrorism that implied the systematic murder of politicians, workers, students, intellectuals, and artists that opposed the regimes. The methodology employed resulted in the “disappearance” of tens of thousands of people, and involved kidnapping, torture, killing, and other crimes. While the “concentrationary terror” (Pilar Calveiro) flooding out of the detention camps into the public space was clearly paralyzing, it was not absolute. There were also always fissures and alternatives, spaces of resistance, disorder and confrontation, camouflage and reinvention strategies for political action, and new ways of conceiving the body. Between Terror and Revelry speaks of the coexistence or even confluence of different modes of resistance—the denunciations of repression in the public space through the creative actions of human rights movements, but also another mode, which Roberto Jacoby characterizes as a “strategy of joy”: the exultation of being alive, of enjoying our bodies, and of transforming them by disobeying disciplinary norms.
#10. DJ set
Lies Van Born, DJ
Friday September 16 (5:45–11 pm)
Εxercises:
#11. Torture and Freedom Tour of Athens
(5:45–8:45 pm)
Collective walk through the city of Athens, in collaboration with ASKI archives, exploring the historical traces of oppression, violence, and the quest for freedom during the military dictatorship of 1967–74.
Tour in Greek
Starting point: 5:45 pm at Polytechnion by the Tositsa Street entrance
Ending point: Parko Eleftherias
The Greek tour is conducted by Vangelis Karamanolakis (historian, University of Athens) and Tasos Sakellaropoulos (historian, head of the Historical Archives, Benaki Museum, Athens)
Tour in English
Starting point: 6:15 pm at Polytechnion by the Tositsa Street entrance
Ending point: Parko Eleftherias
The English tour is conducted by Kostis Karpozilos (historian, director of the Contemporary Social History Archives–ASKI, Athens) and Katerina Labrinou (historian, Panteion University, Athens)
In collaboration with the Contemporary Social History Archives–ASKI, Athens.
Meanwhile at the Athens Municipality Art Center, Parko Eleftherias:
#12. The Chronicle of the Dictatorship (1967–74), Pantelis Voulgaris, Greece, 37 min
Film screening
Εpitaph for Democracy
(9:30–11 pm)
#13. Epitafios II
Angela Brouskou – Theatro Domatiou, theater group and MiniMaximum ImproVision, improvisational group of musicians
Epitafios II is a collaboration between professional actors, musicians, students, performers, and the audience. A blanket of human bodies and objects covers the floor of the former headquarters of the Greek military police EAT/ESA. At a time when the world is plunged into economic, political, and social desolation, the performance formulates an ode, a musical installation, that is in dialogue with Pericles’s Funeral Oration from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War—read by an honorable citizen of contemporary Athens—with excerpts from Cornelius Castoriadis’s text The Problem of Democracy Today (1990).
Epitafios II is open to anyone who wants to participate for personal or shared reasons. The questions being raised deal with the concept of public grief and its expression, death, the end of sexual and family relationships, everyday crime, political and socio-political turbulence, violent displacement and existential dead ends, or simply time’s passing with no return. We are expecting the visitors to express and confess—together and separately—unthinkable public or private losses. The first version of Epitafios was presented at Kunsthalle Athena in 2012.
Saturday September 17 (7 pm)–Sunday, September 18 (10 pm)
ARCHITECTURES OF TERROR, VOICES OF RESISTANCE
Exercises:
#14. Ojo de gusano: Don’t Look Down
Regina José Galindo, artist
They fell in Greece
They fell in Panama
They fell in Venezuela
They fell in Brazil
They fell in Argentina
They fell in Colombia
They fell in Ecuador
They fell in Chile
They fell in Peru
They fell in Bolivia
They fell in Uruguay
They fell in Paraguay
They fell in the Dominican Republic
They fell in Haiti
They fell in Honduras
They fell in Nicaragua
They fell in El Salvador
They fell in Guatemala
The 1967–74 regime of the colonels in Greece was just one more in the long list of bloody dictatorships during the Cold War, supported by the United States against the forces of the communist danger, as they used to say. No matter how distant it seems we are from each other, we share a common past of repression, fight, and resistance. No matter how distant it seems we are from each other, we share a link.
#15. Chronotopes / Dystopic Geometries / Terrifying Geographies
Neni Panourgia, anthropologist, visiting associate professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research, New York
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history” (The Dialogic Imagination). The fleshiness of time encloses the texture of experience: experience of pain, power, abjection, danger, and exclusion. Space indexes time and its content when it acquires them, it is imbued and made to perform dystopisms, whether this happens in the Greek torture chambers of EAT/ESA or Villa Grimaldi in Chile, on the Yugoslavian prison islands Goli Otok and Sveti Grgur, through the stories of the Western Apache mentioned by Keith Basso, or the various Holocaust Memorials and their touristification. What, exactly, becomes the object of the tourist’s gaze when such spaces are touristified (that is, undergo the equivalent of gentrification)? How can the presence of raw power be safeguarded from the brutally leveling effect of the tourist’s gaze?
#16. Lingua Tertii Imperii
Daniel García Andújar, artist
Democracy has become a matter of aesthetics. The stage of the public has become a kind of orchestrated video game or operetta with a few recited parts; this operetta is performed daily for a people overwhelmed by the consequences of the “crisis,” critically applauding a fake and pre-established, frivolous, affected, and ridiculous script in which the audience is immediately proscribed by the mass media and defused before its fellow citizens, should it dare boo from the stands.
A space for political ventriloquism.
Language is never innocent.
Architecture is never innocent.
Images are never innocent.
