12-Hour Non-State Parade | International Symposium

About

“Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity or genuineness, but in the style in which they are imagined”. – Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983.

Standing still and tall above us, the contemporary state is a fiction groomed on pomp, circumstance and coercion. Surging forth with unrestrained desire the 12-Hour Non-State Parade will set forth an alternative imaginary in which the hidden powers and style sheet of the contemporary state and its expression as social relations will be unpacked, subverted and redressed. 

Resounding with passionate calls for action, the 12-Hour Non-State Parade will proclaim alternatives and set in motion a creative and critical mass of national and international practitioners from the arts, theory and social activism. Indicated by but not limited to the ideologies circulating in Jasmina Cibic’s exhibition The Pleasure of Expense at Cooper Gallery, the 12-Hour Non-State Parade will be led by Keynote Talks from Birgitta Jónsdóttir (Poetician and a former parliamentarian for the Civic Movement & Pirate Party in the Icelandic Parliament), Pinar Aksu (Human Rights Activist and & Theatre of the Oppressed practitioner) and Dr Rebecca Gordon-Nesbitt (Researcher, author of To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture: The Cultural Policy of the Cuban Revolution and the Labour Party’s parliamentary candidate for South Thanet). Steering the flow of the Parade is our Navigator, Angela Dimitrakaki. 

Choreographed as a performative think tank immersed in debate and exchange the 12 hours will include among its urgent words a crowd of contributions from story tellers, dancers, playwrights, writers, poets, film makers, a feminist blogger and an international women’s community choir. This eventful parade will be punctuated with annotations by one of the most radical thinkers of our time, French philosopher Alain Badiou. 

Confirmed contributors include: Jasmina Cibic, Marjorie Lotfi Gill, Claire Heuchan, John McCann, Rosie McDonald, Lucy Parker, Frank Ruda, Elisabeth Schilling, The Joyous Choir and writersfrom GSA MLitt Art Writing. Two newly commissioned performances will be presented during the 12-Hour Non-State Parade by artists Gordon Douglas and Shona Macnaughton.

“Power is actualised only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions about to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities”. – Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958