Aneducation for Erasure

aneducation – documenta 14

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members. The documenta 14 Chorus also met here, those who “sing differently” in the aim of embracing disharmony and to let others sing along. aneducation was an attempt to bring the makers and visitors of documenta 14 together – not just another name for educational activities, guided tours, and so on, all of which usually form the educational outreach of a large exhibition. The artworks served as orientation marks for walks amid the dense fabric of both cities and within individual venues. This richly textured experience constituted a capillary infrastructure for documenta 14, nourishing participants’ curiosity to engage in a common experience of walking and thinking rather than merely being provided with information. This publication is a small reminder of what has been achieved, what remains, and what yet needs to be done in order to help us forget what we were taught to believe and reach out towards the Great Unlearning.

Adam Szymczyk, artistic director, documenta 14

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ANEDUCATION

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The word “aneducation” could never be fully translated into either Greek or German. The neologism therefore had to negotiate its place in Athens and Kassel; it captured the shifting mode of documenta 14’s education department, with its constant doing and undoing, weaving and unraveling, knowing and unknowing, learning and unlearning. The single department across two cities included a director, coordinators, artists, producers, program assistants, interns, and various publics. It was first called “an education”, the prefix “an” pointing towards a notion of “self-education” or one education among many. The merging into “aneducation” was heavily discussed within various documenta departments for its awkward grammar and loaded meanings that connoted misbehavior, learning dysfunction, questioning education, shift in perspective, and more-than-one-way knowledge transmission.

Employees of any documenta are part of building an institution from scratch: a sixty-year-old start-up.

No handover notes, no introductions to systems – not even a job description. We found ourselves in a landscape of possibility, but also responsibility. This differs from other biennial models in that documenta sees itself as the formation of an institution that presents a 100-day experimental museum. documenta 14 sought to expand the 100-day museum and rather see itself as a formation of different publics, through readership of its magazine South as a State of Mind, to the Parliament of Bodies, and aneducation already beginning a year before opening. What does it mean to become a learning institution that attempts to flatten the hierarchies between the exhibition, publication, public program, and education? documenta 14 dealt with difficult knowledges, rupturing the safety of what we know to break down grand narratives. It ventured into the minor – or short – stories and the seemingly unspectacular. aneducation had to embody its own experiences of shifting, repositioning, and adjusting through listening while learning, through intimacy, vulnerability, and questioning. Within its

program, the Chorus of documenta 14 worked both at the heart of the exhibition and at the edges of the public program. In conducting walks with visitors the Chorus attempted to address the decolonization of knowledge, schooling in relation to history, and displacements of bodies. The Faculty was formed to decenter a singular methodology, and convene the Chorus voices to go out and collectively navigate the exhibition. The aneducation team itself had experienced various degrees of displacement due to war, political upheaval, work, or education. Now we were adrift between Athens and Kassel, each city having divergent yet entangled migration histories.

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between knowledge, power, and bodies. The program sought to de-sanctify the “canon”, and instead position experience as knowledge, to share it in forms open to contributions from different bodies under the idea of the “body as a container of knowledge” and site of learning.1 This was the starting point for Under the Mango Tree, which thought about collectivizing the body in forming temporary communities and different ways of knowing.

Shift

Drift What does the body carry with it as it moves from one place to another? What is displaced and what is replaced? What cultures continue to form and shape the identity of a city and the social environment?

How do we learn from these lived experiences and cultural influences? The forced exchange between Greece and Turkey after the sacking of the Ottoman Empire in 1922 saw over one million Greeks exiled from their homelands in Asia Minor and other parts of Turkey, becoming refugees in their new “home”.

The large influx from 1923 to 1924 had a major impact on social architecture affecting housing, schools, and public spaces, coinciding with the growth of modernist architecture. The need to create open forms, relating indoor and outdoor spaces, prompted many reforms including a form of education that focused on preparing students to become citizens. Babis Baltas points to these reforms in the entry on “Deschooling”.

Many school workshops in aneducation’s Telling Works took place in schools built during this period, where those once engaging reforms seem a thing of the distant past. aneducation located itself within these histories, and desires to consider how the organization and architecture of physical spaces create relationships

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documenta has its own (rarely documented) educational history. The exhibition itself could be seen as an education project, which, from the beginning, forged relationships between art, knowledge, and the public.

Arnold Bode (1900–1977) embodied this intermingling as a teacher at the art school in Kassel, an artist, and the force behind the first editions. Passionate about the gap in knowledge forged through National Socialism’s damning of so-called “degenerate” art, the initial documenta exhibition, Art of the Twentieth Century (July 19 – September 18, 1955) was a kind of accompaniment to the concurrent Bundesgartenschauen (German National Garden Show) in the then bombed out Fridericianum, its walls covered in billowing clear plastic. Students Bode brought in to help install works later gave informal tours to visitors. Bode had the inherent ability to educate, to draw out and lead, to enthuse, excite, and bring people together, recognizing the capacities people had to make his vision realizable.

In 1968, Kassel students revolted against documenta’s curatorial direction and Bode. They claimed the institution was outmoded and out of touch with emerging post-war generation voices. Bode stepped down and from 1972 onwards documenta had a new artistic director for each edition. Around this time artist Bazon Brock developed the Besucherschule (Visitors School), which sought to provide the opportunity for every visitor to be professionalized as viewers. The

Besucher­schule was implemented from documenta 4 (1968) to 9 (1992). Brock used media such as radio and television to circulate his vision. From documenta 6 through documenta 11, Evelyn Lehmann’s Kinderdokumenta enacted a child-­centered approach, in which children, without their guardians, were encouraged to develop creativity through looking at artworks in the exhibition and sometimes engaging with exhibiting artists, using Lehmann’s creative workbooks, and making work, even exhibiting.

Catherine David’s 100 Days – 100 Guests program for documenta X (1997) situated the exhibition as a place to produce meaning and positions through lectures, discussions, and artistic offerings. Another example of the “educational turn” importantly lodged in the curatorial, as described by Irit Rogoff, was Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta11 (2002) with its many discursive platforms in different parts of the world.

After documenta 12 (2007) the education team published a two-volume theoretical and practical compendium identifying issues still prevalent today: namely, the commercialization of mediation through third-party contracts that puts freelancers in precarious conditions and gives a price to neoliberalism’s stake in education. The position of freelancers like the Chorus members incited furious negotiations within documenta 14 on its overall structure. More recently, the Maybe Education and Public Program led by Julia Moritz for documenta 13 (2012) saw residents give dTOURS as Worldly Companions, questioning how the exhibition could be read by non-­art professionals and connected to Kassel.

ANEDUCATION

a student again. It’s no surprise then that the art schools in Athens and Kassel were our first partners – through relationships with spaces like these and others, we developed our practice continuing off the long lines of enquiry begun a year before opening (d14 Sessions, Elective Affinities, and Telling Works). Other learning models within and outside the classroom to gather, learn, explore orality, and spread rumors took place in reactivated kiosks (A-Letheia) in Athens and storefronts in Kassel (Peppermint and Narrowcast House).

Thinking through the body was crucial to orienting ourselves in these two radically different cities: we returned to our feet, opened our ears (Visual Sounds), and read the city on a 1:1 scale. We found meeting points (Synantiseis) in altering discourses, and through cooking, eating, and drinking together (Nourishing Knowledge) or inverting the radio waves to listen to the public (Narrowcast House) and generally inhabiting varied spaces in the city to create different social relations. We endeavored to convene a public of bodies through listening, walking, artistic intervention, programming, dialogue, and using what remains to build aneducation in a constant state of undoing and doing.

SOME OF US WILL BE AGAIN WHAT WE WERE GOING BACK TO LIFE WE KNEW SLIGHTLY ALTERED —Joar Nango, European Everything (2017) Sepake Angiama (SA), head of education, documenta 14 and a BAK, basis voor actuele kunst 2017/2018 fellow, researching science fiction, intersectional feminism, and modernist architecture.

Remains What remains from these attempts to educate diverse publics around the equally wide spectrum of topics in each documenta? documenta 14 attempted to place itself in an awkward position in order to learn, listen to the unheard, think from the periphery, drift in and out of the center, find new alignments, and become

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1 From an interview with Cristóbal Martínez of Postcommodity for aneducation in 2016.

Supported by

documenta 14 is organized by documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, a non-profit organization financed by the City of Kassel and the State of Hessen in their capacity as shareholders. Funding support for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel is also provided by the German Federal Cultural Foundation and the Federal Foreign Office of Germany.

ISBN 978-3-943620-80-1 Printed in the Netherlands © 2018 documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, the artists, the authors, documenta 14 All rights reserved.

While we have done everything we could to make sure the information in this volume is properly credited, please contact us should you have any questions or concerns.

Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank all of the generous program contributors and participants (see Appendix) and the following partners: Karl Schlecht Stiftung, Australia Council for the Arts, Canada Council for the Arts, Athens Municipality, Kunsthochschule Kassel, University of Kassel, Sourisseaux Partners, Athens School of Fine Arts, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen, Samsung, Stiftung Mercator, Hessisches Kultusministerium

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CONTENTS

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A-Letheia 3 Afterword 11 aneducation 17 Appendix 23 Athens 51 Bibliography 55 Chorus 59 Circle 99 Colophon 103 Contents 105 Conversations and Convergences 107 Corpoliteracy 109 Curriculum 117 Deschooling 119 documenta 14 121 Elective Affinities 125 Faculty 137 Foreword 155 Gesture 159 Gossip 165 House of Commons 169 Inclusivity 173 Intimacy 177 Introduction 181 Kassel 185 Laufmappe 187 Library 189 Listening 195 Lose Fäden 201 Material Matters 205 Membrane 221 Methodos 225 Narrowcast House 227 Nightshift 233

CONVERSATIONS AND CONVERGENCES Cc What were the points of convergence between the many collections of books housed at Peppermint? Can a bibliography be read as a series of conversations across time and space?

