Parrhesia:The Risky Activity of Speaking Up and Speaking Out

Ulrike Möntmanns project Parrhesia: The Risky Activity of Speaking the Truth again focuses on a marginal group, and with the aid of arts-based research and practice seeks ways out of systematically imposed powerlessness. The research project centres on the conditions of life for female drug addicts before and after the onset of their addiction. That they are regarded as a negligible social phenomenon and, moreover, the women experience themselves as guilty in principle and justifiably imprisoned, in no way diminishes their suffering from a life on the streets and in prison characterised for the most part by (sexual) violence. On the contrary: being structurally condemned literally to voicelessness and therefore also to defencelessness raises the question of whether recounting the stories of their lives in public can prove to be an emancipatory act. In an interdisciplinary amalgamation of art and social science Möntmanns gender-specific study analyses a phenomenon that concerns society as a whole from a variety of perspectives. To expand areas of action and the circulation of knowledge of her Outcast Registration network, the findings of the projects conducted so far in central Europe will be supplemented and extended by a number of projects conducted in prisons in northern and southern Europe. The key theoretical concept of the project is Michel Foucaults conception of parrhesia, which describes the courage and the duty to speak the naked truth; from a seemingly powerless perspective to take up a stance sincerely and candidly against powerful persons and the established order at the risk of being sanctioned. Parrhesia reveals existing hierarchies, here based on the position of female drug addicts pushed to the outermost margins of society. The initial question contradicts the widespread cliché that junkies have nothing significant to say. In prison, societys most isolated space, the project participants discover art as a potential space of action. In their biographies recurring patterns and contingent structures become visible, in particular the disproportionate nature of the consequences of offences they have committed and that have been committed against them. Art thus becomes a socio-political means of mediation and, through the employment of aesthetic media, an instrument of public visibility. Art interventions and empirical research prove to be effective and complementary investigative methods that can be applied in an interdisciplinary context. Within the framework of new collaborations with research institutions in the countries where the project will be carried out in the future, a large-scale network is being established with expertise that will promote and enrich arts-based research on possibilities for socio-political interventions in the long term. Ulrike Möntmann, PhD, studied Visual Communication at Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences and Fine Arts at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Since 1997 the artist has conducted projects with female drug addicts in collaborations lasting several years. Her artsci studies at the outermost edge of societys periphery are documented in the Outcast Registration web archive, including the audiovisual portrait THIS BABY DOLL WILL BE A JUNKIE which was supported by the Austrian Science Fund. The project included interventions in public spaces and was exhibited in the five countries participating; the book on this dissertation project was published in 2018. Her new project is funded by the Elise Richter PEEK Programme of the Austrian Science Fund with 380,000 Euro until 2025. In addition to teaching commitments and supervising PhD candidates at various Universities of the Arts in The Netherlands, Ulrike Möntmann regularly gives guest lectures, including in Vienna. She lives and works in Amsterdam and Vienna.