They are openly involved in a body-to-body fight with history.
These buildings were once a hospital.
They later became the headquarters of the Special Interrogation Section of the Greek Military Police (EAT/ESA).
Now they house the Eleftherios Venizelos Museum, the Museum of Anti-dictatorial and Democratic Resistance, and the site of the documenta 14 Public Programs at Parko Eleftherias (Freedom Park).
Take out Diogenes’s lamp and stroll through the park in full daylight to search for an honest language.
#17. Red Star, Crescent Moon / after Sohail Daulatzai
Naeem Mohaiemen, artist
In Black Star, Crescent Moon (2012), scholar Sohail Daulatzai charts post-1950s Black internationalism as an intersecting history of black Muslims, black radicals, and the Muslim third world. In response, Mohaiemen argued that these encounters did not always lead to progressive politics, especially when state agencies were involved (“Muhammad Ali, We Still Love You: Unsteady Dreams of a ‘Muslim International’”, The New Inquiry, June 2016). In an expansion of this discussion, and leading into his forthcoming film in two chapters for documenta 14, Mohaiemen explores state-led Muslim International projects of the 1970s as a sometime nemesis of the radical emancipatory possibilities of the Third World International within, and after, communism.
#18. Soundscapes of Detention: Music and Torture under the Junta (1967–74)
Anna Papaeti, independent researcher and musicologist
Although torture under the Greek military junta (1967–74) has been subject to scrutiny, with important trials in Strasbourg (1968–69) and Greece (the so-called “Torturers’ Trials,” 1975), the use of music and sound has so far been conspicuously absent from the discourse. In addition to the restrictive legal definitions used for the Torturers’ Trials in 1975, the humanistic perception of music as an inherently positive and enlightening art-form accounts for such omissions and silences. The history of music’s abuse by repressive regimes tells a different story. To expose and reflect on the elusive potential of music to damage human subjects is an exercise of critical freedom.
Papaeti’s presentation examines the use of music and sound as a means of terrorizing, humiliating, and ‘breaking’ political prisoners. Drawing on new interviews with survivors, supported by overlooked testimonies in existing sources, the presentation documents how music and sound were used in the detention centers of the Security Forces (Athens and Piraeus), and the Athens-based Special Interrogation Unit of Greek Military Police (EAT/ESA). It focuses on the practices used at EAT/ESA, exploring how these related to cutting-edge interrogation methods of the time, and exposing the genealogy of current forms of torture as they were practiced in the so-called War on Terror.
#19. Attempt. Come.
Georgia Sagri, artist
Attempt.
Come.
Undefined.
Be the point of no-reference.
Constant,
and as a state of formation.
Play.
Continue to play with the beat.
Vibrate with me, so chaos can enter.
It is an invitation.
Come.
As water.
As the beat sounds,
the senses awaken.
Move.
Unrepresented
eros
hits the drum.
And celebration starts,
for joy and grief.
Note: Visitors can bring along sleeping bags, comfortable clothes, food, and water and may stay in the space for the twenty-four-hour duration of the piece. Smoking is not permitted. A public discussion with Georgia Sagri follows the completion of the performance on Sunday night.
Tuesday September 20 (7–11 pm)
SILENCE AND MASKS
South as a State of Mind #7 [documenta 14 #2]
Silence as resistance; masks as resistance. Both, perhaps paradoxically, as means to act and to speak, as modes of aesthetic and political participation. If words and images can be put to the service of critical inquiry, silence and masks, while withdrawing the claim on self-evident truth, can help give sharp contours to political statement, testifying to the need to address the real—without, however, falling into the pitfalls of direct representation. In essay and allegory, artist projects and conversation, poetry and fiction, the second volume of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind explores issues of masking identity and silencing dissent, orality and recognition, indigeneity and exile, provenance and repatriation, and colonial and gendered violence. To launch the new issue of South at Parko Eleftherias, Clémentine Deliss, Stathis Gourgouris, and Candice Hopkins engage in a series of offerings: readings, listening sessions, and rituals, old and new.
Exercises:
#20. Transgressive Listening
Stathis Gourgouris, professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York
#21. Outlawed Social Life
Candice Hopkins, citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, is an independent curator, writer, and curatorial advisor for documenta 14 based in Albuquerque, New Mexico
U’mista, in the Kwak’wala language, means the return of something or someone thought to be lost or taken. In Alert Bay and Cape Mudge, First Nations communities along the northwest coast of Canada repatriated ceremonial masks and regalia, and now have U’mista.
#22. I Owe You Everything
Clémentine Deliss, writer and curator, currently curating the Dilijan Art Initiative in Armenia. First act of giving in the series I Owe You Everything, in the presence of Chief Robert Joseph, hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation, ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, and a member of the Assembly of First Nations Elders Council
I Owe You Everything is a project that chooses and follows a series of contemporary thinkers, poets, and activists who are invited to construct a public “act of giving,” a critical and poetic ritual, in which they give “everything” to the Parliament of Bodies of documenta 14.
What is worth giving? What do we “owe” to each other? What has to be given back to history in order for history to change? The public act of giving is a critical and poetic ritual in which an artist, activist, thinker, or poet “gives everything” to someone else. The units of giving acts constitute a chain of heterogeneous practices, reservoirs of affect and immaterial value. The acts of giving explore different cultural and political economies such as debt, gift, potlatch, revenge, retribution, promise…
Wednesday September 21 (5–7 pm)
STATE VIOLENCE / DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
Exercise:
#23. Interior Effects as an Outcome of War
Workshop with Bonita Ely, artist
You are invited to join artist Bonita Ely in a workshop to discuss the ongoing, inter-generational effects of undiagnosed, untreated posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by family members of returned soldiers. During the workshop, Ely shares her family’s experiences following her father’s return home after the Second World War. The artist has made these often tragic effects of undiagnosed PTSD the focus of her artistic work.