Conversations and Convergences wall at Peppermint. Photo: Natalia Escudero López, 2017

Nourishing Knowledge 237 Peppermint 249 Place of 100 Places 251 Questions 253 Radical Pedagogy 257 Radioke 265 Score 275 Synantiseis 279 Telling Works 281 Unlearning 285 Unpacking Burckhardt 287 Visual Sounds 291 Voices 295 Walking 299 Xerox 303 Zebrasteifen 307

In a context already saturated with books, the Conversations and Convergences collection of texts and practices ran the risk of becoming yet another row on the shelves. We needed a method to open up and stake out some foundational concepts in radical pedagogy while also introducing some key authors that had shaped aneducation’s approaches.

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In a specially designed wall display, with the books presented face forward and accompanied by short texts on their main arguments, we sought to contextualize the significance of each author for us as a team. To draw out the relationships between the authors and how they might have worked with or influenced one another, we made connections using string as well as typewritten notes on pink

Conversations and Convergences wall at Peppermint. Photo: Natalia Escudero López, 2017

index cards, discussing the points of convergence, even if speculative. For example, how Lucius Burckhardt might have taken a stroll with Ivan Illich during his visit to Kassel in the winter of 1979.

Issuing from a shift in pedagogical practices from the 1950s to early 1980s, these texts provided a framework for further contributions and recommendations from participants in the Under the Mango Tree: Sites of Learning gathering which took place in Athens and Kassel in July 2017. During and after the gathering, Conversations and Convergences continued to change as books were added or removed and visitors left notes or made new connections. It was also a way for us to share our thoughts and activities with the wider documenta public. I was glad to see how people engaged with the books, taking them down and thumbing through them.

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O my body, make of me always a man who questions!

— Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks But they jeered one and all and said: This is only the night of bonfires We need dancers around the blaze Acrobats and drummers, stilt dancers And, listen carefully, lest you forget — Olu Oguibe, The Youth Who Dances An Igbo proverb states that when we dance we express who we were, who we are, and who we want to be. Time is compressed and telescoped teleologically to contain and express the past, the present and the future in one fluid kinaesthetic moment.

— Esiaba Irobi, The Philosophy of the Sea In a December 2017 presentation for the symposium That Around Which the Universe Revolves – On the Rhythm­analysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space,1 filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-Hà proposed rhythm as the door between body and mind. She later expatiated on this proposal, referring to the concept of the embodied mind common to many Afro-Asiatic philosophies. I have been thinking of rhythm within this analogy: everything that leads to or induces a rhythm, facilitates a passage through, an inscription in, a writing on, a recording, and a spelling on and of that embodied mind.2 If the body is the mind, then it has the capacity to learn and memorize. Every movement in space and time – be it a walk, a dance, or otherwise, every gesticulation, every exercise of the muscles and the cells that make up the body – is possibly remembered.

But every intervention on the body – scarifications, tattoos, scars, or injuries – trigger that process of memory.

Laurie White is a curator and an art historian based in Vancouver.

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I explore the possibility of a corpoliteracy – an effort to contextualize the body as a platform, stage, site, and medium of learning, a structure or organ that acquires,

stores, and disseminates knowledge. This concept implies that the body, in sync with, but also independent of, the brain, has the potential to memorize and pass on/down acquired knowledge through performativity – the prism of movement, dance, and rhythm.

It is common practice that when the Nguemba peoples – like many other peoples on the African continent and beyond – dance, they invoke and embody certain totems important to particular families or societies at large. The elephant, lion, monkey, or snake dances not only mimic typical movements of these animals but also summon the spirits that connect the human to his/ her animal. These dances, which are usually performed in groups, then serve a purpose beyond that of mere entertainment and pleasure: the dances become sites that enliven rituals, spaces of spiritual communication and bonding; the bodies that perform are the tools through or with which the rituals are practiced. To the accompaniment of ritual music, the movements of the legs, arms, and rest of the body invoke certain spirits, and through repetition and reiteration, a certain degree of automation is achieved. Dance becomes a means through which rituals are expressed – or better still – dance is the ritual. Through dance one can communicate with certain spirits and convoke them for the purposes of worship and appeasement. It is no surprise that in the performativity of dance, more often than not, the dancer is catapulted into a temporary state of ecstasy. The etymological roots of ecstasy are not unimportant: “elation” comes from Old French, estaise (ecstasy, rapture), derived from the Late Latin extasis and the Greek ekstasis (entrancement, astonishment, insanity; any displacement or removal from the proper place). It is this rapture, displacement, and removal from a particular space – in dance, the displacement from one’s own body, the possibility of an out of body state – that becomes very interesting: trance as state; transcendence via the exalted state of body and soul when dancing.

Besides the spiritual and ritual aspects of dance, performing has obviously been a way for people to

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write or encode their own histories. Wars or other challenges faced by a group of people take form as dance moves, or are integrated into costumes and music. Battle techniques, loss of life, or moments of victory are re-performed, passed from one generation to another, as with the Mbaya dance or Capoeira.

Group dances often reveal moments of encounter.

Encountering of a new religion, for example, can lead to the appropriation of those religious signs, as happened with the appearance of the Catholic cross in the Pépé Kallé and Nyboma dances. Encountering new technologies also gives rise to dance moves: arms open wide can symbolize a plane; or the move in the Pédalé dance in which dancers mimic cycling. There is more work to be done exploring the body’s performative role in dance with respect to the conservation, portrayal, and dissemination of peoples’ histories and that of places and events – dance as a method of historicity, an alternative writing of history, as historiography. The challenge is to acknowledge dance performance as a medium – in its own right – that can reflect with veracity, authenticity, and actuality historical knowledge claims.

Through dances like the Juba, the Chica, or Calenda, one learns about particular times in history: repressions, racial relations, resistances, resilience, and more.

The body of the dancer is the witness. The witness’ narrative – especially when the witness is silent – occurs through performativity. Every performance is to a certain degree a re-experience and re-­witnessing, rather than just observation. Through dance the observer becomes witness. In “Consciousness is Total, Pure Energy” from the Tibetan Buddhist The Book of Wisdom, we learn: [T]he observer means the subjective, and the observed means the objective. The observer means that which is outside the observed, and the observer also means that which is inside.

The inside and the outside can’t be separate; they are together, they can only be together.

When this togetherness, or rather oneness,

is experienced, the witness arises. You cannot practice the witness. If you practice the witness you will be practicing only the observer, and the observer is not the witness. 3 It is this oneness of the observer and observed, inside and outside, that makes dance as a method and practice particularly interesting at this juncture. In Osho practice, it is said that while the scientist is an observer, the mystic is a witness. The dancer too could be considered a witness in this light: their ability to perform the processuality of making histories, and offer testimony, collapses the separation of inside from outside.

Through dance and the accompanying music, sociopolitical realities are embodied, portrayed, and sometimes even processed psychologically and somatically.

During the avian influenza outbreak in West Africa in 2008, DJ Lewis released a popular track in the Ivory Coast called “Grippe Aviaire”; the dance moves in the music video spread like wild fire among the young and old alike. In nightclubs, offices, public spaces, people dangled their half-raised arms, eyes wide open, evoking movements of chickens with bird flu. That same year another Ivory Coast artist, DJ Zidane, at the height of maltreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo on the other side of the Atlantic, invented the Guantanamo dance. Teenagers gathered in public spaces dancing as though handcuffed or crippled. Art engulfed sociopolitical reality; histories and knowledges were embodied in dance, as were societal sentiments, traumas, joys, and fears. Dance is not about the individual, but the community – the commons. As Léopold Sédar Senghor put it: “Je pense donc je suis”; écrivait Descartes. ...

Le Negro-­africain pourrait dire: “Je sens l’Autre, je danse l’Autre, donc je suis.” Or danser, c’est créer, surtout si la danse est d’amour. C’est, en tout cas, le meilleur mode de connaissance. (“I think, therefore, I am,” Descartes writes. ...

The Negro-African could say, “I feel, I dance the other, therefore I am.” To dance is to create,

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especially if the dance is of love. In any event, it is the best way to know.)4 Senghor – the poet, philosopher, and politician – points out a few important things here. Dance is about creation and it is about knowledge. But maybe most importantly, dance seems to be about connecting with the other, about communion, a group action.

Dance, in all the aforementioned functions, manifests itself most effectively when one “dances the other”.

Dance is a social phenomenon. From Agwara dance, Bikutsi, Coupé Décalé, and Zouglou, or circle, contra, or square dances, to street dances like breakdancing in which the crew becomes a surrogate family, dance reflects sociopolitical realities, current and historical affairs, and needs a community to be lived and experienced. One can find solace in the dance crew, and share happiness among birds of a feather. The crew is a place for mentorship, often crucial to community building. Hip hop, dancehall moves, krump, and many other urban forms of dance offer a degree of social credibility to the dancers – not only because they dance well, but because of their affiliation with the crew.

In Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries, Dana Mills writes about dance as a means of communication and as writing. Her argument can be radically summarized as follows: there are more languages than just verbal; human beings have found manifold ways to communicate with each other; and dance is an embodied language, a form of communication between bodies in motion. As such, the language of dance adheres to different rules and structures than those of verbal language. Dance is the way those subjects perform their equality before expressing themselves verbally. There are clashes between verbal and non-verbal languages. At the meeting point between dance and verbal languages, different symbolic and political frameworks collide, underscoring the presence of two forms of language. Political dance, or the constitution of dance as a world that does not require language, creates a shared embodied space between dancer and spectator, between equality and plurality;

equality of bodies allows them to speak with each other unmediated by words; plurality of human beings pushes them to express themselves through their bodies. Through these two aspects, dance is inscribed upon the body. The body is altered by inscription, informing it of communities and possibilities – a dancing body is never alone but conversing with an Other.

