documenta 14 is not owned by anyone in particular. It is shared among its visitors and artists, readers and writers, as well as all those whose work made it happen.…
In the spring of 2011, Syrians rose up against a dictatorship inherited from another era. Schoolchildren wrote “The emperor wears no clothes!” on the walls. Young people streamed into the streets and…
2016 was a year of wild speculations, burning insults, half-lies, and post-truth (Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year). But even before the UK referendum, with its demonized immigrant laborers, or…
Pedro Matta is a survivor who gives guided visits to people who want to know about what happened in Villa Grimaldi, Santiago de Chile. Given my work on…
In 1987 Martin Bernal published Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization putting forward a controversial thesis that tried to delink Greek history from the western narratives that…
Cecilia Vicuña completes the Athenian chapter of her documenta 14 project by way of a ritual offering to the sea gods of ancient Hellenic lore. The sacrifice in question consists of Vicuña presenting…
“The movement of the eye, the trace of the sliding glances, the muscles that contract and distend link the shapes seen in nature and form a uniform rhythm … The rhythm is mostly the rhythm of autonomous…
Since the closing of the Henschel factory during World War II—once a pivotal site in German industrialization and the development of military technology—the Henschel-Hallen today stand empty, to be…
I am trying to think “language or hunger,” but I inevitably supplant hunger with eating, not eating, and shitting, all of which differ from hunger. Hunger is abstract, and…
Bloody Beans, Narimane Mari’s first feature-length film, is a dreamlike take on the violent spiral of Algeria’s recent history. Its force and beauty is that it does not employ a straightforward historical narrative, but instead re-enacts the past through play…
I am called BODY WRITING. Unidentified Verbose Object. ISBN: 978-1-14210-562-7. 197 pages, deletions included. 15 x 21 cm. Standard offset paper. Cover: a photograph by Mark Velasquez depicting a naked…
Twenty years ago, the No One is Illegal campaign was established as a decentralized network of anti-racist, migrant, and refugee-solidarity groups within documenta X’s Hybrid Workspace. Since then, it…
by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín
We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship…