Universal human rights mean nothing as long as it is not possible to bring legal action on their basis against the fact that some lives or deaths count while others do not. Under those circumstances, they are rather an integral component and legitimation of the politics of death. As with the Pied Piper of Hamelin, one is beguiled by their songs and does not notice the abyss towards which one is being led with a clean conscience. What use are laws that are supposed to protect the rights of indigenous peoples if economic interests constantly undermine them? Political lip service and propaganda, populism and seduction are the software that has always kept the machines of our democratic systems running. Can these machines still be hacked and repurposed in a double volte-face: machines that synchronise hegemony and homogeneity. In this part of the exhibition, too, it is life beyond the normative, the dissident body, the body in transition that counters this hegemony. At the same time, the focus is on strategies of the counter-public and on aesthetic forms through which the experiences and knowledge of resistance and emancipation can be shared.

bergen assembly