Elaine Tsui

The Divan: Parrhesia and the space of law, sovereignty, and knowledge

To reconstruct cities in a non-homogenous way would be through pure languages, since it defines architectural space and govern the space of law, space of sovereignty and knowledge production. Language posits an initial “oral legal cultural” that
does not resort to legal texts but instead retrieves oral traditions from collective memory. Language is not about empowerment through an act of writing or the concurrence of meaning, speech, and writing, nor is it about what language philosophy calls a performative act. It is about administration. Through looking at the transformation of Greece and turkey and the detail studies of universities, the project has come to realize the conflicts of archives between authority and administration. The strategy of the project is to control the transfer operations, the mediators between law and specific oral utterances (in universities, offices, courts). What is at stake in both situations in Greece and Turkey are going through a rapid re-organization. In order to organize all these stories, the Parrhesia Zone that I refer as the divan is the key. It is the key factors of separate and to create new intensity and multiple disciplines. It locates in multiple spaces including in Athens, Thessaloniki, Istanbul, Izmir, Ankara, they are the act of exchanging so it becomes the medium of transfer.