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In early 2020, London-based project space Parrhesiades published Parrhesiades Volume 1, an anthology of sorts that saw outcomes of its first years’ programme settle onto the printed page. The original London launch took place on the 11th of March at Camden Arts Centre, on the same day that the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 a global pandemic, Harvey Weinstein, who’s criminal sexual abuses spawned the #MeToo movement, was sentenced to 23 years in prison for some of his crimes and the Pound collapsed to a record low against the Dollar. At the launch, context loomed large over Cally Spooner’s reading from the DEAD TIME score. With its depiction of financial collapse, collective illness, and abuses of power, interwoven into discourses of care and durational respite, the project met an anxious audience and parrhesiades subsequently entered into a long period of pause and reflection.

As the context shifts again, and we can once more gather together in public, Radio Athènes asks parrhesiades to open up Volume 1 for a new audience in a new time. Quinn Latimer will read from her forwarding essay, Jesper List Thomsen will return to the material that informed his project, FROM TACITURN TO BUFF, and a new reading from Cally Spooner’s DEAD TIME will be made accompanied by cellist Stavros Parginos.

The book will be available to buy and alongside these works by Cally Spooner, Jesper List Thomsen and Quinn Latimer, Volume 1 also includes new work by Sung Tieu, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Johanna Hedva and Eva Gold. —Lynton Talbot

• Parrhesiades is a multi-platform project, established in 2019 by curator Lynton Talbot to work with artists for whom language, either written spoken or otherwise performed is an essential part of their practice. Together with the artist, Parrhesiades develops a single new work that exists across multiple platforms. A distributed or exploded model for exhibition that incorporates a partner institution, a speculative book, an online space and part of the curators’ home in South East London which is open by appointment.

By inviting artists to work through the different physicalities and temporalities that this offers, the work is made available to a public in a way that problematises a single reading. This fractured or emergent approach culminates in a publication, presenting an account of the six projects, and constitutes the only form of documentation of the works.

Parrhesiades is informed by the resistant politics found within poetry, where meaning is made not in the strictly codified effects of the language used but in the freedom words are given to emancipate themselves from a useful function. Parrhesiades is interested in this as a methodology. As in poetry, the meaning is made from the real conditions the language produces and not as a representational gesture.

Parrhesiades offers an infrastructure that privileges discursivity over commodity. It is an attempt at a more discrepant form of resistance to the market capture of ideas and understands language in its temporal and ephemeral nature as “always already political”.

Forthcoming projects include Anaïs Duplan, Isabel Waidner, Quinn Latimer, Tai Shani, Caspar Heinemann and Sophie Jung. The programme begins November 2020, with Parrhesiades Volume 2 released in late 2021.

https://www.parrhesiades.com