Do you work the standard grind of Monday through Friday without finding any time to restore your body and mind with creatively or intellectually challenging activities? Sure, you may squeeze in a few pages of a book or a quick visit to a museum, but do you constantly struggle to undo the damage your hips, shoulders and brain have suffered from sitting all day and passively following the horrors of the 24-hour news cycle?
In my novice experience, nothing does a better job of offering an antidote to this feeling than a Friday night visit to Freedom Park. For most of us, Friday is the time to let loose, we’ve spent all week at the office, studio or classroom, and we are eager to unwind as soon as Friday 5pm strikes. But before you head out for happy hour, take some time to watch a video from 34 Exercises of Freedom, the inaugural event of the documenta 14 public program The Parliament of Bodies, held over ten days in Freedom Park (Parko Eleftherias) in Athens, Greece during September 2016. If you do, I promise you that you will end the week energized, inspired and ready to face any challenges ahead.
Replenish yourself by learning about new political and artistic practices dedicated to the invention of new forms of affect, knowledge, and political subjectivity (whether it is through ecosex, queer-indigenism, or radical performativity). While I have written my own notes as I watch these videos, if you join me in this weekly ritual, you may find your own path through these freeing exercises.
Let’s get started!
- Take a deep breath – these are dangerous times
- Every human being is affected by decisions we make today
- Welcome to this space
- Acknowledge the land that you are on, because it has a history and many others have walked on it before us today
- Receive the privilege of being covered in a blanket, or accepting gifts, in togetherness and collectiveness, for your own culture and other traditions
- Hear a peace song to chase out any bad energy
- While here, take on the role as knowledge keeper
- Make it your duty to thank those who made your stay here possible
- Remember that an exhibition is not meant to be a final station
- Put yourselves in a position of ignorance
- Be moved
- This doesn’t exist without you
- It may seem crazy
- These are 68 blocks, made by Andrea Angelidakis
- These are 34 Exercises of Freedom
- Thank people as well as institutions
- You may ask: What is a public program?
- Usually it is a footnote and a side show, people speaking about the exhibition, critical minds doing analysis on the exhibition
- But not here
- Here we question the distinction, between art and theory, between practice and theory
- Art is always public discourse
- Theory and philosophy is always direct action
- Note the history of this building: the headquarters for the military police during the Junta of1967-1974
- How do we inhabit this history and what do we do with this history?
- Find the relation between this building and the building behind: the Museum of Anti-Dictatorial Resistance – an art gallery of the municipality of Athens
- How to reconnect the two buildings? Some kind of circulation of voices, bodies and histories for memory to start appearing
- Say no to the neoliberal chair – on which we sit down and behave like a consumer of something delivered to you
- Say no to the traditional amphitheater – which gives a fixed position and a politics of representation that we wanted to move beyond
- Read these 68 blocks of Athens as two things – an idea and physical object
- The idea of the birthplace of democracy, that Europe (and elsewhere!) borrowed as official architecture for libraries and courthouses; plus concrete blocks as modernism, after 1920 migrations and reconstruction, after World War II.
- This is a reconfigurable protocol not a design
- Soft ruins which force us to look back into the recent history of being a democratic culture
- Our democratic institutions are in ruins and need to be reinvented collectively
- Freedom Park is almost like a joke, an impossible contradiction, but don’t give up on this notion of freedom; use it differently; freedom (as Foucault reminds us) is not a natural right, but something that has to be constantly exercised and practiced.
- Find a position, sit down and get comfortable (but not too comfortable)
