For its gathering during the opening days of Bergen Assembly 2019, The Society of Friends of Lorenza Böttner calls for an extraordinary meeting of the Parliament of Bodies, questioning the hegemonic idea of artistic and political action as based on a strong, virile, healthy and medically normalised political subject. Thus the PoB mutates into the Impossible Parliaments. Attentive to other forms of producing knowledge and other types of sensorial experiences, the Impossible Parliaments question the model of the assembly as a series of acts of communication between equal ‘able bodies’ destined to achieve consensus. 

Within the context of Bergen Assembly 2019, the Impossible Parliaments explore political and aesthetic practices that go beyond the form of the assembly and contest the traditional frameworks of the exhibition and the public programme as well as the public gathering of human, walking, speaking, ‘normal’ subjects. Taking as their starting point the work of artist Lorenza Böttner (1959–1994), the Impossible Parliaments explore somato-political dissidence, calling into question normative distinctions between sickness and health, and focusing on specific knowledges and practices of those historically considered ‘sick’, ‘fat’, ‘dysphoric’ or ‘deficient’.

Bearing in mind artist and writer Johanna Hedva’s question of ‘How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?’, as much as writer Dodie Bellamy’s prophecy that ‘When the sick rule the world, mortality will be sexy’, the Impossible Parliaments call to traverse the abled-bodied regime by coming together, in pain as much as in joy, to create alliances in and through sickness, and to understand care work not as a medical or ethical task but as one of the potential sites of the radical enlargement of the public sphere. Understanding abled-bodiedness as not only a political privilege and a technology of oppression, but also as an accidental, momentary state, its differences become cultural phenomena and public feelings, neoliberal symptoms and reactions towards ecological toxicities, political categories and powerful strategies of refusal.

We call the sick and the crips, the weak and the fragile, the depressed, the addicted and the failed to celebrate the refusal of being considered as inefficient recourses to a system which is itself inherently broken. We call all other bodies that resist being subjugated to the pharmarcopornographic, capitalist and liberal demands of limitless growth and profitability that are fundamentally interwoven with techniques of abled-bodied, heteronormative, colonial, racial and ecological oppressions.

In the context of Actually, the Dead Are Not Dead and following the crip and queer time perceptions, the Impossible Parliaments simultaneously seek to challenge the predominance of time-bound bodies within and beyond the realms of capital and the nation-state and to disrupt the chrono-normative logics through considering blissful and sensual dynamics of binding, longing and belonging, beyond somato-political or temporal limitations.

SCHEDULE

Doors open at 4.30pm
Program starts at 5pm sharp

5–5.10pm
Iris Dressler and Hans D. Christ: Introduction

5.10–5.50pm
Paul B. Preciado, Viktor Neumann and Andreas Angelidakis: Introduction to the Parliament of Bodies and The Society of Friends of Lorenza Böttner

5.50–6.30pm
Eva Egermann and Jemina Lindholm: AFTERLIVES – On crip temporalities and zine-making along the projects nothing/special ZINE and Crip Magazine

6.30–7.30pm
Mariana Valencia: ALBUM

7.30–8.10pm
Antonio Centeno: Crip politics of Desire and Pleasure: speaking from the point of view of functional diversity

8.10–8.55pm
Jeremy Wade: Technologies of Impossible Repair

8.55–9.10pm
BREAK

9.10pm–9.30pm
Eva Egermann: An Outcast Night

9.30–10pm
Pedro G. Romero and María García: Los aceptamos, son de los nuestros (We accept them, they are our people)

10–10.30pm
Laressa Dickey and Magdalena Freudenschuss: re:assembling emotional labour

10.30–11.25pm
Göksu Kunak a.k.a Gucci Chunk and Laure M. Hiendl: Bergen, The Woman of Agonies.

11.25–11.45pm
BREAK

11.45 pm–12am
Daniel Mariblanca: For all my Dicks and Pussies

12–12.40am
Valentine Tanz/Vala T. Foltyn: Feelings are facts – magic, sex, politics

12.40–1.20pm
Georgy Mamedov: Delirious Blues: A Philosophy Letter from the Low Life

1.20–2am
Liz Rosenfeld: i live in a house with a door

Belgin is a partly accessible venue on one level; not all facilities are entirely barrier free. Acknowledging the transitional period of our venue, we dedicate our resources to make Belgin fully accessible.