But dancing subjects can transcend the boundaries of their communities and live in more than one world – both that constituted by dance as a method of communication and by words as a method of expression. As a practice that goes beyond boundaries, dance challenges demarcations between communities erected by verbal language, transcending spaces created by words: this happens at the moment dancers gain entry into a community larger than the one to which they were assigned, attesting to the equality of bodies. 5

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performances? How can the observer of a performance decipher and relate to these bodily knowledges? If rhythm and dance provide the structure for a form of such bodily knowledge, what are the limits?

Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, curator at large for documenta 14, is artistic director of SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin.

Dance is a sociopolitical method and practice, a means of writing, narrating, and disseminating histories. It is a corporeal phenomenon that can be a catalyst for building communities and challenge and transcend the boundaries of societies and languages. The dancing body becomes the witness, a somatotestimonium – the body in a dance performance and the movements employed as a formal statement are equivalent to a written, spoken, eyewitness, or earwitness account, proof of a spatiotemporal reality.

The above lead me to develop the concepts of corpoliteracy and corpoepistemology, involving the study of the nature and extent of bodily knowledge in dance performance, as well as how the body and dance performance produce, enact, inscribe, and propagate knowledges. Like epistemological studies in general, it is important to analyze bodies employed in dance in relation to notions of truth or belief. Corpoepistemology focuses on manifestations of politicized, sexualized, genderized, and racialized bodies in performativity.

Corpoepistemology is preoccupied with questions like: what is bodily knowledge? How is bodily knowledge acquired? How is bodily knowledge expressed in dance

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Trinh T. Minh-Hà, “On Fourth Dimension”, presentation for SAVVY Contemporary’s discursive and performative symposium, That Around Which the Universe Revolves – On the Rhythmanalysis of Memory, Times, Bodies in Space, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 3 December 2017.

Henri Lefebvre says: “Everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm.” See his Rhythm­analysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 15. The body, according to Lefebvre, is a collection of rhythms with different tunes that result from history, facilitated by calling on all senses, drawing on breathing, and blood circulation, just as much as heartbeats and speech utterances, as landmarks of this experience.

See Osho, The Book of Wisdom: The Heart of Tibetan Buddhism (New York: Osho Media International, 2009 [1979]).

Léopold Sédar Senghor, Liberté 1: Négritude et humanisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1964), p. 259. Translation by the author.

See Dana Mills, Dance and Politics: Moving Beyond Boundaries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017).

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When asked about this word’s definition, some­one in the group of students asked: “Isn’t cirrus a kind of cloud?” Indeed, a cloudiness accompanies the circular tracks which once delineated the “curriculum” of the ancient Gymnasium. The Latin roots of the word meaning “to run a course” became somehow embodied as we walked the well-trod paths around the Temple of Apollo’s περίμετρος (perimeter) in Delphi.

A course in what and towards what? We wondered as we encircled the remains of epic facades, surrounding the place from which the oracle’s words once emerged, steeped in laurel and earthy mists. Running tentative fingers across aged graffiti, we traced coordinates and scores detailing wisdom and warnings, and the welcoming words: γνῶθι σαὐτόν gnóthi saftón (know thyself). In the now faded ruins, the greeting seems ironic. Yet it would have proven intensely more apposite in a haze of prophecy and attempts at its translation, the oracular voice merging with priestly interpretations and personal doubts. In a crumbling amphitheater, we sat on the cold stones and listened to a recording of a woman, a sage, holding forth from an unassuming portable speaker, on the power of knowledge to at once bring life and turn to stone, to petrify meaning, to stunt intuition.1 The short story, undergirded by her gravelly voice resonated in the cobblestones on which we sat. Apparently the story was not

short enough, however, as a security guard interrupted us for its being distracting.

“Distracting for whom?” we asked.

“Just turn it off!”

“It’s one more minute.”

“Switch it off now, you’re distracting the researchers!”

We looked around and saw one or two figures deciphering markings on a staircase some distance away. To go off course, to pull in different directions: distraction is surely an antidote to loops, rehashed solutions, and redirection.

While the dimensions inspired by the thinking body – moving, exercising, learning – might be useful, the questions around what kinds of bodies, which exercises, pronounced by whom, and for what purposes, echo loudly among ruins. Other voices, other words, those forbidden, interrupt the comfortable canons that encircle education. What if these misty, doubtful, and unassuming kinds of knowledge were found not at the perimeter, but at the center of curricula? A word of welcome and of warning to those who enter: know thyself distracted.

Clare Butcher (CB) is a teacher and part of documenta 14 aneducation; she is still cooking.

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Thanks to Barbara Casavecchia for sharing the sound recording and translation of Maria Lai, “La storia di Maria Pietra” (“The Story of Maria Pietra”) (Rome: RAI Sardegna, 2005). This sound fragment was shared in the context of the aneducation Winter Instensive – School of Voice: Hearing Voices held at the Athens School of Fine Arts Annex in Delphi, January 2017.

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Movement belongs to modernism itself: in the context of school, this movement calls to mind yards, gardens, bicycles, outdoor classes, streets, routes, material networks, touch, interaction, intervening non-directedly, performances of space and time, and community.

The street is a site of concentrated class struggle, and constitutes the material condition for the transition to and from school.

There are many ways in which we may reach school and deschooling often implies the absence of school. However, this deschooling consists of bringing children from the domain of invisibility to that of visibility, and offering them the possibility to be represented in spaces of the city. This “city school” or, better yet, this “community school” is a passage to and from, not a fixed location.

It is a school that fights against war, using media of institutional pedagogy (printing houses, class councils, correspondence, cooperatives). Its objective is to transform the condition of a single building into an “isle” of numerous scattered spaces, exactly because deschooling is the socio-pedagogical movement of the deinstitutionalization of all forms of confinement (family, digital networks, image, prisons, schools, asylums, youth shelters).

The rationale of material networks is a transition from childhood to subjectivity, based

The present publication offers an overview of the program’s varied topics. For those who attended documenta 14, this is an attractive memento, while for those unable to visit, this volume gives an insight into the lively, controversial, and multifaceted activities in the educational programs at documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel.

Annette Kulenkampff, CEO of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, 2014–2018

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Working together with a body of students from various institutions, the documenta 14 Summer Intensive – School of Gesture (May 2017) explored particular histories of the body, examining how power is inscribed through a series of gestural exercises, readings, and both intimate and more public conversations with contributors to documenta 14 and guests.

School of Gesture, workshop with Alexandra Bachzetsis and Sotiris Vasiliou. Photo: Angelos Giotopoulos, 2017

Okamoto, Natalia Escudero López, Michael Gärtner, Tetyana Zolotopupova, Sabiha Keyif, as well as the Faculty, Chorus, Nourishing Knowledge team, invigilators, and the entire internship program. They have drafted and developed novel concepts, and it will be fascinating to see how aneducation continues the sixty-year documenta tradition of always generating innovative ideas and setting a precedent for educational programs aimed towards accessing contemporary art.

Marianne Wex’s book Let’s Take Back Our Space: “Female” and “Male” Body Language as a Result of Patriarchal Structures (1979) is lying on a wooden plank. Alexandra Bachzetsis brought it with her, together with some other publications and images around body postures and gestures, in advance of a performative workshop she is giving with dancer Sotiris Vasiliou at the Athens School of Fine Arts (ASFA). With me are several students from Athens. Many others arrive from Kassel with Clare Butcher. We meet at the school’s Old Library to spend a week together under the

title School of Gesture. Architect Aristide Antonas has made a series of movable platforms within the premises of the Old Library, now becoming an empty university: wooden planks from old desks connect on the floor that fluctuates between a dance floor and a kind of island for reading. We move around soft, large, minimalist ottoman cushions for comfort, reading, sleeping, writing. The Athenian sun shines high in the blue sky, ASFA’s walls full of graffiti and a high chimney visible through the window.

Wex’s book is revelatory in a familiar way, revealing what one has known tacitly for years. It was compiled between 1972 and 1977 by the German feminist conceptual artist, and consists of thousands of photographs she took clandestinely on city streets and of images in magazines, advertisments, and museum displays; they capture people hanging out, posing in states of quotidian self-performance, revealing power relations encoded in the body’s cultural history. Divided into thematic grids, the book is a wide visual survey of: arm and leg positions; standing persons – leg and feet; arm and hand positions; seated persons – leg and feet; people sitting and laying on the ground; Egyptian, Greek, and Roman statuary; how the men of Christianity took over an old goddess gesture; the stultifying effect of the patriarchal socialization of men; Middle European sculptures; and seated figures.

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The characters in the grids perform very gender-specific gestures, conditioning their bodies to the language of patriarcal hierarchy.

In German the artist uses the word Körpersprache, literally “speech of the body”, or “body speech”, a silent signifier. How does the body speak without a sound? What do we communicate through gestures?

In Latin the verb gestare refers to the management of the body or how to carry oneself and the body. In modern Italian gestire means “to manage”. Gestures include a wide spectrum of codified behaviors and communications – from the simple and unintentional to the complex and mimetic. These might seem universal but they are always embedded in specific social, institutional, and temporal histories. While many artists dealing with performance have encountered the legacy of gestural history, not too much has been written or shown (as in the case of Wex) on gestures in modernity. In 1832, Andrea De Jorio (1769–1851), a Neapoletan priest, compiled a lexicon of Italian hand gestures. His volume La mimica degli antichi investigata nel gestire napoletano is considered one of the earliest anthologies of gesture and body history. It was translated

by Adam Kendon as Gestures in Naples and Gestures in Classical Antiquity in 2000 to great scholarly acclaim. The author describes ordinary gestural expressions with drawings and images from ancient frescos to sculptures

In contemporary Europe, gesticulation is widely considered an attribute common to its South, often related to class, upbringing, and social strata. There is a silent power in encounters that encourage those who migrate North, to diminish their gestural abilities from home, to minimize them. Gestures are political. They resist articulation and foreknowledge. In her brilliant text “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Bodyâ€?, Kathy Acker discusses the clichĂŠ of how athletes are considered stupid for their lack of written and spoken articulation and for their different relation to body-knowledge.

