Our good friend, curator Paul B. Preciado invited us come to Athens, Greece to give a visiting artist lecture and do a water ritual performance prior to the opening of documenta 14. Paul explained that he was curating a series of public programs called The Parliament of Bodies which would take place at the Athens Municipality Arts Center at Parko Eleftherias. Of course we said yes.

We had just 3 weeks’ notice. Quickly we wrote up a call for collaborators to join us in creating a performance ritual which documenta 14 posted on their website. We were fairly confident we could give a great talk, but the water ritual was something we had never done before, and such short notice made for some serious performance anxiety. To gather enough collaborators so quickly seemed virtually impossible.

When we arrived at the Municipality Arts Center in Parko Eleftherias, (Freedom Park), we were intrigued to learn that the 19th century building where the Arts Center was housed had been the police station for the Greek Military Junta of 1967–74. Behind the police station resistance fighters were jailed and severely tortured in that building during the Junta. Clearly this place had a very heavy history, and we wanted to honor the history.

On the day of the ritual, September 23, 2016, we met our performers, as they met each other, for the first time. We discussed what we hoped to do that night and then held a short two- hour rehearsal. Our performers hailed from Greece, England, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, the USA and one performer was from Planet Queer. Our intention was to show water our love, address issues of the day, and to respectfully bathe the performance space, where horrendous torture during the fascist dictatorship in Greece took place.

The printed program listed activities for the audience members during the ritual, some using props we had handed out: rub a balloon with your wet fingers to make sounds, shake a water rattle, shed some tears, dribble some spit, sprinkle water from wet leaves, move your body like water, tell water what you love about it, blow bubbles, drink some water, clean the floor, or some other activity as long as it’s being respectful of the history of the space we were in.

The time had come to begin. The space was packed full of all kinds of people. After forming a circle, one by one, each of us walked to the center of the circle and poured water from the places that we had come from into a big container. After that everyone broke into simultaneously doing a water-based activity of their choice accompanied by a mesmerizing soundscape by Andrew McKenzie of the Hafler Trio. The whole thing was chaotic, weird and also visually quite beautiful. Our group of freedom loving, weird aquaphiliacs were working together to wash away the horrible order imposed by the former dictators who would never allow the kind of freedom with which we performed. After closing the ritual with a moment of silence and three claps of our hands, we opened the circle, and most of us ran outside into the grass. Right on cue, the janitor turned on the lawn sprinklers. We played and celebrated in our makeshift public fountain as the audience members trickled out and enjoyed watching us enjoy getting soaked.

Click here to view the PDF of the Wet Dreamers program with more details and the credits. 

Curator Paul B. Preciado asked us if we could (re)do our piece Cuddle during the first few days of documenta 14’s Athens official opening. Although we had not performed Cuddle in well over a decade, we were game to revive the piece. Given the current state of the world, a lot of humans and nonhumans could use a good cuddle. A queen-sized bed was installed in the lobby of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (E.M.S.T.), April 8–10, 2016. The mattress and three pillows were covered with dark blue cotton sheets and pillowcases, an insider reference to the deep blue sea. Paul wrote a curatorial statement which was posted by our bed.

CUDDLING ATHENS

They say: close the borders.

We say: cuddle.

They say: build a wall.

We say: cuddle.

They say: fear the foreigner, watch the stranger.

They say: praise the individual, compete, win.

We say: cuddle.

Artists Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens have installed a bed within the museum lobby where they propose to cuddle every visitor who would like to participate for 7 minutes. An active answer to the increasingly aggressive political measures taken globally against the survival of vulnerable bodies, the piece questions also the relationship between labor and sex, interrogating the exclusion of certain gestures and affects within the neoliberal regime.

We did Cuddle for three days. We worked together with a host/timekeeper who would stand nearby with a signup sheet on a pedestal, where people could sign up to cuddle us. When it was the next person’s turn, the host would ask the cuddler to take off their shoes. Once the cuddler was in bed with us, a timer was set for seven minutes. Over the course of the performance we cuddled curators, artists, locals, tourists, sex workers, young people, old people, naked people, and anyone who wanted to cuddle. Sometimes we cuddled couples, or friends together. We cuddled journalists who interviewed us as they snuggled between our bodies. We even cuddled a transvestite wearing a niqab.

Cuddle embodied our interest in existing beside others, no matter how problematic, rather than dominating those people who seem different than oneself. Using the platform provided by documenta 14, we cuddled as an artistic and political act of visible and embodied resistance.

Curator Paul B. Preciado asked us to do a series of three Sidewalk Sex Clinics in and around Athens, Greece, as part of documenta 14’s public programs. We prepared plexiglass standing placards to put on our tables with our neatly typed names, bios and sex education offerings which read like scores sprinkled with a dose of Fluxus absurdity. We offered radical sex education, although we sprinkled in some practical sex advice.

The documenta 14 team helped us enlist some local sex educators for the performance. We knew that it was important to have Greek citizens be part of our clinician team. Paul brought on board Activista, a genderqueer safe sex expert and an amazing drag performer, as well as Dr. Bubuke aka Bubu, a trans woman with a Ph.D. who offered advice in transgender and queer issues and counter hegemonic sexual practices. There had been some horrible anti-GLBTQ+ violence around Athens, so we were assigned a body guard. The documenta 14 production team members, including our main handler for the clinics project, Maria Dolores, were all extremely helpful when scouting and reserving our sites and setting up the tables, chairs and signs. Our good friend, Veronica Vera, dean of the Academy for Boys Who Want to Be Girls, joined us from New York. Our French friends from Emmetrop art center, King Erik and his wife Mamita, joined us as well.

The people of Athens were generous with us and hopefully our Free Sidewalk Sex Clinic, which documenta 14 described as a nomadic performance, helped open up more space for queer and marginalized people in Athens as it opened more minds to creative sex positivity and absurdist sex humor.