Whenever people suffer the violence of war—when traumatized soldiers return home, when refugees and migrants worldwide flee from war-torn countries to seek safety—generation after generation may be exposed indirectly and directly to the traumatizing effects of war through epigenetic transfer, acute anxiety, insecurities, and family violence.
Open to up to twenty participants, register at: program@documenta.de.
Thursday September 22 (7–10 pm)
THE VIRAL 1980S: DEMOCRACY, NEOLIBERALISM, AIDS
Exercise:
#24. They Glow in the Dark, Panayotis Evangelidis, Greece, 2013, 69 min.
Film screening and discussion with director Panayotis Evangelidis
Friday September 23 (7–11 pm)
POST-PORN ACTIVISM AND ECOSEXUAL FREEDOM
Exercises:
#25. An Evening with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens and Wet Dreams Water Ritual
Annie Sprinkle, activist, artist, and educator and Beth Stephens, ecosexual performance artist, filmmaker, activist, educator, founding director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab and professor of Art, University of California, Santa Cruz. Together they authored the Ecosex Manifesto.
An invitation to partake of the pleasures and perils of water. In collaborating with local artists, activists, musicians, sex workers, refugees, and other humans and non-humans.
Note: Please bring some water from your home or town/city for the water ritual. Wear the colors of water; aqua, blue, and black. Be costumed, naked, painted, adorned, or as you like.
#26. The Waltz of the Dirty Streets
Adespotes Skiles, self-organized music and theater collective
This performance is inspired by all those people who at some point, in some place, in some way reacted to what was putting them down by posing thousands of questions. By all those who, if only for a brief moment, questioned the status quo or doubted their deepest convictions—all those who experienced even for one moment a personal encounter with life and the world that fell outside of a preconceived view.
Saturday September 24 (7 pm–3 am)
“APATRIDE” TRANSFEMINIST QUEER NIGHT
Exercises:
Organized in collaboration with AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts).
#27. Decolonizing Memory: Vita Futurities in the Americas
Macarena Gómez-Barris, chair of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, New York
In this talk, Gómez-Barris asks how we might decolonize memory to activate different potential alternative and anti-capitalist futures. Specifically, the talk addresses how the evacuation of colonial and dissident memories in the Americas has reproduced settler-colonial and genocidal logics that are imbricated with and steeped in authoritarian state histories. Gómez-Barris explores spaces “en el Sur,” or Southern spaces, such as former concentration camp Villa Grimaldi in Chile, the southern territories of Wallmapu, and post-colonial formations in Bolivia to address living futurities through submerged perspectives, or rather those modes and potentials that perceive beyond coloniality and patriarchal state narratives in order to pursue other forms of seeing and being. The analysis centers on indigenous and feminist forms of visuality and communal living that interrupt normative processes of capitalist accumulation and western aesthetics. Gómez-Barris discusses indigenous experimental film, anarcho-feminisms, inverted visuality, and other forms of anti-capitalist, anti-extractivist representation in the Americas to show how these submerged perspectives decolonize the inevitability of capitalist decimation and the anthropocene, while foregrounding different, regional, queer, and feminist planetary futures.
#28. Rojava is a Women’s Revolution: Jineology as Women’s Science
Hawzhin Azeez, political theorist and activist, Kurd from south Kurdistan (northern Iraq)
The revolution in Rojava in western Kurdistan has been gaining international traction across leftist groups and organizations. Despite the immense socio-political gains and the colossal fundamental changes that have occurred within the spheres of gender, democracy, and ecology, the international media still regards Rojava from perspectives that are dominated by Eurocentric and Orientalist views of the Kurds, especially Kurdish female fighters. Less attention, even on the left, has been awarded to the ideology driving the women fighters forward, which has ensured a solid, democratic, and feminist foundation for Rojava. Media interest, if at all, has been in regard to radical democracy and its “anarchist” roots in connection with Murray Bookchin’s Libertarian Municipalism. It is, however, the ideology behind women’s liberation known as Jineology (womenology) that is the force underpinning the radical democracy of Democratic Confederalism. This school of thought has been produced entirely by Kurdish women activists and fighters. It is this ideology, in connection with stateless democracy, which requires further exploration and attention in Rojava.
#29. Trans*: Bodies and Power in the Age of Transgenderism
Jack Halberstam, visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York
Halberstam’s recent research has focused on the exponential increase in the last decade of public discussion in the US and Europe around transgenderism. In his upcoming book Trans*. A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (forthcoming 2017), Halberstam analyzes the reasons that transformed what was formerly considered an unusual or even unfortunate disorder to become an accepted articulation of gendered embodiment as well as a new site for political activism. How did a stigmatized identity become so central to articulations of self and other? What fuels the continued fascination with transgender embodiment and how has the recognition of its legitimacy changed current gender protocols in the US? What is the history of gender and how does it sit alongside histories of sexuality, race, ability, and health? Whether it comes in the form of Preferred Gender Pronouns (PGP) or even new classifications of gender identity (agender, androgynous, cis-gender), the visibility of transgender must be seen as part of a larger shift in habits and customs around classification, naming, and inhabiting the human body. While new gender protocols as expressed on Facebook and in other forms of social media seem to register advancement, flexibility, and even a decentering of normative gendering, increased flexibility with regards to gender may also be part of new regulatory regimes.