For Acker a language that is speechless (definitely not universal but culturally coded) still threatens Western understanding.

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She proposes the language of the body as which rejects ordinary language, and yet constitutes a language in which meaning is not directly linked to reason.

School of Gesture, workshop with Alexandra Bachzetsis and Sotiris Vasiliou. Photo: Angelos Giotopoulos, 2017

as support. In addition, he provides a lexicon as an entry point to a rich culture now lost in translation. Not only a priest, De Jorio was also an archeologist and a curator at the Royal Borbonic Museum (now the National Archaeological Museum of Naples). This background enabled him to see the links between the survival and transmission of gestures from antiquity, in ancient paintings and sculptures, and through to the nineteenth century. Neapolitan gestures were less about gender codes than simplifying communication. Yet for both Wex and De Jorio, body gestures underline a silent bond that enables communities to form and the positioning of oneself within a network of signifiers.

I think about the endless gestures that have been embodied at ASFA. Gesture in this place has many underlying meanings. There is the changing codifying gender behavior among the students and the extensive majority of male teachers, there are the political gestures of dissent and protests. The school is rooted in a tradition of painting and icon making. The first day I visited the school I stumbled upon a nude drawing class, the students around the nude model, and in front of their easels each hand movement became a gesture. When we first started speaking about gestures there was a general understanding that we would spend a week on painting. The gesture in painting now looms like a ghost in our discussion on performance and body lexicons.

Back in the Old Library, Alexandra is preparing with the students. At first they look at the books she has brought, going through different images and histories of gestural poses in fashion, street life, pop culture, and art. For Bachzetsis the overlapping of these histories is a core part of her choreography. As writer and curator Paul B. Preciado points out, the references of her work include diverse sources such as YouTube tutorials, fashion, porno­ graphy, rebetiko, yoga, and football that form a kind of “report on the formation of gender and desire under a neoliberal regime via ritualistically repeated gestures”. The history of gestures can only be practiced as a “living archive of social scores”. At the Old Library Wex’s book starts to come alive in the different exercises Alexandra proposes to the students. One, two three, we begin the school of gesture.1 AZ

1

The School of Gesture took place alongside and was informed by many practices within the documenta 14 exhibition such as the collaborative project Collective Exhibition for a Single Body initiated by Pierre Bal-Blanc (April – July 2017). See Appendix for more contributors.ª

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GOSSIP

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What are the weapons of the weak?

Nagging. Poison. Gossip. Sneaking around instead of confrontation.

— Toni Morrisson When I say hi and you say hello and the words are exchanged on kitchen-office tables or in front of modernist paintings across the ocean, how do I know for sure that what I’m saying and what you are speaking of is not just idle chatter?

On January 30, 1980, Mexican artist Ulises Carrión wrote in his notebook: I don’t know how I came up with the idea of using gossip for an artwork.

Now it seems to me an excellent idea that, besides, fits perfectly with the rest of my work.

This note was made manifest in a series of artistic performative interventions around Amsterdam titled Gossip, Scandal and Good Manners commissioned by De Appel, Amsterdam: between March and June 1981 a small group of people in the city spread – and noted the dispersal of – several semi-­ fictional rumors about Carrión’s work and life. The word of mouth dissemination culminated in a lecture-performance at the University of Amsterdam on June 25, 1981.

Carrión also produced a film as a unique work and documentation of the process.

Gossip offered Carrión the space to work differently with language. At the time, he was best known for the bookshop and art space Other Books and So, which he ran in Amsterdam from 1975 until 1978, and for his text “The New Art of Making Books” (1973). Exploring gossip, a key component of queer communities, gave him the opportunity to escape the narrative of the self as a contained and unique identity. As his stories were altered in being voiced by different speakers, the artist’s work transformed and lived through those bodies.

A venomous target in philosophy by writers such as Martin Heidegger, gossip is often associated with women, servants, and the queer community. It is almost common knowledge that gossip is an unproductive and “regressive” feminine activity. The warnings to girls on the dangers of gossip have a long tradition: Judeo-Christian texts pointing to the destruction gossip can generate; ancient Greek mythologies that propone fear of chatting women; or medieval didactic texts on how ladies should not succumb to the pleasures of idle talk. In Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) the suspicious tool of idle talk is discussed at length. Gossip is what “releases one from the task of genuine understanding”; it is symptomatic of the falling of dasein (being); it is simply unrooted.1 166

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Gossip or idle chatter can be understood as that which does not directly enter discourse and resists borders. It is a collective chain of communication that evolves erratically in daily life; it is embedded in oral and familial practices. In a binary understanding of the world, gossip (or girl talk) is associated with feeble chatter – the opposite of doing and action.

Could gossip, idle chatter, and small talk, these vectors of personal communication, offer a form of education? Could a pssss – the unrooted words, the whispering of pleasure at school – become the sound of information exchange?

In the case of Carrión and Amsterdam, gossip shed light on how learning and communication chains work, in tandem with an elegant look at the choreography of teaching and learning. In terms of aneducation and documenta 14, gossip is not a form of content, but rather a form and an attitude towards interaction: a physical movement of knowledge from person to person, traveling from Athens, to Athens, and through Athens. The motion of information as gossip delineates a space through the active forgetting of official knowledge. Gossip is in the forming of communities, constantly shifting in and out of the periphery where knowledge is made. It is there and then it isn’t. It has no claims to history.2

In 1986, a few years after Carrión’s experiment, theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reevaluated the role of gossip within language and community building. She praised its art, the bodies through which it flows. She claimed gossip has to do not even so much with the transmission of necessary knowledge as with the refinement of skills for “making, testing and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses about what kinds of people there are to be found in one’s world”. 3 Idle chatter opens a path, a strategy of self-reinvention, formation, and redistribution. Gossip is a privileged form of giving and receiving information. Gossip is for you and me when I’m no longer me and you are no longer you. Gossip is for finding other people with whom to share a worldview.

In Athens gossip is for lovers.

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1 2

3

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), p. 213.

The Society of Friends of Ulises Carrión met regularly throughout the Public Program of documenta 14 encountering book works, rumors, plagiarism, chewing gum, dispersed archives, plastic flowers, the new art of making books, weather reports, secret alphabets, trios and boleros, performances, stars, disseminations, and erratic desires.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2008 [1990]), p. 23.

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HOUSE OF COMMONS

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In the seven months leading up to the exhibition, local cultural and political initiatives in Kassel were invited initially by Hamid Aaqil Shah and Ayşe Gülec – with Amelie Jakubek, Anton Kats, and other team members – to listen to each other. The urgencies of these groups, and their relationships to documenta 14, guided discussion. Within this framework, Narrowcast House producer Aiko Okamoto organized workshops, lectures, and sharing events. To avoid misrepresenting or muting the many people involved, or requesting more time from volunteers, herewith a cultural-­ political statement relayed through emails between two representatives of the institution.

INTIMACY

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Our practices of intimacy need to establish how we deal with difficult knowledges. Can we imagine a space where intimacy reveals the brutality and pain of decolonizing knowledge?

When does an environment of tolerance of differing opinions become an unwitting platform for prejudice? When does listening also become an act of being silenced? What happens to intimacy when hegemony is challenged? Could aneducation for documenta become a critically vulnerable encounter – scaling down grand narratives and extreme polemics to destabilizing intimate proportions?

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aneducation took place in many spaces: schools; community centers; the EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens; περίπτερα; the Old Library at the Athens School of Fine Arts; Peppermint; the Kunsthochschule Kassel; and Narrowcast House, Kassel. Various spatial forms for public gathering were enacted: some on a regular basis, like school and university visits, and the Löse Faden sewing group in Kassel; and others more sporadically, as with the Synantiseis meetings in venues across Athens. In each program, concepts were converted into forms of knowledge and/or methodologies to help situate practices within given frameworks. For instance, during the d14 Sessions and Elective Affinities programs, the questioning and sharing of practices and emerging ideas gave way to us reading and listening together, and

then performing or working gesturally with the body.

Intimacy is a vital ingredient for learning – especially when working within informal spaces. To learn from each other and be open to knowledge requires us to be vulnerable, to trust, and to be willing to actively listen openly. Intimacy is a climate or an atmosphere that creates temporary familiarity, a closeness with space or people. Taking into account how architecture conditions our bodies to behave, as education programmers we often formed flexible environments in consideration of the body’s flexibility: fluid spaces towards optimum exchange, deep thought, and close encounters to strive toward an intimate space for learning. aneducation did not work to make a spectacle out of learning, but to drift away from the format of large-scale events in favor of intimate conversations. The spaces for learning became sites of gathering, dedicated to drawing out knowledges, perspectives, and experiences from each other and letting curiosity lead a process of listening, conversing, and walking. This was reflected in the methodologies of the documenta 14 Chorus whose walks with visitors through the exhibition revealed how intimacy decenters knowledge. The Chorus had to quickly establish a temporary context to negotiate meaning among strangers while walking through the 178

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exhibition. Listening to the room and reading bodily gestures and group dynamics were key to finding ways to draw out inner thoughts and move through unequivocal positions – at times even racist or sexist ones.1 Visitors’ expectations of being taught were unlearned and replaced by exchange, showing how cultural values and experiences could be shared without consensus.

