Revolution starts with reading and writing. Revolution starts with theater and public talks. With debating and sharing. Revolution starts with friendship.

Within the context of the “world integrated capitalism” of the twenty-first century, the documenta 14 Public Programs, in collaboration with the Athens School of Fine Art, supports the development of a series of Societies for the transformation of the political imagination.

Inspired both by the “Open Form” methodology of artist and architect Oskar Hansen, and by the potential of spontaneous meetings to generate social and political change, the Open Form Societies work like self-learning, self-organized micropublics that generate their own activities.

Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias is the main home of the Societies in Athens, although they can move freely within the city and contaminate other spaces, ranging from Prevelakis Hall at the Polytechnion to different archives, cafés, and cinemas, or uncharted areas of the city. The Societies develop their activities from October 2016 until the opening of the exhibition in Athens in April 2017, transforming themselves progressively into the public infrastructure of the exhibition.

The Societies meet at least once a month around a series of activities: seminars, screenings, workshops, walks, reading sessions, and artists’ interventions. All the activities of the Societies are free and open to the public. Anyone can be member of any of the given Societies. The members share knowledge and practices (bibliographies, references, and archives) and decide on the future events of the Society. It is not necessary to be a member of a Society to participate in any of its events.

Each Society may determine its own temporality and forms of action. There is no fixed ontology for a Society. A Society is the result of its own performative practice. Therefore, a Society can mutate in accordance with its participants, its actions, or its alliances with other collectives or Societies. More Societies can emerge over time, or several Societies can merge and create another hybrid institution.

Mutating and performative, together the Societies constitute the affective soul of the Parliament of Bodies to come.

Six Societies are hosted at Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias.

Starting in October 2016:
The Apatride Society for the Political Others, coordinated by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz, Nelli Kambouri, and Margarita Tsomou;
The Society for the End of Necropolitics, coordinated by Paul B. Preciado;
The Noospheric Society, coordinated by Angelo Plessas

Starting in December 2016:
The Society of Friends of Sotiria Bellou, coordinated by Paul B. Preciado, in collaboration with AMOQA, Athens Museum of Queer Arts;
The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión, coordinated by Arnisa Zeqo in collaboration with Pierre Bal-Blanc and Hendrik Folkerts

Starting in January 2017:
The Society for Collective Hallucination, coordinated by Hila Peleg and Ben Russell

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.