Trans* pays attention to the ebb and flow of regulation and innovation, governance and experimentation. In addition to placing shifts and changes in trans identities firmly within a matrix of gender and sexuality identities and practices, in his presentation for documenta 14, Halberstam argues that new visibility for any given community has advantages and disadvantages, liabilities and potentialities.
#30. #Direnayol (#Resistayol), documentary by Rüzgâr Buşki, Turkey, 2016, 60 min.
Film premiere
#31.Voices of Trans and Queer Politics in the Mediterranean with:
Rüzgâr Buşki, multimedia artist and producer, member of Kanka Productions
Gizem Oruç, musician, producer, and multimedia artist, member of Kanka Productions
Şevval Kılıç, sex worker, queer and trans activist working in Istanbul
Nelli Kampouri, gender scholar, Centre for Gender Studies KEKMOKOP, Panteion University Athens
Margarita Tsomou, publisher of Missy Magazine, author, dramaturge, and curator based in Berlin
Maria Mitsopoulou aka Maria F. Dolores, visual artist and performer, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts)
Anna Apostolelli, activist, currently a member of Beaver, a women’s co-op café in Athens, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts)
Tina Voreadi, visual artist and educator, AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts)
#32. Queer Indie Gig, HTH Green to Blue Shock Treatment
Prasini Lesvia, musician
#33. DJ set
Gizem Oruç, musician
#34. The Epic of Eleftheria
Irena Haiduk, artist and Eirini Vakalopoulou, writer and poet
In the East and Far East, the South, deep South, the other side of North, and the Far and the Deep West, history is mostly an oral technique. The poet is a witness. She records and weaves history and allows others contact with it through the act of listening and re-telling. During the Ottoman occupation that lasted for five centuries, Serbian history was recorded and transmitted mostly through oral means by singers called guslars. The tradition persists to the present day. The poems tell a range of histories both public and private: of births, deaths, weddings, treaties, battles, migrations, and retaliations. In the early 1800s, the majority of the poems were collected by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić and published in Serbian in Vienna and Leipzig.
To mark the last event of the inauguration of the Public Programs of documenta 14 at Parko Eleftherias, Haiduk presents the process of creating an oral epic telling of the event. The poem shall serve as a historical record.
General dramaturgy for the Exercises of Freedom:
Prodromos Tsinikoris, artistic co-director of Experimental Stage -1 of the National Theatre, Athens.
Participants
Adespotes Skyles is a performing arts co-op established in 2008, whose configuration is constantly in flux. The Waltz of the Dirty Streets is a performative format used as a vehicle of critique of socio-political reality. Admission to Adespotes Skyles shows is by voluntary contribution; the company supports free access to art and all self-organized initiatives.
AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts) is a queer and self-organized platform for artists and activists of which Anna Apostolelli and Tina Voreadi are currently co-directors and co-curators.
Daniel García Andújar is a visual media artist, activist, and art theorist who lives and works in Barcelona. Andújar began his artistic activity in the late 1980s, working mainly in the field of video, and with projects intervening in the public sphere on the topics of racism and xenophobia as well as the misuse of technology in surveillance systems. Most of his artistic projects are based on collaborative research that critically explores political, historical, social, and cultural phenomena and their media representations: body politics, corruption, censorship, xenophobia, urban developments, the cultural industries, the inclusion and exclusion of technologies, and the use of public space. Through interventions in the public space and a critical use of digital media as well as the communication strategies of the corporations connected to these media, the theoretical and artistic work developed by Andújar oscillates between territories that are real (the city) and virtual (the Net).
Andreas Angelidakis holds a BA in Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Santa Monica, and an MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, New York. Recent solo shows include Soft Ruin, ALT Art Space, Istanbul (2016); 1:1 Period Rooms, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (2015); and Every End is a Beginning, his 2014 retrospective at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST). In 2015 he participated in the 1st Chicago Architecture Biennial, and the 12th Baltic Triennial, Vilnius. He has recently curated and designed Fin de Siècle, Swiss Institute, New York (2014), and The System of Objects, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens (2013).
Anna Apostolelli studied Marine Engineering at the National Technical University Athens; she currently works at Beaver, a women’s co-op café in Athens. She has participated in queer, feminist, and anti-nationalist groups in Athens and collaborated on these issues with international groups.
Hawzhin Azeez is a Kurd from south Kurdistan (northern Iraq) and holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Newcastle, Australia, where she settled in 1994 after escaping Saddam Hussein’s genocidal Anfal campaign with her family. She is a member of the Kurdistan National Congress (KNK) and the Kobanê Reconstruction Board. She has been based in Kobanê for the past nine months where she directed and supported the rebuilding of the canton. Azeez has published several articles regarding the rebuilding process, particularly the problems caused by the lack of a humanitarian corridor into Kobanê.
Angela Brouskou / Theatro Domatiou was founded in 1993 by Angela Brouskou (actress-director) and Parthenopi Bouzouri (actress) in Athens. Its core group of actors and other partners engage in workshops aiming to expand acting methods and practices, seeking a contemporary theatrical code. The company focuses on inquiry and experimentation in the broader sense of the terms, as their main concern is to connect theater with the extreme reality that we face daily. Modern and classical theater texts, as well as classical tragedy—the main axis of their research—form the basis for their work. Moreover, non-theatrical texts serve as a means to penetrate into a field of consciousness that allows for a reevaluation of the meaning of theater through issues topical to the cruel times we currently experience.