Dialogue opens up multiple perspectives to accept, acknowledge or question, reject, and challenge. Engaging with art in this way means entering a space in which perspectives meet and positioned statements can be formulated. With the addition of intimacy, our inner thoughts can become outer expressions, shared ideas, actions, and conversations, even if ideas are not yet fully formed.

Intimacy provides the sanctuary for the formation of knowledge sitting between the foreign and the familiar, overcoming discomfort in the pursuit of a continued curiosity to know what forms and shapes our different understandings of the world.

SA

1

See “Questions” on p. 253.

LIBRARY

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Libraries were a reoccurring motif throughout the documenta 14 exhibition as both a static collection of books and activation of dialogue and space.

Peppermint housed what remained of the university office library of Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt while they taught in Kassel. Throughout documenta 14 libraries within libraries emerged, including Conversations and Convergences, which focused on radical pedagogies and relations between texts and authors. aneducation commissioned Aristide Antonas to rethink the Old Library of the Athens School of Fine Arts as a space for coming together, a working office, and for Elective Affinities. His “space intervention” Empty University saw “specific platforms for different possible acts” installed there. Empty Library’s immaterial performance was a starting point to consider how knowledge is transferred and exchanged. It hosted the Materials Matters Library, which included materials from exhibiting artists. During Under the Mango Tree, Vincent Tao, a “librarian without a library”, reflected upon how books and bodies resonate.

1.

Designed by Carmen José (CJ), an illustrator and a designer based in Kassel.

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I met Sepake Angiama on Valentine’s Day, 2017.

She joined us at 221A in Vancouver for an evening I had organized of readings by artists. We were hosting a temporary library of texts selected by the forty artists featured in a parallel survey exhibition at Vancouver’s civic gallery. Our project – ad hoc shelves, forty or so books, and a series of events programmed around them – served as a prototype for Pollyanna 圖書館 Library, which was at the time little more than a half-finished policy document on my laptop and a couple hundred books in a storage basement across the street. I introduced myself as a “librarian without a library” – a sad kind of joke that maybe spoke more to my thinking around Pollyanna than I knew at the time.

Jesse McKee, who curated the survey exhibition, flew in Sepake as part of 221A’s speaker series and wanted to introduce us. He’d told me about Sepake’s

“library of radical pedagogies” at Peppermint and I was excited to talk over the affinity between her project and the reading I’d been doing in planning Pollyanna.

Tasked with transforming a one-room gallery into a permanent library, I was in over my head. With little time and even fewer resources to create a comprehensive collection, not to mention my conspicuous lack of professional experience in the field, I was given the liberty – or a species of it, borne from desperation and necessity – to seriously consider what a library is, what it could or should be. Hard-pressed to find a present-day example for inspiration, I looked to its kin.

My research for Pollyanna drew together a constellation of affinities, taking me through freedom schools, Panther newsstands, feminist bookstores, the back rooms of communist print shops; places to assemble, read together, act together, always towards a communal idea of a better world.

Seeing Sepake the next day, I gave her a short bibliography I’d jotted down. Reading was for me the production of friendships – between individuals, ideas, and histories. I imagine she agreed; I was invited to Under the Mango Tree. To think: Peppermint and Pollyanna. A pairing too perfect to pass up.

2.

At a recent dinner party, I was caught taking pictures of the host’s book collection. I couldn’t help it. Settling around the table, I found myself faced with the bookcase and as such spent much of the evening eyeing spines immodestly while trying to keep up conversation. I was scolded by my partner for having a “greedy” relationship to knowledge, always wanting to know what other people were reading. Greedy, yes. But, I would protest, not selfish (though this is no excuse for poor table manners either way).

Months earlier, I attended an intimate workshop with a Bay Area poet and organizer who spent the last decade teaching in prisons. Amid the idle chatter after

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The Office of Aristide Antonas, Empty University design for the Old Library at the Athens School of Fine Arts, 2016, architectural plan

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the event I asked him, maybe a little too earnestly, for advice on cultivating revolutionary consciousness in Vancouver. He saw right through me. “You feel alone”, he said. “But there are others like you, who have read the same books, who want the same world you want. They’re around. Just find them.”

I’d been waiting all night to tell the host that Eric Hobsbawm, whose multi-volume history of capitalism was sitting at eye-­level, had a little-known career as a jazz critic. Finally the opportunity came about for me to divulge this bit of socialist gossip, sotto voce. The host laughed: “That makes me like him a lot more.”

3.

Under the shade of an oak tree, Jorge taught us how to braid rope from common cattails. We learned the craft in pairs – one wove, one supported – as he read us a text titled “Buscando el bejuco” (Looking for the Vine). Told from the point of view of a basket weaver walking the island’s thicket, the meditative text guided us through the craftsman’s dilated apprehension of place and time. Following Jorge’s measured speech as we worked the material with our hands, we were braided into the weaver’s rhythms; through his voice we followed the vine. The reading elaborated on a contemplative, generous relation to the world embodied in the traditional practice, now nearly disappeared from Puerto Rico by grace of modern life. “When you lose a craft, you lose the vine.” We were implored, or perhaps warned: “Cultivate your vines.”

Claudia and I admired our rope – I wove, with more than some trepidation; she very charitably supported, holding the other end – for its many imperfections.

Narrow in some parts and plump in others, with intermittent nodes where new vines were woven in, Claudia observed that the rope’s variations recorded our learning of the craft, as well as the beginning of our friendship. Tight, hesitant knots gave way to confident braids, with some loose ends that marked passages when we had momentarily lost our rhythm in conversation.

4.

As I gather these fragments and begin to trace the relations between them, Pollyanna’s shelves are at last being installed. Days before the ribbon cutting, I admit I’m no closer to having a definitive idea of what the library is. Certainly, I’ve read a few more books, collected citations. But the bibliography has swallowed the thesis.

In a droll inversion of Paulo Freire’s solitude-communion nexus that I’m sure was not lost on Sepake, I left our communion under the mango tree to return to a new solitude in the stacks. You asked us: what remains?

Reverberations of your voices, residues of connection.

Spinoza would call this spectral force a kind of joy: the remnants of an encounter with a body that combines its relations with my own, increasing my relations to and in the world. Audre Lorde would call it eros: the power that comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person, the wellspring of collective action not possible before. I suppose I would call it the library.

A “librarian without a library” – now a retired joke.

The shelves are up, but most are yet to be filled. What, then, is a library without books? A tangle of vines, where greedy, searching runners coil together and reach out to find new supports to grow with.

Vincent Tao is 221A’s librarian. He stewards Pollyanna 圖書館 Library.

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LISTENING

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The following is the result of an exercise conducted across distances – some short, some rather long – by six ears that includes but is not limited to the silences, eavesdrops, glitchy missives, and ambiguous whispers that make up the task of listening from institutional and individual positions.

Do you remember the last evening you spent close to a lake or sea or maybe a river?

During these evenings you always hear better.

When the temperature is changing rapidly there is a thin layer of warm water in between much colder air that is called thermocline.

Sound, that appears in the thermocline, bifurcates at the edges of extreme temperatures, accelerates and becomes directional. In the ocean, the layer of thermocline is home to nuclear submarines, creatures whose existence depends directly on the technology of silence and a constant improving and developing of listening techniques and methods. Living on a planet in which human life often enough finds itself in a thermocline between political extremes, submarines, and in proximity to institutions of human becoming, make perception of every sound event a priori political and eventually lethal.

Consider silence, sound, and listening as firmly embedded within the parameters of institutional agency. It is about time we shift the emphasis of listening from dialogical and conversational labor towards a listening

that Grant Kester, a pioneer of dialogical art, calls a central element connecting knowledge capable of redefining existing processes and conditions.1 Here, the directionality, materiality, and acceleration of sound is like thought and action: both have a frequency, an amplitude, a spectrum, a duration, a location, and an envelope. The sonarity of the ear allows for listening, thought, and action to gain concrete dimensions materialized in the thermocline.

— In his text on the history of hearing or hearing history, Richard Rath digs into archeoacoustics, challenging the reader to consider a “sonic literacy” in imagining the past. He says that due to our habitual ocular-centrism (video killed the radio star), listening into rather than looking at history could “loosen our grip on ‘the certain’ just a little to allow for new ways of thinking”.1 What would it be to sonar our way around the dark paths of certain ideas, to carve new desire lines by consciously or accidentally letting our ears lead us off track? And rather than dismissing our subsequent encounters with walls, manholes, unexpected bodies, because of their aural and therefore ephemeral nature – in one ear and out the other as the saying goes – what if that space of listening became concrete? Concrete not in a strictly institutional sense by way of a roof, a floor, a window, 196

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or climate control, but in a technological sense by way of tools, methods, and means to amplify those experiences that might, just might, give definition to new ways along which other ears have traveled.

— I am opening my ears; this is what I am hearing. The muted sound of the busy street outside the thick paned glass, this is sound that you feel more than you hear. The low rumble of buses, the screeching of car brakes, metal on metal, the way that these sounds are amplified – almost whooshing in like warm, humid air that rushes inward each time someone swings open the door. Our lives are permeated by sound. If I open my ears I can hear the things I was blocking out, the chirpy jazz soundtrack in this coffee shop played too quietly, the low Cantonese spoken to my right, the shaking of ice in the background, the constant hum of the air conditioning high above. In Vancouver in the 1970s, composers started a soundscape project; by taping and studying field recordings they believed that they could gain new insights into urban life. Most revealing about these recordings is what they chose to edit out – the hum of the street, the noise and “disruptions” of everyday life. Intentionally or not, they imposed a hierarchy of sound.

I am interested in those sounds that get edited out, the low rumblings that might

otherwise go unheard, the clangs, screeches, and hums that are often ignored. How do we lend an ear to the cacophony and move towards a musicality of the everyday?

