In the Parliament of Fear, audience members and speakers summon the world’s fears together. The first day of the session begins with a talk by Timnit Gebru, an AI ethicist recently fired by Google, on the dangers posed to marginalized people by large-scale language models in machine learning. This will be followed up by the President of the World Uyghur Congress, Dolkun Isa, with remarks on the genocide of the Uyghur minority in China. The second day of the session, Kai Burmeister talks about employees’ fear of climate change and green technologies. This is followed by a problematization of the dangerous connection between immunity and community. Together with cultural theorist Klaus Theweleit, sociologist Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky discusses fascism as a bodily state of anxiety-filled men, and author Bini Adamczak argues for a materialist analysis of anxiety. These contributions are framed by greetings and interventions from the civil society groups involved in the parade.

But it is simply impossible to overcome fear with just language. In this meeting, we will also listen to unique music by Zachary Watkins and members of The Notwist, as well as lecture performances of Slavs and Tatars and Heba Y. Amin. Moreover, the setting will become an art in its own right: The viewers will be involved in the discourse by parliamentary procedures, and they will actively take part in determining which fears are to be sent to the parade and the ritual.

Meeting Point: Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Akademiestraße 2–4, 80799 München and Radio 80000

On Sunday, the day before All Saints’ Day, the fears collected in Parliament will be carried through downtown Munich in a Parade of Fear. The procession will consist of civil society groups such as #ausspekuliert, the Bavarian Refugee Council, the Molestia fraternity, Extinction Rebellion, Randgruppenkrawall, the World Uyghur Congress, and others. It will include specially created contributions by artists such as Chicks on Speed, Der Plan, Jesaja Rüschenschmidt, Ogutu Muraya, Laura Ziegler, Stephan Janitzky and Quinsy Gario.

The parade and its audience will kick off at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) and move along Leopoldstraße towards the Olympiapark, where artist Jörg Besser’s Wicker Man, a huge human-like figure made of wicker, will welcome the participants and spectators. Here a parliament delegation will hand over the collected fears to the master of ceremonies, Anna McCarthy.