Rüzgâr Buşki was born in Istanbul. He studied journalism at Istanbul University. He currently lives in Berlin and studies Multimedia at Universität der Künste Berlin. He is one of the founders of Kanka Productions, a transfeminist production collective. #direnayol (2016) is Rüzgâr Buşki’s first film.
Clémentine Deliss is curator of the Dilijan Art Initiative in Armenia. From 2015–16, she was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study (Wissenschaftskolleg) in Berlin. She studied contemporary art and anthropology in Vienna, Paris, and London. Between 2010 and 2015 she directed the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt/Main, and from 2002 to 2009 ran the interdisciplinary research lab Future Academy, with student cells in London, Edinburgh, Dakar, Mumbai, Bangalore, Melbourne, Tokyo, and Yamaguchi. She was the publisher of the itinerant artists’ and writers’ instrument Metronome and Metronome Press (1996–2007), which was presented at documenta 10 and documenta 12.
Linnea Dick is the daughter of Pamela Bevan and Beau Dick. She carries the Kawakwaka’wakw name Malidi, meaning “to always find a purpose and path in life.” She is of Kawakwaka’wakw, Nisga’a, and Tsimshian heritage. She spent her early childhood in Alert Bay, later relocating to Vancouver with her sister Geraldine. Between 2004–05 she was immersed in Haida culture and traditions, while based in Haida Gwaii, where her two older sisters live. Her practice is centered on helping people, and she aims to establish a wellness center for women and children. She is also a writer and a painter. Dick was one of the central participants and organizers of Awalaskenis I and Awalaskenis II, two copper breaking ceremonies that took place on the steps of the British Columbia Legislature and at the Parliament Buildings in Ottawa, Canada. The act of breaking copper revived a shaming ceremony that was at one time a part of the complex economic and social system of the potlatch.
Bonita Ely is an Australian artist. Her interdisciplinary artworks typically address environmental and socio-political issues, inventing fantasy personas, insightful mythologies, and narratives to address the causes and effects of environmental destruction, as well as social inequities. In the 1970s, her series Locust People correlated the ravages of locust plagues with human exploitation of resources. The ingredients for her show cooking performances, Murray River Punch (1979), are the pollutants contaminating the Murray River. Public artworks include Thunderbolt (2010), signaling the neighborhood’s level of power consumption. Her creative method often involves forensic mappings of environmental degradation. Interior Decoration (2013–ongoing), by contrast, is made from Ely’s parents’ bedroom furniture morphed and militarized into an incanny installation. It addresses PTSD’s psychological affects on families as a consequence of war. Ely is Associate Professor in the Art and Design faculty, University of New South Wales, Sydney, where she is a member of the Environmental Research Initiative for Art (ERIA).
Panayotis Evangelidis was born in Athens. He is a graduate of the Law School, University of Athens, and works as a scriptwriter and translator (of Japanese, Spanish, English, and French). Evangelidis has published four works of fiction and co-written a number of scripts for films such as The Attack of the Giant Mousaka, Real Life, Strella (Official Selection, Berlinale Panorama 2009), and Xenia (Official selection, Un Certain Regard, Cannes Film Festival 2014) with Panos Koutras, Fog under the Sun with Nikos Lyngouris, Ventilator with Dimitris Bitos. Evangelidis directed his first documentary film, Chip and Ovi, in 2008. Several other films followed, including The Life and Death of Celso Junior in 2010, They Glow in the Dark in 2012, and Pure Life in 2015.
Regina José Galindo was born in Guatemala City. As an artist and poet, she began making public performances in 1999. Galindo’s work received international acclaim in 2005 when she won the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Biennale in the category Artist Under 30 for ¿Quien Puede Borrar Las Huellas? (2003), making her the first woman from Central America to receive this accolade. Today, she is considered to be one of Guatemala’s most acclaimed contemporary performance artists. Galindo’s art is influenced by the violence of her native country’s past and current culture following the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–96). In her performative works, Galindo uses her body as a means to convey visual metaphors of the Guatemalan condition, and specifically injustices towards women within that society. On a universal level, her works can be seen as translations of issues of vulnerability, imbalances of authority, and loss of power.
Macarena Gómez-Barris is chair of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute, New York. Her research is on cultural memory, anti-authoritarian aesthetics, decolonial thought, social ecologies, and radical alternatives and futurity. She is the author of The Extractive Zone: Submerged Perspectives and Decoloniality (forthcoming, 2016), Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), and co-editor, with Herman Gray, of Towards a Sociology of a Trace (2010). Macarena teaches on social and cultural dissident movements, comparative indigeneity, decolonial theory, visualities and Latin American cultural thought. She is also co-editor of Las Américas Quarterly, a special issue of American Quarterly (November 2014) and Decolonial Gestures, E-mísférica (May 2014).
Stathis Gourgouris is professor at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of Synaesthetics of the Polity (forthcoming, 2018); The Perils of the One (forthcoming, 2017); Lessons in Secular Criticism (2013); Does Literature Think? (2003); Dream Nation (1996); and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (2010). He has published numerous articles on ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film and theater, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. His text for South as a State of Mind #7 [documenta 14 #2] is part of his new project on transgressive listening.
Jack Halberstam is visiting professor of English and Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at Columbia University, New York. Halberstam is the author of Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (2012); The Queer Art of Failure (2011); In a Queer Time and Place (2005); Female Masculinity (1998) and Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (1995). Halberstam is currently working on several projects, including a book titled WILD THING on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy, and the intersections between animality, the human, and the environment.
