In which we do the documenta 14.

Though only two days at one of the world's most important contemporary art exhibitions can hardly qualify as "doing" documenta, as you would need weeks of time and lots more brainpower to give it the proper "doing" it deserves. I had never heard of documenta until my dear friend Steven proposed going to Kassel for a weekend to see it, at which point I did some speed googling (okay, gigantic art exhibition in Kassel, only takes place every five years, artsy website, cool logo) and said sure, absolut! Neither of us had ever been to Kassel and both of us had quite a few unplanned weekends coming up, so we booked some train tickets and an airbnb for mid-August, and off we went. The days before our departure had been pretty chaotic and neither of us had had a chance to really inform ourselves about what we were going to see, art-wise or city-wise, so we went into the adventure with open minds and no expectations. 

Important note. In my rush to pack the night before, I'd checked the weather forecast and as it was supposed to rain all weekend, I made a rash decision not to lug my camera along, then regretted it about 423 times in the course of the next two days. The pictures in this post were almost all taken by Steven on Steven's fancy phone, sometimes with my prompting/pestering. Thanks, Steven!  

Adventure time. 

The ca. 2.5 hour train ride between Hamburg and Kassel was pretty uneventful. We arrived late in the evening, just in time to enjoy the last minutes of a street festival that popped up between the train station and our apartment. The carnival rides were pretty kidless at that point, but the tap was flowing and a rock band played on into the night in front of a small but supportive audience. 

In my experience living in Germany and hearing people talk about German cities, Kassel has always sort of had a "meh" reputation -- I'd never heard anyone gush about it or tell me I absolutely had to go there. Kassel? Meh. Steven said the same thing when we talked about it later. Imagine our surprise then when we left the our apartment in an adorable neighborhood and walked downtown to find a lovely city with a truly scrumptious panorama. Noble-looking museums, funky nooks and crannies, wildflowers abloom, and unfortunately, surprisingly few places to get breakfast on a very active documenta weekend. As we walked around throughout the day marveling at how lovely everything was, I got to wondering what the city motto was -- "documenta Stadt" (only good every 5 years), or according to kassel.de "Capital of the German Fairy Tale Route" (home of the Brothers Grimm -- too wordy) -- and came up with a better nickname: 

Kassel -- eigentlich ganz schön! 

Kassel -- actually pretty nice. 

The exhibition itself is spread out throughout the city, both outdoors and indoors with exhibits in most of the city's many museums as well as old industrial spaces, warehouses, otherwise abandoned buildings, basements, you name it. This year it was first hosted in Athens for 100 days before opening for its 100 days in Kassel, and attracted over a million visitors to the two locations combined. Many of the pieces are site-specific, and what was founded in 1955 as "an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with modern art, both banishing and repressing the cultural darkness of Nazism" has since become a place for artists all over the world to confront and explore important issues to them in today's world, from the deeply political to the deeply personal and everything in between.

Probably the most visible, media-grabbing piece was the Parthenon of Books, which was under construction throughout the exhibition and was built of donated books that were banned somewhere in the world at some point in time. Spoiler: There are a lot of them. New books appeared in the donation box every day and were mounted in the metal structure with plenty of plastic wrap. Upon its completion towards the end of the exhibition, there was a big celebration where visitors were "invited to participate in The Parthenon of Books open stage in any number of ways, including reading from once-banned books in numerous languages, reciting their own texts or poems, presenting silent contributions like dances or performative gestures, playing alternately music, or by simply watching and listening in the Parthenon with the artist, documenta 14 curators and team members". Then the whole thing was dismantled and the books were given away to anyone who wanted them. It was fascinating to walk around the giant columns and see so many familiar titles. For some it was clear to see how they could be banned in some countries, like those with clear political themes (Guantánamo Diary appeared again and again -- guess where that was censored), or obviously scandalous books like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight, but then there were books like Le Petit Prince, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill A Mockingbird, all the Harry Potter and the this and the that in all different languages that appeared again and again, or Toni Morrison novels, etc., and really made you think about what kind of world we share and the power that language and literature can hold in such a world. 

And something I just learned when reading up on it again -- the exhibit was constructed on the Platz where Nazis conducted book burnings not so many decades ago. So there's that. 

Another fun piece nearby was this one, where whole rooms were created inside clay pipes, in part to draw attention to how some refugees were living in similar conditions in Greece while waiting to continue on to other countries, and in part to criticize the obsession with building vertically -- such as how often social housing is demolished to make way for skyscrapers for the elite. The artist was planning on sleeping in the pipes for a few nights during the exhibition, and encouraged the students from the local art school who helped design the installation to bring their laptops and spend some time inside as well.