— And that’s when I realized that for my whole life, I’ve been listening to the voice of an old white man inside my head! We were talking about reading and our relationship to the texts prescribed by teachers during our formative years. I found reading really difficult in school, mostly because it became quieter and quieter. From the slow syllabic readingout-loud of grade one to noiseless library interiors, the act of reading was somehow forcibly sub-vocalized. I had to find inner voices, or in some cases, those voices found me. Specters cast dark shadows over pages and whispered words of a story that was, shamefully, also mine. I heard that the copyists in monasteries responsible for reproducing sacred texts would listen to the words read out loud and then transcribe these.

Errors and all. How to keep from simply reproducing the sacred scripts of powerful, problematic voices in our heads? Eavesdropping on the pages of history. We need a hearing of the heard. An internal filter: a stubborn tinnitus?

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“The task of listening”, says Rolando Vásquez, “presents itself also as an ethical orientation, towards knowledge as relationality”.2 How could an exhibitionary institution built on modern principles and burdened by histories built on the separation between “the visible and the invisible”, learn to decipher who is speaking and who is silenced?3 Moving beyond such orders requires a critical practice of listening which allows for hope: of renegotiating, again and again, the terms of transmission.

CB Candice Hopkins (CH) is an independent curator and writer based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She was a member of the curatorial team of documenta 14.

AK

1

See Richard Cullen Rath, “History of Hearing/Hearing History”, essay draft, n. d.

2 Rolando Vásquez, “Towards a Decolonial Critique of Modernity: Buen Vivir, Relationality and the Task of Listening,” in Capital, Poverty, Development, Denktraditionen im Dialog:Studien zur Befreiung und interkulturalität, Vol 33, ed. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt (Aachen: Wissenschaftsverlag Mainz, 2012), pp. 241–52.

3 Ibid.

METHODOS

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Some places leave a very specific impression on the walker, artist, or passerby. One such place is the series of paths built by Dimitris Pikionis and his students in the late 1950s on Filopappou Hill in Athens.

While named after Gaius Julius Antiochus Epiphanes Philopappos, a consul and administrator under Roman Emperor Hadrian, Filopappou is usually referred to as the hill of the muses. A gathering place for many Athenians, it has seen many lovers, battles, walkers, tourists, and travelers. The networks of paths traverse the hill like pulsating veins, but veins made of stone, marble, and concrete. Each path has its own personality, character, and attitude: some are elegant and large; others are small and sloped, leaving the walker slightly off-balance. Most reuse fragments of ruins in the area: pieces of mugs, tiles, rooftops, and marble from archeological sites. Near a church on the hill, there is a pavilion surrounded mainly by overgrown trees with shadowy areas. It offers a place to rest, eat, read, and contemplate.

The use of archeological material raises the discussion of local reutilization of history in art, and calls for a reevaluation of what is known as critical regionalism. The hill is a site of memory and feeling for generations of Athenians.

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Monika Szewczyk brought me to the hill of the muses and the paths when I first moved

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NARROWCAST HOUSE

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Narrowcast House is an open radio studio and a listening space I initiated within documenta 14’s aneducation program.1 As you enter Kassel from any direction by car, by bike, or on foot, at some point you are greeted by a sign that reads “documenta-­ stadt Kassel” (documenta-city Kassel). The hyphenated term that designates this small city in the middle of Germany underscores its symbiotic relationship with the quinquennial art event. Over the last sixty years, the porous metropolis, largely destroyed during the Second World War, has become a modern town with decreasing property vacancies and increasing property value. But if we exchange the linguistic gesture, a hyphen bridging Kassel and documenta, for the mathematical, a minus sign separating them, the hyphen becomes ambiguous and calls for a relationship to negotiate, not take for granted.

Anton Kats, Narrowcast House Open Radio Studio, Gottschalkstraße 36, Kassel, 2017, sketch

to Athens. I went there often with artists, students, and friends. In early 2016 I frequently took walks and developed Methodos, a semi-public program. The title aimed to bring together a specific methodology of learning through engagement of the body and within Athens. Methodos was initiated during the period of the Continuum, documenta 14’s semi-public events at Prevelakis Hall from March 28 – April 11, 2016. Several local poets, artists, architects, and students were invited to conceive a collection of walks in different parts of Athens and lead conversations with the team and documenta 14 artists. Some of these walks came alive on Pikionis Path.

Literary characters from stories like Franz Kafka’s “The Sudden Walk” (1912) functioned as frameworks for the bodies moving along the paths. How could a “corpoliteracy”, an ability to read, write, and communicate through the body take shape? We read poems, told jokes, walked side by side, and got to know each other. The peripatetic tradition, from the schools along the Ilisos river in ancient Athens to the “strollology” of Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt in Kassel, triggered our approach to Athens and the paths of Pikionis. Gossiping, word of mouth conversations, were intrinsically connected to the stories of the city and its history.

Pulling itself in different directions, during the fiveyear hyphen, a dissonance is created – one that was often acknowledged in conversations between the aneducation program and local artists, residents, initiatives, and organizations. To investigate this increasingly complex relationship between the institution of which aneducation is part, and Kassel’s cultural, activist, intellectual, and musical scenes (among many others), Narrowcast House sought to launch an open-ended enquiry. It is a hybrid space and method for exchange

NOURISHING KNOWLEDGE

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As long as one of us preserves your nourishing knowledge, as long as the recipes of your tender patience are transmitted from hand to hand, a fragmentary yet tenacious memory of your life itself will live on.

The sophisticated ritualization of basic gestures has become more dear to me than the persistence of words and texts, because body techniques seem better protected from superficiality, and also, a more profound and heavier material faithfulness is at play there, a way of being-­ in-the-world and making it’s one’s home.

—Luce Giard1 How is knowledge produced, shared, and digested? What ingredients are necessary to nourish relationships? Can the histories, labor, and ecologies of making and sharing a meal be organized into a kind of curriculum for learning how to gather together? How could a meal between strangers resist the sometimes distance of performative art world gestures? How do intimate encounters feed back into a collective, bodily learning process? Could a kitchen be understood as a microcosm of institutional practice?

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Marinating over these questions, Nourishing Knowledge brought together a number of contributors to documenta 14 with groups of neighbors nearer and farther from the doors of the exhibition for a series of intimate meals.2 Attempting to connect the practices

and shared questions within the exhibition to every­day contexts in Athens and Kassel, the gatherings were not highly public events addressed to art professionals but rather encounters that sought to host exchanges of knowledge in the form of table conversations, recipes, personal experiences of the city, family rituals, political urgencies, and the “bodily roots of the thinking process”. 3 Continuing a longer line of inquiry in my own practice, this approach to cooking and eating together was not limited to the meal events per se, but somehow became a way of beingin-­documenta as we learned with each other.

The following is a fragmented set of conversations, anecdotes, extracted ingredients, and those heavier elements which speak to the ways that factors of class, culture, and migration “impact our relationship to food” with a vision of cooking as a “vehicle for artistic expression, a source of sensual pleasure, an opportunity for resistance and even power”.4

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We’re sitting on a kind of strategic split as if by knife in Kassel. On one side is the more established “white” Kassel, and on the other is the newcomer. The bakery is located in the middle of this split. It looks exactly like a bakery my father ran during the war in Lebanon to support an institute for people with special needs.

It was bombed during one of the last wars in 1989.

This space, with all its glass windows, is very much of the same spirit as that bakery in Lebanon. This one has been in a resting state as a kind of monument during most of the exhibition. Now it runs as a bakery, a living monument. As people share food here, they enact the purpose of this space as a gathering of memory through conversation in a part of the city shaped by histories of migration – be it first or second generation experiences.

The project’s title is I Strongly Believe in Our Right to Be Frivolous, because being born in a civil war, the last thing you want to talk about is “the war”. You just want to live, to make an art of survival. Poet Mamoud Darwish said in an interview that he would have rather spoken about love and more existential matters, but when you are under siege, there’s nothing else you can talk about, stating: “I strongly believe in the right to be frivolous.” Why should I always speak about the war or the curfew? Reading his interview liberated me.

I didn’t want to talk about the Lebanese war, but when the Syrian war began, it was time to be confronted.

He helped me realize that I couldn’t stand still anymore.

From behind the counter, I see many people come in without knowing quite what to expect. It’s a full experience: you activate all the senses, from smell to taste to sight. It’s amazing that the human being

can make use of all these senses, and perhaps even better when they are mixed. I was scared the food might kill the visitors’ intellect. I found it was the opposite.6

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Mounira Al Solh is a multidisciplinary artist working with drawings, testimonies, fiction, performances, bread, ink, talking, survival, migration, writing, and the like.

Hāngi is the traditional Maori word for food cooked in an earth oven. The process takes about seven hours in total from lighting the fire to serving the kai (food).

In this case, all meals are cooked separately so that the vegetarian meals are kept free of meaty interference.

A discussion on how a hāngi is prepared and cooked as well as some of the tikanga – traditions around hāngi preparation – and kaupapa – Maori processes fit for purpose – will follow. Delicious, healthy, and mindful goodness for all!7 We’ll need a small crew to prepare the food, and another to handle the pit, digging and fire-lighting, watching, etc. The digging team needs to tap in and out of watching the fire in the early hours, dig up the food, and bring it to serving tables from which the kitchen crew serve. At the end the whole team cleans up and has a cuppa or drink together before resting.

There’s no gender split here. Anyone who wants to do something is welcome and encouraged.8

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Everybody has their own preference for how a hāngı¯ (earth oven) gets done. Depending on where we make it, people can determine the kaupapa and the tikanga (procedures and guidelines for handling food). Everybody’s different. There are some general ways in which things are done, but you have to allow for each rūnanga (gathering or assembly) to have its own kawa (protocols and what’s important to them under what circumstances). The situation can sometimes dictate the tikanga (what happens on the spur of the moment and how things pan out). The tikanga observes the kawa.

