PARRHESIA at Prison Schwarzau (AT)

11 July 2022

The second project implementation of PARRHESIA took place from 11 to 22 July 2022 at prison Schwarzau (AT).

After the completion of the research project at the Schwarzau prison, a field report was prepared, which is available in German and English on request.

The resulting biographies have been made available and can be found in the "biographies" section of OUTCAST REGISTRATION and on this page, on the right.

Women State Prison Schwarzau am Steinfeld

Participants:

to be aware of outsiders, that is, marginalised groups in a society, to register and research conditions they live under, and to demand public visibility for them, is the main concern of this arts and science research project. Such groups all suffer from similar systematic exclusion procedures that push them over and over again further to the margins of society. Unlike their male fellow sufferers, drug-addicted women in European prisons are considered a “negligible phenomenon”. The work of the OUTCAST REGISTRATION counters this by recognising the need of the participants to make their lives a public affair, which ultimately also means laying part of the responsibility for their illness at society’s door.

comes from the Greek and means “freedom of speech” or “talking about everything”. It is the key theoretical concept of the eponymous project PARRHESIA: THE RISKY ACTIVITY OF SPEAKING THE TRUTH, which is based on Michel Foucault’s remarks on parrhesiastic speaking the truth. Drawing on the ancient tradition of truth speaking that can be traced back to Euripides, Foucault defines parrhesia as “a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a speciﬁc relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a speciﬁc relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognises truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of ﬂattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy.” (Source: Michel Foucault, The Meaning and Evolution of the Word Parrhesia in Discourse & Truth: The Problematisation of Parrhesia, 1999, 6 lectures at the University of California at Berkeley, CA, Oct.–Nov. 1983. https://foucault.info/parrhesia/foucault.DT1.wordParrhesia.en/)

a biographical protocol that uses the Matrix Method to collect facts as soberly as possible which is devoid of emotional suggestion. From the resulting collages of words the biographers formulate sentences in the present tense, so that the events of the past are brought into the present.