Irena Haiduk is against biography. http://irenahaiduk.com/sitefiles/AGAINST_BIOGRAPHY.pdf
Candice Hopkins, a citizen of Carcross/Tagish First Nation, is an independent curator and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is a curatorial advisor for documenta 14. Her writings on history, art, and vernacular architecture have been published in a wide range of magazines and edited volumes. Hopkins has lectured widely, including at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Tate Britain, Tate Modern, Dakar Biennale and the University of British Columbia. In 2015, she received the prestigious Hnatyshyn Foundation Award for Curatorial Excellence in Contemporary Art. Previously she has held curatorial positions at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, National Gallery of Canada, the Western Front and the Walter Phillips Gallery at the Banff Centre.
Chief Robert Joseph is a hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation, ambassador for Reconciliation Canada, and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council. He was formerly the executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society and is an honorary witness to Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As chairman of the Native American Leadership Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation and ambassador for Peace and Reconciliation with the interreligious and International Federation for World Peace (IFWP), Chief Joseph has sat with the leaders of South Africa, Israel, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, and the USA to learn from and share his understanding of faith, hope, healing, and reconciliation. Chief Joseph was a participant in the copper-breaking ceremonies Awalaskenis I and Awalaskenis II.
Nelli Kampouri is a gender scholar working since 2005 at the Centre for Gender Studies and at KEKMOKOP, Department of Social Policy, Panteion University in Athens. She teaches classes on gender, labor and social policy, and conducts research on gender and logistics; she has completed a research project on gender, science, and technology at the Foundation for Research and Technology (FORTH) in Crete. Her research, teaching, and publications focus on the intersections between gender theory, migration, precarity, and social movements. Currently, she is mostly interested in seeking ways to think of the “crisis” in Greece through the lenses of postcolonial theory and decolonial movements.
Vangelis Karamanolakis is assistant professor in Theory and History of Historiography at the University of Athens. He is also secretary of the Board of Directors of the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI) and vice president of the Board of Directors of the Historical Archive of the University of Athens. He is the author of The University of Athens and its History, 1837–1937 (in collaboration with Kostas Gavroglou and Chaido Barkoula, 2014) and The Formation of Historic Science and History Teaching at the University of Athens (1837–1932) (2006).
Kostis Karpozilos is a historian and the director of the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI). He is the scriptwriter of the documentary Greek-American Radicals: The Untold Story (2013), author of Stavros Kallergis Archive. Building Blocks from the Design of a Socialist State (2013) on the Cretan socialist intellectual Stavros Kallergis; his forthcoming book Revolutionary Diaspora focuses on revolutionary diasporas in the United States. He has written extensively on the Greek “crisis”, the European left and the limits of political imagination in the post-1989 world; currently he is working on an international history of the Greek left.
Şevval Kılıç was born in Istanbul; she has worked in support of sex-workers’ rights for more than fifteen years. She is one of the founders of the women’s rights organization Women’s Door, a member and candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (HDP), and has been a part of LGBTI+ movements for twenty years. She is also one of the founders of Istanbul LGBT, one of the founders of Istanbul Trans Pride, and member of Istanbul’s Pride Committee. Still fighting.
Kostantinos Kornetis is UC3M CONEX-Marie Curie Fellow at the Department of History, Carlos III University, Madrid. His research focuses on the history and memory of the 1960s, the methodology of oral history, and the use of film as a source for social and cultural history. His book Children of the Dictatorship. Student Resistance, Cultural Politics and the “Long 1960s” in Greece was published in 2013 and was awarded the 2015 Edmund Keeley Book Award. He is currently working on a book project on the memory of transitions to democracy in Southern Europe and Latin America.
Kanka Productions was founded on queer-feminist comradeship in Istanbul by Rüzgâr Buşki, Senem Donatan, P. Ulaş Dutlu, Gizem Ornc, and Zara Zandieh. Kanka Productions produces experimental film, video, sound, and multimedia works with the aim to amplify the joy of collective creation.
Katerina Labrinou holds a PhD from the Department of Political Science and History of the Panteion University, Athens. She is a graduate of the Philosophical School, University of Athens, and holds a postgraduate degree in Cultural Studies from Lancaster University (2003) and in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Athens (2006). She collaborates with the Centre of Political Research of the Panteion University. She has published articles and studies in academic journals and edited anthologies.
Ana Longoni is a writer, researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council Argentina (CONICET), and professor at the University of Buenos Aires. Her field of research is centered on the crossroads between art and politics in Latin America since the 1960s. She is also an active member, since its foundation in 2007, of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur (Southern Conceptualisms) network. In her role as curator, she coordinated the exhibitions Losing the Human Form (2012) and Desire Rises from Collapse (2011), both at the Reina Sofía Museum Madrid. She has published, alone or in collaboration, among other works: El Siluetazo (The Silhouettes) (2008), Traiciones (Treasons) (2007), and Del Di Tella a Tucumán Arde (From the Di Tella Institute to Tucumán Arde) (2000/2008).
MiniMaximum ImproVision are musicians, architects, and visual artists who work on narrative concepts, using acoustic and electric instruments, sampled sounds, voices, texts, objects, and images. An improvisation evolves into a sound-image flow, with its elements composed and constructed around a basic narrative theme. Lately, their work has focused on incorporating live audiovisual installations in theater plays and performances. They form spaces using the three-dimensional installation of sound sources, exploring the use of music as a scenic element and an essential feature of dramaturgy. MiniMaximum ImproVision evolved from a duet (2005) to a sextet (2011–including a sound engineer) and has performed in Athens and other cities in Greece.
