1. As I explained in last week’s post, it is not possible to continue the project Freedom Park Fridays since the videos of the events of 34 Exercises of Freedom (in Athens, September 14-24, 2016) on which the project is based, have been taken down from the documenta 14 website.
2. I sent an email to Systemantics, the website designer for documenta 14, who recommended I email the Documenta Archive, which I did and now am waiting for a reply (to learn more about the website design for document 14, click the image below).
3. As I wait to learn about what happened to the videos, I thought it would be helpful to explain why I embarked on this project in the first place.
4. The general impetus for Freedom Park Fridays was to make the case for the continued significance of the documenta 14 exhibition, over a year after the formal exhibition closed in Kassel (on July 16, 2017).
5. The continued significance of documenta 14 is hard to measure, and impossible for one person to account for. I do not think it would be excessive for documenta 14 to actually generate a new academic discipline (“documenta 14 studies”, or perhaps better, “critical documenta 14 studies”) to really make sense of what happened between Athens and Kassel, not only during the formal ‘run’ of the exhibition (April 8-July 16, 2017), but from the appointing of Adam Szymczyk as the artistic director in November 2013 to projected opening of Documenta 15 in 2022 (if that ever happens…)
6. Writing in The documenta 14 Reader, Szymczyk outlined the broad themes at the heart of the exhibition as (1) contemporary decolonial critique, (2) Indigenous knowledge, (3) feminism, (4) minor traditions within and outside of the mainframe of modernism and (5) postqueer politics.
7. These themes were grounded in the four issues of the magazine South as a State of Mind (from 2015-2017) each with a focus that explored the intersection of these five themes: (a) Displacement and Dispossession; (b) Silence and Masks; (c) Language or Hunger; (d) Violence and Offering
8. It was the experience of documenta 14 that made me quit the discipline of Classics and commit my work as an academic to these issues and topics. In short, to work in the field of “Critical documenta 14 Studies”.
9. My work has been going on for some time and I have been getting closer.
10. “Closer to what?” you may ask. Well, it all started with this blog and the year of posting every day (from November 2016 to November 2017) in the project “Minus Plato Today”. I wanted to see what it meant to write on a daily basis about Classics, Contemporary Art and the first year of the Trump regime.
11. Within this project, my preparations for and encounters with documenta 14 had a profound impact on me.
12. In the following 6 months (January-June 2018), in the project “Minus Plato Return, Reform and Refresh”, I revisited these daily posts and turned them into a book manuscript (No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life under Trump, to be published by AC Institute in February 2019).
13. At the same time, I was gearing up to work on a new project, the first that explicitly abandoned Classics (aka the study of the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome), as inspired by documenta 14, which is provisionally called 2043, whisper it into a hole and which will culminate in spring 2022 to coincide with the opening of Documenta 15.
14. What place does Freedom Park Fridays play in (i) the assessing of the impact of documenta 14 and (ii) the development of my own research projects?
15. Well, one of my strategies in writing about contemporary decolonial critique, Indigenous knowledge, feminism, minor traditions within and outside of the mainframe of modernism and postqueer politics has been to accept the limitations of my own identity and privilege.
16. To engage with these themes cannot turn into an act of appropriation
17. So, instead I attempted what could be described as a distribution model of engagement.
18. Instead of writing about these themes as a white cigendered male European academic, I would use Minus Plato as a means to point to ongoing debates and voices.
19. This is where the uploading of the videos from 34 Exercises of Freedom on YouTube comes in.
20. The aim was to make Minus Plato in general, and Freedom Park Fridays in particular, an informal distribution site for these videos (just as I have tried to do for the magazine Contemporary And and the Artist Op-Eds of Postcommodity and – forthcoming- of Sky Hopinka).
21. At the same time, I understand that this distribution model of engagement cannot be completely without traces of my own intervention.
22. This is why I added the 35th exercise of freedom to the original 34.
23. I saw my act of distributing the videos as an exercise of freedom in the spirit of those that came before me.
24. In addition, I relish how the freedom from my Classical education and the discipline of Classics has its expression in the turning of Minus Plato into a Post-Classical project, which itself is an act of decolonization.
25. (While at the same time acknowledging that metaphorical decolonization has dangerous limitations).
26. This means that the themes, ideas, artists, debates, dialogues and platforms of documenta 14 have take the place of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, literature, mythology and culture.
26. Put another way, while in the past Minus Plato has explored the dynamic between ancient Greek and Roman culture and Contemporary Art, explores the dynamic between contemporary decolonial critique, Indigenous knowledge, feminism, minor traditions within and outside of the mainframe of modernism and postqueer politics along the paths laid out by documenta 14.
27. I think now it is time for an example.
28. The immediate impetus to return to and supplement 34 Exercises of Freedom came from the process of writing about the controversy surrounding a specific work for documenta 14.
29. On May 22nd 2017, Spanish artist Roger Bernat and Italian academic Roberto Fratini wrote a press release on Bernat’s website addressed to the Athens-based collective LGBTQI + Refugees in Greece in response to their act of stealing a fake stone.
30. The stone in question was a replica of the ‘oath stone’ or lithos of ancient Athens, which was sworn on by the king archon (the official responsible for overseeing the city’s religious laws) each year in office as well as by those citizens indicted on accusations of impiety (such as the philosopher Socrates in 399 BCE).
31. The replica of the ‘oath stone’ was the central prop in Bernat’s participatory work The Place of the Thing, commissioned for documenta 14, which was carried through Athens by a series of invited groups, from school children to activist organizations.
32. Bernat and Fratini’s 13-point statement was in direct response, not so much to the act of stealing, but to the way LGBTQI + Refugees in Greece conceptualized this act in their own statement as a theft (which utilized the aesthetic of the ransom note, called Between a Rock and a Hard Place) and a video called Rockumenta posted on their Facebook page.
33.The showdown between Bernat/Fratini and LGBTQI + Refugees in Greece played out in the media fails to do justice to the complexity of the issues at stake and specifically how they were raised by the work of Curator of Public Programs, philosopher and trans activist Paul. B. Preciado, specifically in the 34 Exercises of Freedom program that took place in September 2016.
34. In the session “Voices of Trans and Queer Politics in the Mediterranean”, members of the Athens Museum of Queer Arts spoke about their work and how it related to the upcoming documenta 14 exhibition. One member Tina Voreidi stated the following, which shows how returning to these exercises of freedom can intervene in debates such as those between Bernat and LGBTQI + Refugees in Greece, as well as documenta 14 in general, and also for the failure that our own Freedom Park Fridays has had to contend with:
35. I am addressing all the people who are here today simply because Documenta is “one of the most important artistic events in the world”. Do you feel comfortable? Does it offer you something to listen to us today? Let’s get closer. We are, therefore, an “art museum” that does not converse with authorities and established subjects. We are dealing with bodies. We stand in front of all these gaps in narrative and imagine possible fields of action. For the bodies the crowd gives them only when it comes to attacking them. To speak of bodies that, like me, and much more than me, can not do it. We know that we can not produce majority meanings, nor is there space for us in the predominant narratives. We are close to what Jack Halberstam says when he talks about the Cure Art of Failure. Failure as a synonym for freedom. I want to play and I want to fail. Let’s play and let’s get together.
