I entered documenta fifteen from the back door.
I knew that the Fridericianum had a secret passage for babies up to 4 years old. Since I was visiting Kassel with my partner and our 3 years old daughter, we walked around the building until we saw a parking space for strollers indicating we had found the entrance we were looking for. The Public Daycare that artist Graziela Kunsch developed for documenta fifteen occupied the north wing of the museum. It didn't give only free access to a space designed according to the pedagogy of Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler (1902–1984), but it also allowed visitors to enter the premises of documenta fifteen without paying a fare. (I immediately recognized Graziela's concern of making access free - which is always a fundamental part of her work as an artist and activist.)
Several parents were hanging out with their babies at a slowed down pace. They were scattered around several rooms that allowed different kinds of activities, each room designed according to the babies' mobility and autonomy: a place to rest, a place to eat, diaper changing tables and a playground to trigger free play - all at both children and parents' height. As one walked through the space, one could notice it slowly shifted from a daycare to an exhibition: Graziela's videos of her daughter Manu, books, objects and a series of pictures from Marian Reismann (1911–1991) who spent part of her life photographing the learning process of babies growing at the orphanage, run by Emmi Pikler.
This was the fundamental starting point for our journey. It was as if we had entered documenta fifteen from Alice in Wonderland's rabbit hole. The next rooms were occupied by RURUKIDS and Gudksul. Instead of an exhibition, the Fridericianum's ground floor had turned into Fridskul – a place to learn together, to sleep, to play and to cook. While walking through the rooms and watching the choreography of the public, I could not but remember what Portuguese pedagogist José Pacheco often says in his conferences: "schools are not buildings, they are people".
PEOPLE, NOT BUILDINGS
ruangrupa's now famous motto – "make friends, not art" – is often wrongly interpreted. It is not about refusing to make art, it is about making friends first. Paraphrasing José Pacheco, museums are like schools: they are not buildings, they are people in the first place. So, if you want to make art, maybe you should start making friends - not in the sense of networking, but rather trying to look for people who you would like to spend time with. If museums are made of people, why are they always so filled up with objects?
ruangrupa's provocative inversion of perspective makes exhibitions (understood as collections of objects) somehow overrated, as if one of the possible outputs for art (objects) had become the sole format accepted in the artworld. We are so used to accepting this as a natural condition for art that there was something unsettling about walking through galleries that looked more like places to hang around – "nongkrong" in Indonesian - than exhibition halls. I could hear the discontent of art goers who come to Biennale and Documenta to look for artists, to consume the new hype, to explore and excavate something they can take back home. But I could also see most of the public recalculating their expectations, reading, sitting, watching – simply being generous with what was going on and trying to be part.
We constantly ask for something new, but when we are facing something different, we struggle. I guess it is a normal defense mechanism from the brain. But it is always strange to see it operating in the art world which is supposed to be a place to think and do things differently and which is often the most outlandish experience for those who do not handle the proper conventions. Narcissus cannot love anything except its own reflection. I guess that for many collectors, gallerists and curators there was something like a narcissistic pain at stake.
NOT NEW, NOR SOUTH
documenta fifteen did bring to the center another understanding of what art does and how it operates, but there is nothing new about it. To label it as a novelty is a way to reduce it in time. In fact, it felt very familiar to me. I work at Casa do Povo, a Jewish Brazilian autonomous art space in São Paulo that identifies with the dynamics of documenta fifteen: to work with processes rather than results, to understand that the public is a construct (and not a target), to develop projects collectively, not to divide art from other spheres of life, to blur the frontiers between culture and social initiatives, to look into art as a place to think and experiment things differently. In that sense, documenta fifteen felt homelike.
Another way to reduce the reach of documenta fifteen is to limit it in space by labeling it as a voice from the South (global or local). I do not think it is. Borders were geographically more subtle: one could walk from the Black Archives from Amsterdam to hearing songs from the Komîna Fîlm a Rojava, looking into Archive des luttes des femmes en Algérie or watching how the UK-based Project Art Works functions. documenta fifteen felt like a community of voices. It reminded me of Aimée Césaire's rewriting of Shakespeare's The Tempest. In the original play Prospero, the Duque of Napoli, is exiled on a savage island where he is saved by a monster called Caliban. He then enslaves Caliban, takes his power and becomes the ruler of the island and, more powerful than ever, reconquers the throne of Napoli. The play was written in connection with the beginning of colonization in the XVIth century. Aimée Césaire's 1969 rewriting of the play tells the same story from an anticolonial point of view and raises new questions: what if the monster would tell the story of the tempest? What would they say? Would they be heard? By whom? How so?