Today we decided to cook the food in these small portions and that’s a tikanga. But the kawa of keeping the food clean and edible remains the same. The soil type alone can make a difference, so too the weather, the timing, who’s available, resources. You’ve got to be

practical. But over and above everything else, everyone tries to keep the kawa the best they can. There is always someone on site who makes decisions and stays near the fire.9

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Nathan Pohio calls upon Kāi Tahutanga, the cultural platform of identity to ground his practice.

Natalie Karaitiana: Nathan’s mother proudly represented her whanau/family who are all Nathan’s number 1 fan base, at documenta 14.

There are a lot of things you naturally associate with a place that have dubious histories: tomatoes arrived quite late in the Mediterranean and in Malta where they produce more butter than olive oil due to their status as a British protectorate. The history of importing and exporting complicates the selection of one type over another. We looked archeologically at the use of ingredients, from medicinal to edible, through the art of making soap. Few original recipes were written down, but the cold-pressed soap we work with was initially, like soup, a way to recycle leftover ingredients. It’s interesting to see, however, that perceptions of cleanliness or thrift changed with the advent of detergent and other compounds. A language is also developed around what is “natural”, “organic”; once you begin to learn it you become aware of how constructed it is. There are a lot of cheap greenish soaps in Greece, which claim to be natural olive oil but in fact require laurel oil to get that green color. Soap is a very bodily thing, a kind of continuation of the environment it’s placed in. It leaves a residue or touches another surface, so that we become aware of our preconceptions about what is “clean” and “good” and what is “dirty” and “not good”.

There’s not much science to it, it’s societal. Soap has also been imposed as a form of body control, to regulate smell, lighten skin, regulate the home.

Certain scents are associated with class. It makes no sense this scent thing. Our smell changes how we relate to each other, the moralistic connotations of cleanliness and godliness, or the expression “wash your mouth with soap” as a civilizing mechanism.10

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Maya Tounta is a curator working with psychotherapy and ritual.

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Ahlam Shibli’s photographic work addresses the contradictory implications of the notion of home. She was a contributing artist in documenta 14.

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I’m a bread-dreamer. There are some old – what they call – “dreambooks” from Byzantium among the first practical “how-to” literature that provides interpretations of bread in dreams. White bread means profit.

In Greece, while the cities are seeing a big shift in the way people consume bread, there is still a strong culture of bread making in villages. Many varieties of bread exist, such as that made for church ceremonies, prosforo (offering bread). Because these were made in communal or public ovens, the ovens became the centers of villages where people would gather to gossip and get news.

In relation to time or history yeast is also interesting.

To start sourdough, for instance, you have water and flour. You then take small amounts from it but continue to “feed it” so that the “mother” stays alive – creating a kind of continuum. When you eat this bread, you eat something very old. It’s like the story of the holy light on Easter that never goes out, the same light that comes from Jerusalem, symbolized perhaps by the bright bread or lampropsomo served then. The bread that we’ll eat today, a special recipe of ours, we could also bake again. Less yeast is used in Turkish breads, though there are many similarities between Turkish and Greek styles of bread making.

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There’s a book with a selection of texts in which bread is featured throughout historical Greek literature and

Katerina Stefanidaki is a visual artist. Her works include large-scale drawings, object designing and modulating natural environments.

ZX Photos: Fred Dott, Holger Jenss, Mathias Völzke, 2017 Visual annotations by CJ. Project by CB and CJ.

Luce Giard, “The Nourishing Arts,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, Volume 2: Living & Cooking, Michel de Certeau, Luce Girard, and Pierre Mayol, trans. Timothy J. Tomasik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), p. 154.

2 The Nourishing Knowledge team consisted of Ella Froemmel, Michael Gärtner, Ayşe Güleç, Wanda Heimbs, Carmen José, Karl Leonard Heinemann, Ann-Kathrin Mogge, Beat Sandkühler, Ida Westermann, and others.

3 Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, trans. Elizabeth Guild (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 8.

4 Arlene Voski Avakian, ed., Through the Kitchen Window: Women Explore the Intimate Meanings of Food and Cooking (Boston: Beacon Press, 1997), pp. 5–6.

5 See Mahmoud Darwish, If I Were Another, trans. Fady Joudah (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

6 Conversation with Mounira Al Solh and Hendrik Folkerts, Nassib’s Bakery, Kassel, September 4, 2017. See Al Solh’s I Strongly Believe in The Right to be Frivolous (2012).

7 Invitation to meal with Nathan Pohio and Mata Aho Collective, June 5, 2017.

8 Email from Nathan Pohio to author, May 19, 2017.

9 Conversation with Natalie Karaitiana, cooking with Nathan Pohio and the Mata Aho Collective, Sandershaus, Kassel, June 5, 2017, reflecting on Pohio’s Raise the anchor, unfurl the sails, set course to the centre of an ever setting sun! (2015) and Mata Aho Collective, Kiko Moana (2017).

10 Conversation with Maya Tounta, cooking with Otobong Nkanga, Carved to Flow, Archimidous Street, Athens, May 18, 2017.

11 Invitation to a meal with Ahlam Shibli, FC Bosporus Kassel, September 19, 2017.

12 Shibli’s list of ingredients sent by email for preparation by the Nourishing Knowledge cooking team on September 18–19, 2017. See Shibli’s project Heimat (2016–17).

13 Invitation to a meal with Katerina Stefanidaki and Zafos Xagoraris, June 16, 2017.

14 Conversation with Ana Pataki, Katerina Stefanidaki, and Zafos Xagoraris, Peppermint, Kassel, June 16, 2017; see also Xagoraris’ The Welcoming Gate (2017).

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Pp Outside Peppermint, visitors engage with the findings of Mapping Week in Kassel. Photo: Mathias Völzke, 2016

poetry: in narratives of war, bread was a very important and durable material, as it could become dry and stay tasty, like paximadi. Or take the 1970s Junta resistance slogan: “Psomi, pedia, eleftheria” (bread, education, freedom), in that order. Bread comes with everything.14

A space for thinking out loud, convening, coming together, reading, meeting, and sometimes just a space to rest in the Terminal room. The large open space in the front provided a cinematic view of the world: the park where teenage skaters would while away the hours, and others gathered and listened to music. We witnessed break-ups, make-ups, downtime, spare time and free time, loiterers, plastic bottle recyclers, and a wide variety of passersby. It was important to be connected to the street, to be onlookers but also to be looked at. They were attracted by the fluorescent green peppermint typography, which looked as though it had been sprayed directly on the window. The small red flashing diodes of the inviting “open” sign gifted to us by Hiwa K that we later learned to turn off when we realized recuperation from a demanding public was also necessary. The well-used Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt professorial chair

UNLEARNING

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UNLEARNING THE GIVEN included lectures and performances, DJ sets, and exercises in demodernity and decoloniality of ideas and knowledge, as a performative, discursive, and corporeal curatorial framework for The Long Night of Ideas at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 6 pm – 6 am, April 14, 2016.

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Poster. Courtesy SAVVY Contemporary, 2016

Uu Unpacking Burckhardt: What Remains?, University of Kassel, with talk around oversized table by Joseph Beuys and students. Photo: Olga Holzschuh, 2017

UNPACKING BURCKHARDT

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I am packing my library. Yes, I am. And in four, five weeks’ time, I’ll be unpacking her again – or so I hope. The books will once again be put on the shelves and become blessed, contra Benjamin, by the mild boredom of order. Now is an ideal moment of librarylessness, in other words, to reflect upon the legacy of the Annemarie and Lucius Burckhardt library that was such a central feature of documenta 14’s aneducation program: the first “exhibit” (and exhibition space) of documenta 14 to be made public – the Peppermint programming platform that housed the library was inaugurated in the fall of 2016 – now momentarily returned, as far as I know, to the darkness and bureaucratic limbo of a campus basement. (Seeing Lucius Burckhardt’s orphaned “academic” library in a barracks-­like office slated for destruction was one of my earliest curatorial experiences working for documenta 14.)

We have long grown accustomed to thinking of libraries as portraits, of a kind – the shadows cast, in binding and print, of the people who once acquired and cherished the volumes that make up these towers of Babel. This one, however, was much more meant to be understood as a toolbox – to be put to use, rather than enshrined, in the fetishistic manner of the “vitrine complex”, as an object of aesthetic contemplation.

To us, custodians of the Burckhardt library, this seemed much more in keeping with the willfully pedestrian, self-effacing pragmatism of the original Burckhardt spirit, inviting application rather than veneration – and I am evidently using the adjective “pedestrian” here in a reverent nod to the Burckhardts’ pioneering work in the art and science of promenadology and strollology, which the library likewise served to bring back to life. In fact, the Burckhardt library quickly established itself, in Kassel, as one of documenta 14’s most vibrant social spaces – in which cooking and eating, in fact, would go on to play a pivotal role: not the type of activities habitually associated with conventional art experience – but then again one of my favorite books from the library was a volume chronicling the architectural history of the Currywurstbude... This culinary takeover, so to speak, was no mere curatorial irreverence, but more a matter of animation, of bringing to life – not precisely art, perhaps, but a 288

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petrified knowledge. Something or other packed in a library, which always awaits a new unpacking.

Dieter Roelstraete was a member of the curatorial team of documenta 14.

He is a curator at the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where he also teaches.

Vv Transpositions with Dana Papachristou and Giorgos Samantas. Photo: Stathis Mamalakis, 2017

VISUAL SOUNDS

Visual Sounds consisted of a three-­day series of drop-in workshops delivered by the Athenian Chorus of the documenta 14 venue of the Athens Conservatoire (Odeion) from July 11–13, 2017 focusing on the relationship between sound, visuals, and material.