While walking through Kassel's hilly gardens and gardeny hills, a war memorial caught my attention. Monuments to fallen soldiers, like this one for Hessian soldiers who fell during the Napoleonic Wars, usually depict brave men in action, not sad lions. A cause for pause on a quiet corner.

We decided to hit the outdoor exhibits while the lovely weather held up, as you can see from this panorama atop the Weinberg. Later we got caught in the rain, and the sun, and the rain and sun, and...

There's no way to describe everything we saw over our two days of solid documenta-ing, though suffice it to say my feet were sore, my eyes were sore, and my brain felt like putty by the end -- in a good way. Sculptures, sound installations, videos, and visuals of every shape and size and texture, all with their own story and usually an extensive background story behind that. 

To name a few that stuck with me particularly, there was a video installation in the incredibly dark, crypt-like basement of the Fridericianum that is described as "a comparative film study about the communities of workers in an illegal, small-scale gold mine in Suriname and in a state-owned copper mine in Serbia". We sat in the cold, dark space watching subtitled interviews with the mine workers in the two countries, both while on the job and on their breaks, eating fruit or smoking cigarettes, the interviewer sometimes asking very personal questions -- what are you afraid of? -- do you want your children to work in the mine? -- and following them as heavy, creaking lifts lower them slowly, slowly, down down down into the earth. Fascinating and terrifying and endearing and hypnotic, this glimpse into a world that I know absolutely nothing about. 

In a very dark room of the Grimm Museum, an amazing audio piece portrayed a collection of extinct, endangered, or threatened languages, as well as languages that have survived near extinction and made a comeback. The ancient voices of women telling stories, a weather forecast in Navajo, conversations between friends -- all accompanied by a thin, green line on a screen tracking the speech movements: "Technology allows the voices of the dead to be heard. On being heard, these voices return to the living to be mouthed, to articulate the particular mappings and experiences of the worlds that these languages describe and contain."

Then there were mixed media pieces and huge old boats that had been turned into musical instruments and bedazzled by the spinning stars of a disco ball; a dancer in a Cambodian forest giving life to the intricate animal masks he carries; elaborate typewriter art; that one photograph of a beach where all the tiny people are either looking at their phones, taking pictures or being photographed; robed and bearded men singing the Agni Parthene in multiple languages, their voices entrancing; a series of portraits of Middle Eastern and North African migrants done in conversations with them in Kassel, Athens, and other places -- fleeting moments in coffee shops, whole life stories distilled and sketched on yellow legal sheets; and of course the recurring themes: war, home, loss of home, family, nature, community, death, hope for x, criticism of x, and on and on. 

Or just totally strange, random works like this one, and I quote: "In 1993 and 2000, the artist slept in this bed while an electroencephalograph machine recorded her eye movements. During the day, Janine Antoni would sit at the loom and weave shreds of her nightgown in the pattern of her REM graph. These sections, recorded while she dreamed, are woven into the blanket." Using strips of her nightgown to weave the pattern of her dreams. I don't know what that's good for, but I am fascinated.

One piece that took my breath away was at the top of a high tower of the Fridericianum. There was only room for about 4 people to view the piece at a time, so first you had to wait in line down a long hallway and watch people go up and down the narrow stairs in front of you. Once we had our turn, I still had no idea what would be waiting in the small room at the top, and when we arrived to find the floor covered from wall to wall in broken glass portraying the European flags, my heart skipped a beat. It was very quiet, with the light from the windows shining off the fragments. Steven expertly helped identify the flags with the other two people sharing the edge of the room with us, and I felt like crying. I hadn't expected anything in particular, and still it was somehow so unexpected. When we talked about it later and I mentioned how moved I had felt, and sad, he took the positive outlook and said to look at the whole, how all the pieces were blending together. I could see that, but the shattered aspect had made a much stronger impression on me, and that's the one I still have when I think about it now.
 

This quirky organic café was a saving grace in a time of great weariness.

Steven had to patiently wait his turn for the other kids to finish goofing around on the "me" pedestal outside the Hessisches Landesmuseum, but he finally got his moment. 

At some point the weekend had to come to an end, and when the time came, we exited our last exhibit, found some damn good ice cream, and headed back to the train station while going back over the last two days and trying to remember everything we'd seen. There was so much to process, too much, and it was hard to fathom the extent of all the exhibits we hadn't gotten to. The whole exhibition was incredible -- the whole jolly mix of pieces that MEAN SOMETHING to the WORLD with the pieces that are just pretty, and the pieces that don't seem to mean anything at all and you wouldn't ever know were ART if they didn't have a little tag next to them declaring them so (of which there were many). That in addition to seeing a new part of Germany and spending time with a great friend made this adventure, well, eigentlich ganz schön.