Every 5 years
After all this holiday bliss it’s a little hard to step of the train in Fulda, Germany, after a change over in Munich. We are staying in a sad budget hotel, and even if the city is full of huge baroque buildings, it feels like a waiting room for us. I forget to take any pictures. It’s not always easy to find 3-bed rooms at an affordable prize, so instead of staying in the home city of Documenta, Kassel, 45 minutes further north, we stay here, and take the train back and forth the next day. We’re getting the most out of our inter rail tickets - and I must admit I still treasure out time on trains.
While I hadn’t heard much about the Venice Biennial, news about this years Documenta 15 has been hard to miss. It has been ridden with controversy, and everyone seem to have different versions of what went on. It’s curated by the artists group Ruangrupa and they invited other groups that then invited others. Where the “The Milk of Dreams” in Venice was the most tightly curated show possibly, this is more loosely put together without clear lines of responsibility. In this organizational web a derogatory picture slipped through that should not have been in the show, and the curator group was slow to remove it. As a result one of the few very famous German artist in the show pulled out.
It’s only my fourth time to Documenta, but since it happens every 5th year the visits covers 20 years of my life. I see many older Germans in the crowds. Some must have come here for 50 years. I love this kind of tradition. Life changes and art changes intertwined.
It might be loosely put together, but the strategy of collaboration is present in every presentation. It is both frustrating and freeing to see a show where the focus on individual artists are almost not there. Frustrating because things are less easy to pin and categorize, freeing because one can leave any name dropping skills (or rather lack thereof) behind.
But beyond the framework of collaboration the themes vary. From home there is The Black Archive that among other things have been important in the movement to stop the Dutch tradition of Swarte Piet. Their presentation is like a summary of some of their work, but also a useful library the visitor can take advantage of.
In the Ottoneum, the nature history museum that is used as a venue, they seem good at asking to get something back from the visiting Documenta artists. 10 years ago Mark Dion made a handcrafted wooden shelf system for their collection of 18th century books about trees made out of the same tree type they describe. This time a group have transformed their garden pond from a chlorofied fountain to a more useful ecosystem. Handmade terracotta tiles now support local plants. When the plants have developed a strong root system to support themselves, the clay will slowly have dissolved.
Even if singular artists aren’t in focus, there are many singular works. One work is about the possible contradictions between traditional ways of nature preservation and modern nature sanctuaries in Congo. An interviewer asks an old farmer: -Who owns your land? She laughs and answers -You maybe say it’s the state, but I say it’s me. -How big is your land, the interviewer asks, how many hectares? -Oh, my bush is big. When I get tired, that’s where it stops.
I take this as a sign. The show is big, but I am tired, and that’s where it stops for me. I go and sleep in a beach chair.
Well, I do see more works, like one about recycling clothes that makes me want to never bring any clothes to recycling containers again (I should get a loom to wave rugs from all our old clothes).
And then we eat dinner at the Alex café.