In the Birthplace of Democracy, a Different Kind of Parliament Asks: What’s Next?
CONTACT: Sarah Rogers
(919) 660-3035
sarah.rogers@duke.edu
DURHAM, N.C. – For seven weeks this summer, an experimental collective of artists and thinkers from Duke University’s Laboratory for Social Choreography will bring together hundreds of people in the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece, in an exhibit unlike any other.
Its goal? To reimagine how we live.
“Parliament” is a pioneering work of social choreography — an emerging art form in which normal modes of human interaction are temporarily suspended, heightening our awareness of the political and social structures that shape our everyday lives. By creating a space in which people think and move differently, “Parliament” seeks to generate new, radically imaginative possibilities for society.
He knows that it sounds strange at first, but Laboratory for Social Choreography director, Duke professor and artist Michael Kliën says that imagining alternatives is the only sane response to our current moment, in which the seemingly inexorable systems that have produced climate change and extreme wealth disparities have many citizens feeling hopeless and stuck.
“We’re stuck in a system that we’ve collectively built, but not many people seem to like very much,” says Kliën. “There’s this notion of ‘Well, there’s nothing else, so let’s just settle’ — as if we humans haven’t always invented and created our ways of living together.
“If the system is destroying our environment, destroying our attention, destroying our pleasure in life, then of course you would want to reform or change that system,” he continues. “It’s a symptom of insanity to just accept it because you can’t think of the alternative.”
For this task, he says, you need a broad collective. So the Laboratory for Social Choreography is working with community organizations across Athens to invite all kinds of people — refugees, cancer survivors, politicians, people with learning disabilities, and many others — to join “Parliament.” Anyone can sign up to participate.
Each day, new participants will come into the exhibit space to enact “Parliament.” After a fifteen-minute briefing, they will be left to roam around for three hours or more, all of them bound by the same conditions: they will not speak, or lean on the walls, or play with their shoes. And they will definitely not look at their phones.
What unfolds over the next few hours is anyone’s guess, but “Parliament” often leads participants to a new awareness of themselves and their relation to others — but without the identity markers that typically divide us. Kliën says as much as it’s possible to do so, it strips people down to a state of “pre-identity.”
Even if participants lie down on the floor and go to sleep — which they sometimes do — Kliën says that “Parliament” forces them to confront their own agency.
“What really shows up is the potential that we stand in simply by being in the world,” he says. “It makes you aware of how it’s been reduced in scope by the social system that we’re in. That might not make you happy. But it might open up space for you to say ‘What am I going to do about it?’”
Kliën first conceptualized “Parliament” in 2011, against the backdrop of mass anti-austerity demonstrations in Athens that followed Greece’s debt crisis. It was first exhibited at the Benaki Museum in 2014. Since then, it has evolved in design and scope through new iterations across Europe and the United States, and it has seeded new social choreographic works “Amendment,” “Constitution,” and “Inauguration” as part of the Laboratory for Social Choreography’s ongoing research.
Kliën says it’s apt that “Parliament” is returning to Benaki — and to Athens, the birthplace of democracy — during a time when many are sounding fears about the deteriorating state of democracy worldwide.
“When it’s under threat, rather than saying, ‘Let’s hunker down in our institutions,’ ‘Parliament’ is saying, ‘No, let’s push the boat out and see what’s out there,’” Kliën says.
From June 11–July 27, 2025, “Parliament” runs at the Benaki Museum in Athens from 11:00 a.m.–3:00 p.m. on Thursdays and Sundays and 11:00 a.m.–8:00 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Guides — including Duke students in the community engagement program DukeEngage — will serve as a first point of contact for museum visitors, and will help them enter and navigate the exhibit space.