Drawing upon works from artists who use scores, movement, notation, and performance, together with the members of the Chorus, aneducation invited the public to activate and create their own scores through participation.

The workshop posed questions such as: how would you protect yourself from the cold if you only had a poem, or the memory of a distant sound? How can we listen to the artworks through someone else’s ears? Here we share the list of requested materials as a document of their exploration.

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Thwack, Thwack, Thwack, goes the glove against the boot with Stella Dimitrakopoulou, Sarah De Wilde, and Clare Breen; What to do in Case of Summer Snow with Aimilia Efthimiou, Orestis Giannoulis, Ida Westh-Hansen, and Myrto Vratsanou. Photos: Stathis Mamalakis, 2017

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Singing bowl for smaller rites and sonic interventions Portable Bluetooth speaker 20 sets of earplugs Sound recorder 20 printed scores Pens and pencils White paper 3 microphones (contact mics!)

Amplifier and speakers Tape Yoga mats 2 hammers Glue gun Table Seven chairs Clay String (100m) Nails Wire Cat gut Cans Glass bottles Plastic Bowls Bin bags Rice Blades Hacksaw Balloons Elastic bands Glue Scissors Freezer

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School of Voice (Hearing Voices), enacting Irena Haiduk’s Sailors Sing Suicidal Songs.

Photo: Jero van Nieuwkoop, 2017

Bags of ice Textile (10m) Reading material (copies) Alcohol and juice Calligraphy pens (Lala Rukh) Textured paper (10 pieces) Photocopies of Lala Rukh’s posters Manga pens Soft pastels Canvas 210 × 200 Thin plastic protection sheet Food Rolls of different kinds of paper Rollers and pencils Cartons Fabric Ribbons Typographic elements

Is it really I who speaks when I hear a voice within me?

What is the sound of my voice?

Is my voice really mine?

In “The Metaphysics of Youth” (1913–14), an early text by Walter Benjamin, the writer asks how Sappho and her women friends spoke among themselves: “How did women come to speak? For Language extinguishes their soul.”1 Stories of how voices come of age deviate. I recall thinking of mine at around age ten, reading on endless afternoons. I didn’t know then that Margaret Thatcher took voice classes with a coach to alter the pitch in order to sound more authoritative. I didn’t know then that reading silently represented a major historical shift – Augustine praised his teacher for being able to read silently for three whole minutes.

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Mother tongues, father tongues, city tongues, or lover’s and others’ tongues all influence

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Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 9.

Many different voices were performed and tried out over the last two years – in different languages, silent, as a chorus, and at a special gathering in Delphi. Deep listening, oracular politics, inner voices, writerly voices, language as sound and performance, and ancient scores, are just some of the components of School of Voice: Hearing Voices, an educational and performative intensive that brought together students from Athens School of Fine Arts (involved in Elective Affinities) with students from the Kunsthochschule Kassel and University of Kassel, and many others (January 17–21, 2017).

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School of Voice: Hearing Voices, polyglot reading of Ulises Carrión, Temple of Athena, Delphi. Photo: Jero van Nieuwkoop, 2017

one’s voice. Each of these forms and prescribes a kind of possession of the self: possession can only be detected slowly; it is implemented by the everyday, unassuming, and continuous mastery of specific voices. In this sense the self is laid bare at an intersection where different tongues and/ or possessions meet. Hearing one’s voice is hearing the other, Sappho, or Carla Lonzi in the ancient theater of Delphi as carefully released one afternoon by art critic Barbara Casavecchia as part of the Winter Intensive – School of Voice: Hearing Voices. My voice is a voice without biography, or as artist Irena Haiduk would put it while singing sailor songs, it’s a voice against biography.2

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Walking “within” was a methodology, a way to embody Athens and Kassel, to think, to listen, and to be with others. Some paths were well trodden; some needed to be forged, creating lines of desire for others to follow. Walking connected sites, and developed the muscle memory to return to them. The Burckhardts “strollology” (the science of strolling) was influential, as was the peripatetic – garnered from sources such as Robert Walser’s The Walk (1917). The activities Methodos in Athens and Mapping Week Kassel each used walking to get to know these very different cities. It was possible to begin to unearth the narratives that created a connection to place, learning from the feet in car-centric places.

This fed into the guided walks throughout the exhibition venues and into Athens, and Kassel as described here.

Solitary women are going through the woods: some have long sticks; others have more conventional walking sticks with special ends.

Mine is made of driftwood from the Hudson River. It found me on a sunny day in March as I left the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. I felt that the classroom I had just been in was too small – all the students with their computers open, checking facts.

I went to the river and found a helpful piece of driftwood.

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Sepake Angiama found her walking stick in Athens. It was a fine specimen: a long, elegant,

thin length of wood from a recently cut tree branch. She must have found it in the forest near the city, perhaps on Lykabettus hill, some archeological site, or near the sea during an excursion. It has an attractive, dark, greenish veil over its slender vertical shape, and a bifurcated end. It often stands in the office as a totem, in the corner, or moving from one room to another. You can take it for a stroll, and talk about useless things that come to mind in putting one foot after the other. I wondered if Clare Butcher would also get a walking stick and start moving close by.

The more steps you take the more you forget about them. You start concentrating on the breath becoming heavier, the chest swelling the part of the bra that falls down nonchalantly. Then perhaps suddenly, comes the categorical imperative to think ethically: how is walking a cognitive methodology of the self and the world?

When I first moved to Athens I kept walking, from kiosk to kiosk, from the office to the house, from the market to the office, from the Athens School of Fine Arts to the bar.

When I moved to Athens many people walked from distant places to other distant places; mostly from the south to the north. It was a different sort of walking. By walking you go places. Many times you cannot go places, be it in the city or in the forests in and around it. It is no coincidence that the situationists focused on walking and dérive at a time 300

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when war was brewing in Paris and many people were not allowed to walk at night.

It is said that Maria Kornilieva, the mother of chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, walked him to Moscow from their village of Verkhnie Aremzyani in Siberia. Kornilieva died on this walk, taking her seventeenth child towards the city, and to what she believed was a better education. Rumor has it that it was that walk and her death that gave Mendeleev the force to continue his research into mapping chemical elements.

His mother’s walk was no flaneur pastime; it was a political act, an empowering activity, a technological reverie. But then most walks, and the things that impede them, point towards forgetting part of the self and reinventing one’s landscape and network of souls.

How does one stroll and how does she walk? Is there a right step to take to initiate reverie? She can stroll as she goes from a to b, to fences to nowhere, and to a different self. In the city she might stroll with desiring eyes cast towards shiny, new, old, cheap products. Few have said that she resists the walk, that her step is silent, like some anti-­ Gradiva (the woman who walks). Her steps in shopping malls relate to her steps in green forests. A long stroll from Athens to Delphi lasts approximately thirty-one hours, which means she has to stop on the way between

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Pavel Brăila, documenta 14 artist, 2016, Xerox

the highways and sacred woods. A long, long stroll, and the pulsating of the heart, generates a specific rush, an urgent need for water, selfhood, and some sort of categorical imperative. Time is not time and space is only but a space. Self-education of the body, and writing on the world, might await her just around the corner. Visionary architects Oskar and Zofia Hansen would advise she walk through and not around: through the woods, through the city, through herself, she goes on a wicked walk.

Peppermint, aneducation’s office, the Burckhardt library and later home to the Under the Mango Tree library, has been a vibrant social hub for the documenta 14 team since I started working in the aneducation department in November 2016. People, fellow documenta colleagues mostly, would just drop in and subtly request attention, food, or warmth. Located in some regards “outside” the other working complexes, people also came to Peppermint looking for another perspective. They met there after a long day of work, in between shifts to have a smoke, or for a spontaneous lunch. They were often visible to the street, standing or sitting in the front part of the office, or in the doorway, ringing the bell in search of company.

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Sometimes these moments grew into hours, and groups gradually ventured into the more intimate parts of the space. The multipurpose

Zz May 19, 1993. The unfurled mobile zebra crossing on Kurt-Wolters-Straße. 600 pedestrians took 20 minutes to cross. Photo: Helmut Aebischer © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018

ZEBRASTREIFEN

Transitus How do I get from here to there? By crossing the space in between, the transition zone.

Yet there is never a clean cut, clearly dividing “from” and “to”. The transition from one to the other is gradual, the one never merging entirely into the other.

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Transitus is a performance that deals with a transition zone whose permeability is in flux.

To begin with, the transition zone designed by the new music choir Cantiamo Kassel was open and stroller Gerhard Lang could pass through it with his walking stick. Shortly afterwards, the zone was closed, expressed in the choreography and dissonant sound. Several times, the stroller Lang was prevented from entering the transition zone before the doors opened, and, with the mobile zebra crossing,1 change was ushered in. For a brief moment, the impermeable became permeable. Even

after those carrying the mobile zebra crossing had left the space again, the choir had lost its dominance, the choreography and sound approximated the initial motif, then a freeze, and the chord gradually faded away.

Gerhard Lang is a visual and performance artist. He is based in Schloss-Nauses and London.

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Gerhard Lang’s mobile zebra crossing was part of a “zebra crossing” walk, developed by students at the University of Kassel. On May 19, 1993, accompanied by Lucius Burckhardt the students took the mobile zebra crossing through Kassel’s inner city, an environment hostile to pedestrians, and used it to cross streets normally impassable (see photo p. 307).

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In cooperation with the new music choir, Cantiamo Kassel, 23 singers, 8 carriers, and the mobile Zebrasteifen, 4 x 30 m. Courtesy University of Kassel, 2017. Photos: Helmut Aebischer, Mathias VÜlzke, Fernando Vargas, Nicolas Wefers, 2017. Š VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn, 2018