Maria Mitsopoulou aka Maria F. Dolores is a visual artist and performer. She has participated in exhibitions and collaborative processes combining art, sex, and politics, while co-organizing several DIY queer feminist venues between Athens, Barcelona, and Berlin. Currently, she is devoting her time to the AMOQA (Athens Museum of Queer Arts), a hybrid meeting point for networking researchers, activists, and artists that work on body politics, remembrance, gender, and identity.
Naeem Mohaiemen has been working on The Young Man Was, a series of films and essays exploring the 1970s revolutionary left, since 2006. His protagonists often display symptoms of misrecognition, ending up as “accidental Trojan horses” carrying tragedy to the countries in question (from Japanese hijackers commandeering Dhaka airport in “solidarity,” to the migrant labor networks transformed into unsteady PLO “volunteers”). In spite of the failures of a bygone form of communism, Mohaiemen’s reading of the potential of an international left is still one of hope. Chapters from the project were presented in the survey show Prisoners of Shothik Itihash, curated by Adam Szymzyck at Kunsthalle Basel (2014). Historian Afsan Chowdhury (whose diary inspired The Young Man Was project) referenced Mohaiemen’s project as part of a “second wave of history-writing” about Asia. Mohaiemen is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, New York, and a 2014 John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (film-video).
Antonio Negri is professor of Theory of the State at the University of Padua. Negri actively collaborated in the debates and struggles of workers of the Italian radical left during the 1960s and 1970s. He participated in the publication of the Quaderni Rossi, Classe operaia and La classe, and was part of the non-parliamentary group Potere Operaio. Negri was an active organizer and leading theorist in the debate around worker autonomy, and has taught at some of the most important universities in Europe. Upon being arrested in 1979, he spent more than four years in prison and lived in exile in France from 1983–97. After returning to Italy and following another period of incarceration of almost six years, he now lives in freedom. He is the author of more than twenty books. Together with Michael Hardt, he is the author of the celebrated trilogy Empire (2001), Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2005), and Commonwealth (2009).
Gizem Oruç aka 6zm is a musician, producer, and multimedia artist. After receiving a Masters in Chemistry at Boğaziçi University, Oruç started studying Sonic Arts at Istanbul Technical University, focusing on sound and multimedia art. His interdisciplinary perspective leads to works across a variety of disciplines, including video, generative art, installation, and performance. Oruç currently lives in Berlin, participating in creative collaborations for film, music, and new media.
Neni Panourgia is visiting associate professor of Anthropology at the New School for Social Research (2013–17); senior research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University, New York, leading a project on aging, funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation, and adjunct associate professor at the Psychology Department, Columbia University, teaching in the pilot Master’s Program at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in New York State. Her books include Dangerous Citizens. The Greek Left and the Terror of the State (2009) and Fragments of Death, Fables of Identity. An Athenian Anthropography, with George E. Marcus (1996).
Anna Papaeti holds a PhD in musicology from King’s College, University of London. She worked for Britain’s Royal Opera House Media in London (2004–06) and as an associate dramaturge at the Greek National Opera (2006–09). Her postdoctoral research includes a DAAD fellowship on Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler’s postwar antifascist works (Universität der Künste Berlin, 2010), and a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship (University of Göttingen, 2011–14). The latter investigated the use of music as a means of manipulation and terror under the Greek military Junta (1967–74). She has published widely in edited volumes and scholarly journals, and has co-edited two special volumes on music and torture, and music in detention. She is an Onassis Foundation scholar.
Prasini Lesvia is a queer music project created by Alkis Papastathopoulos. This non-radical idea began in late 2012 as a compulsion to communicate experiences of heartbreak, as well as to accept sexual/romantic failure in the form of bedroom recordings. So far, they have self-released two EPs, and are about to record their third and final album. Since early 2014, Prasini Lesvia has been gigging in queer spaces, accompanied by their music partner, Lara Kristen, and other lovely fellows. All of the songs are written for people (half of them for a specific one) that Prasini Lesvia was, or still is, madly in love with.
Judith Revel is professor of Contemporary Philosophy at Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense (laboratoire Sophiapol, EA 3932). She is a member of the Scientific Office of the Centre Michel Foucault and a highly regarded scholar on Foucault’s work. Her work focuses on how philosophy has problematized its own practice and relationship to politics and aesthetics after 1945. Her latest book is Foucault avec Merleau-Ponty. Ontologie politique, présentisme et histoire (2015).
Tasos Sakellaropoulos is a historian and head of the Benaki Museum Historical Archives, Athens. He has curated several exhibitions on historical subjects, especially on the political life in twentieth-century Greece. He is a member of EMNE (Mnemon Magazine) and of the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI). Sakellaropoulos has published a variety of articles on the German occupation period in Greece, the Greek Civil War (1946–49) and the 1967–74 dictatorship. He has conducted research on the subjects of the formation of a new bourgeois political pole during the German occupation, political movements in the Greek Army in the Middle East during the Second World War, the Greek post-war army re-organization, political persecutions in post-war Greece, formation and function of the Makronissos military camp, army involvement in political life, resistance against the 1967 dictatorship, and the period after the restoration of democracy in 1974.
Georgia Sagri studied music at the National Music School of Athens; she holds a BA from the Athens School of Fine Arts and an MFA from Columbia University, New York. At the center of her practice lies the exploration of performance as an ever-evolving field within social and visual life. Most of her work is influenced by her ongoing engagement in political movements and struggles regarding issues of autonomy, empowerment, and self-organization. She is the founder of the audio-only magazine FORTÉ, and SALOON, an ongoing nomadic curatorial project. Sagri is also is the initiator of Ύλη[matter]HYLE, a semi-personal, semi-public space in the heart of Athens.
