documenta 14 Athens: sidewalk sex clinic

​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.

documenta 14 Kassel: sidewalk sex clinic

We were scheduled to present just one Free Sidewalk Sex Clinic in Kassel, not three like we did in Athens, and we wanted it to be our biggest and best one ever. We put out a call for collaborators through word of mouth and on our social media networks. Our friend, Kristina Marlen, a professional tantric dominatrix, author, and sex positive blogger living in Berlin, enlisted some of her German sex worker friends. King Erik and Mamita had enjoyed doing the three clinics in Athens so much that they drove in from France and joined us again. A Japanese friend and colleague, Hiroko Kikuchi, showed up just as we were setting up the clinic and we invited her to join us. She wasn’t exactly a sex expert, but we had plenty of those, what we needed was a conceptual artist, plus she spoke Japanese. There were thirteen of us and collectively we spoke six languages; English, Spanish, German, French, Greek, and Japanese. On the afternoon of our Kassel clinic, we set up our tables, chairs, and props in the city’s main square, the Friedrichsplatz,  between the Joseph Beuys’ 7000 Oaks trees. Just as we were set up and ready to start, a fierce lightning storm rolled into Kassel. We were firmly instructed to move inside to the ground floor rotunda of the Fridericianum Museum for everyone’s safety.

Our clinic in the rotunda filled up with a diverse mix of people who lined up in front of their chosen sex educators, eagerly seeking advice and conversation. Our clinic was hopping as people are not used to free sex advice in public and many were hungry to talk about sex in ways were not shameful or secretive. Participants asked us all sorts of questions. We did our best to provide practical information while also being creative and thinking outside the box. The two of us offered sex life tarot readings, and usually the cards provided just the right guidance. Drawing on our combined personal experience our group gave radical, queer, and punk rock sex advice that eschewed traditional morality. Our clinicians offered tips on topics such as FluxSex, Chthulu compost love attitude, Naughty karma, Amazon play, rosebud reiki, queer celibacy, sex in performance art, sensual presence, aktivist humanist ethics, sexological bodywork, pollen-amory, sophisticated surrender, food porn addiction, sexual alchemy, sex and psychedelics and more.

This documenta sex clinic was a parliament of embodied sexual knowledge. Some of our sex workers who had not seen themselves as sex educators previously, did now and they were elated and empowered. A good time was had by all, and certainly we opened up some minds and performed a sex clinic as art.

Click here to view a PDF of the Kassel Sidewalk Sex Clinic Program