I believe that documenta fifteen tells the story of our collapsing world from the point of view of those who are considered to be the monsters from a colonial perspective: women, Black people, Asians, First Nations people, neurodivergent people and all the “others”. Their voices are sometimes hearable, sometimes not. It is not always easy to connect to everything that was on show in the many venues of documenta fifteen. Since there is no such thing as an abstract public, one cannot be the public for everything: some contents would need more context and more time to be translated - and not everything is translatable. Eventually, one has to understand that he, she or they cannot understand everything - and this can be a frustrating experience, but an important one. Beyond the North and South separation, documenta fifteen questions the notion of universality, which can be the same as euro-centrality, but it does so by showing the many worlds that exist beyond borders.
Not new, nor South! Reducing documenta fifteen in time (as a novelty) and in space (a voice from the South) are strategies to reduce it conceptually.
TYPOLOGY OF EXPERIENCES
At heart of documenta fifteen was the notion of lumbung, in reference to the Indonesian for collective rice barns. Empirically, it is a tool to hack Documenta. To do so, the artistic team tried to avoid working as a curatorial team that would accompany each project. Through a series of agreements documenta fifteen became a resource for all participants. This was made through sharing and harvesting processes, large and small assemblies (called "Majelis"), the central role of the 14 participating organizations (inter-lokals), public programs and chain invitations (artists inviting other artists). The artistic team decentralized the decision making up to a point that it partly lost control of it. The idea was eventually less to change Documenta through documenta fifteen but rather to use documenta fifteen to launch lumbung one. In that sense, one could say that lumbung one is not so much an exhibition as such and more an alternative dynamic for mega-events. And it asks for upcoming iterations.
This said, I would like to try to organize my experience through lumbung one. It was a rich and challenging journey even though not always a happy nor a comfortable one. I think I can create a quick and superficial typology to make it clearer.
1. "Ah! Good old exhibitions'' – There were many complex exhibitions and installations at lumbung one. The amazing survey of Taring Padi's work at Hallenbad Ost was striking - puppets, murals and videos. The same for the work of Fondation Festival sur le Niger at Hübner areal. Two examples out of many where one could grasp the works in their specific context.
2. "Oops! Wrong time" – Many public activities took place during the 100 days of documenta fifteen. As a visitor, I could often feel that I had arrived too late or too early. I missed the "new rural agenda summit" organized by Jatiwangi Art Factory. I missed the Cinema Caravan and Takashi Kuribayashi's programs. And much more.
3. "Transmidia!" – To have lunch at Boloho's Cantonese-style restaurant while watching their self-produced sitcom was quite something. The complex work of Britto Art Trust - films, pictures, installation and a collective restaurant - was another immersive experience of how to unpack and share one's context in many formats.
4. "Sorry! For locals only" – Some art works were meant to re-signify geographies that might be common for people living in Kassel. Seeing Black Quantum Futurism posters in the underpass of Frankfurter Straße must be more interesting for someone walking there daily than for someone who traveled the world to see this.
5. "Let's talk about money" – The ruru kios and the lumbung gallery experience, even though not totally successful, were unique attempts to turn visible the fact that the market is always present, even in self-proclaimed not for profit mega-events. The idea to put on the frontstage what happens in the backstage was a bold gesture.
6. "The antisemitic turmoil" – Since I work at the Casa do Povo, a Jewish institution, I could not avoid dealing with the antisemitic issues around documenta fifteen. We were even used by the German press to attack the artistic team! We publicly condemned the attacks. It made me feel uncomfortable as if the rightful struggle against antisemitism was instrumentalized to silence other minority voices, in particular Palestinian ones – thus possibly fostering more antisemtism!
LOOKING FOR THE PUBLIC
While visiting documenta fifteen I kept asking myself: who is the public?
In order to understand what art does, I think art critics seriously need to talk to the people that are connected through the arts. Among the many things that art does, it also creates its own public by connecting people between them. We cannot simply analyze a work from a pseudo neutral and universal perspective.
Symmetrically, I am sure that I connected with Graziela's Public Daycare because it made me part of its public by putting me in touch with my baby and with other parents and babies, and with a certain kind of pedagogy through a series of objects. Thus, a good way to measure the success of an art project is through the community it manages to effectively build up. While I am writing this text, parents and babies from Kassel are struggling for the city to buy Graziela's work. Is there something more powerful than people fighting to keep art close to their chest? I guess that, at the end of the day, good art makes good friends.
Talking about our relationship to children, Ailton Krenak, indigenous leader, thinker and activist said recently that we should "host the inventivity that comes with the arrival of the new people". Instead of thinking about them as "empty packages that need to be filled up (...) we should realize that it is from them that creativity can emerge as well as a subjectivity able to invent new worlds - which is much more interesting than inventing futures". Maybe the same could be said about lumbung one: one should listen more to what Caliban has to say about our world, other worlds and worlds in becoming.
Casa do Povo
São Paulo, 19th October 2022