Niillas Somby is a Sámi political-rights activist, journalist, videographer, and photographer. He was one of the seven hunger strikers during the Alta controversy (1982) and lost an arm during a sabotage action. The 1999 documentary film Give Us Our Skeletons, directed by Paul-Anders Simma, describes Somby’s quest to retrieve the heads of his ancestors Mons Somby and Aslak Hætta from the University of Oslo in Norway. Somby’s autobiography, Gumppe Diimmus, was published by ABC-Company in 2016, and is only available in the Sámi language. His videos, which are available on YouTube, document Sámi traditional and contemporary land and fishing practices, and the ongoing fight for Sámi sovereignty.
Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens
Annie Sprinkle has been creating multimedia about sexuality for four decades. She was the first US porn star to earn a PhD. Coming out as an ecosexual in 2008 changed her life forever for the better. Sprinkle was proud to be awarded the Artist/Activist/Scholar Award from Performance Studies International. She is into many nature fetishes and fantasies. Beth Stephens, PhD, is an ecosexual performance artist, filmmaker, activist, and educator. Stephens’s preferred pronoun is “tree.” Tree has made artwork, performances, and writing about queerness, feminism, and environmentalism for over twenty-five years. Stephens’s current focus is SexEcology, a new field of research. Dr. Stephens is the founding director of the E.A.R.T.H. Lab at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has been a professor of art for twenty-two years. Together, Stephens and Sprinkle authored the Ecosex Manifesto, and officially added the E (for ecosexual) to GLBTQII-E in 2015. Their award-winning documentary film, Goodbye Gauley Mountain: An Ecosexual Love Story (2013) has been screened internationally and can be viewed on Netflix and iTunes. They are currently working on a new documentary film, Water Makes Us Wet. Sprinkle and Stephens are married to the Earth, Sky, Sea, Soil, and many other nature entities.
Diana Taylor is professor of Performance Studies and Spanish at New York University. Originally from Mexico, she was trained in Mexico, France, and the United States. Her book The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (2003), won the ATHE Research Award in Theatre Practice and Pedagogy and the Modern Language Association Katherine Singer Kovacs Prize for the best book in Latin American and Spanish Literatures and Culture the following year. She is the author of the award-winning Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ (1997) and editor and co-editor of a dozen books, including Dancing with the Zapatistas (with Laurie Novak, 2016) and Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (1991). Taylor is founding director of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, a network of scholars, artists, and activists throughout the Americas who work for social justice.
Prodromos Tsinikoris works as a director, dramaturge, and performer in Athens and Berlin. Born in Wuppertal to Greek immigrant parents, he moved to Thessaloniki in 1999, where he graduated from the Drama Department of the Aristotle University. In 2008, he was invited to the Theatertreffen International Forum, Berlin. In 2009, he moved to Athens, where he worked as an actor with director Dimiter Gotscheff (Messenger in The Persians, National Theatre, Athens), and as assistant director and researcher with Rimini Protokoll (Prometheus in Athens). In 2015, he was part of the dramaturgy team and in charge of the research for X Apartments (concept: Matthias Lilienthal), performed in Athenian apartments and produced by the Onassis Cultural Centre. He also directed an audio walk in central Athens about homeless people for the Athens & Epidaurus Festival 2016, titled In the Middle of the Street. Since October 2015, he and his collaborator Anestis Azas are the artistic directors of the Experimental Stage -1 of the National Theatre of Greece.
Margarita Tsomou is a Greek author, publisher, dramaturge, and curator based in Berlin. She is the publisher of the pop-feminist Missy-Magazine and writes for German newspapers and radio. Her artistic collaborations and curatorial projects have been shown at theaters such as Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin; Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin; Kampnagel, Hamburg: Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens; and Volksbühne, Berlin. She is part of the publishing collective b_books, Berlin and of the activist/artistic group Schwabinggrad Ballett, Hamburg. Her focuses are queer-feminism, the political implications of art as well as theory of democracy, and the transformation of the Greek society during the debt crisis.
Eirini Vakalopoulou was born in Thessaloniki. She studied International Relations and has an MA in Advertising. She has worked in advertising agencies in Athens and as a teacher of marketing. Vakalopoulou is also the author of a novelette and two compilations of poetry.
Ioanna Vogli is a graduate of the Pedagogy Department of the University of Patras and holds a Master’s degree from the Department of Political Science and History, Panteion University, Athens. She is a member of the Contemporary Social History Archives (ASKI) and has collaborated with ASKI in research programs, including Greek Youth in the ASKI and The Greek Civil War 1946–1949. She has also worked on the classification of private and corporate archives.
Tina Voreadi is a visual artist and educator. She has participated in cultural and political projects in Spain and Greece.
Sergio Zevallos’s first performance was to be born in the best hospital of Lima, when his mother managed to be illegally admitted to the emergencies. The latter is a key term in his life’s itinerary as it was soon followed by Peru’s state of emergency throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This was the beginning of Zevallos’s feeling of being uprooted. He later became the co-founder of the Grupo Chaclacayo (1982–95), and traveled to Germany with the group in 1989. After the group split, he moved to Berlin in 1995, where he is still based. Zevallo is a nomad and often changes places and artistic disciplines. His practice started as drawing and moved on to performance, photography, installation, writing, and finally a mix of everything. His work remains in continual development, a construction site. The main topics of his work are transcultural identity, gender, and the contradictions in the relation between individuals and power, or between the private and public spheres.