Over the past year, we have repeatedly found ourselves reaching for books and texts about violence. Perhaps with the urge to understand that which swells like waves around us, threatening to take us under in all its manifold, rising forms: economic violence, linguistic violence, nationalistic violence, environmental violence, gender and racial violence. In this fourth and final issue of the documenta 14 journal South as a State of Mind, it seemed necessary to name it, finally, as one of the structuring devices of our world. From this decision came a question: What might counter this culture of violence both in spirit and in action? What apposite force? What to generate in the face of it? Our question remains; yet in considering it anew, we realize that this is the query that has guided our editorial vision of the documenta 14 journal, and its four special issues of South, forward. Under the dark star of this question—what might we offer, and what forms might these offerings take?—this issue’s working theme is “violence and offering.” If the latter term implies both a gift and a sacrifice, it likewise describes a different kind of relationship to one’s community, society, or other. Thus the work in this issue of South—its essays, poems, letters, and images—examines how violence structures our relations in and with the world, as well as the disparate offerings (linguistic, visual, auditory) continually created as a cultural movement of opposition to it. Antonin Artaud once wrote: “There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something. We are real. This excuses us from being necessary. There should be as many magazines as there are valid states of mind.” In 2015, when we began editing South, we did so because we believed we were responding to something. Perhaps, as Artaud notes, this belief excused us from being necessary. But we believed then, as we feel now, that there should be as many magazines as there are states of mind, Southern and other. The documenta 14 journal has been the manifestation of one (or rather, many) of them. We thank you for reading.
Yll Çitaku and Nita Deda, Nusja Jonë (Our bride, 2011), video still
Ecology has as its Greek root oikos, meaning the entire habitat, house, or family—an interdependent ecosystem. (Economy has the same root.) We know it now as the study of the relationship between organisms and their environment, the interdependence of humans and their institutions. As Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan notes: “Here is a lesson: what happens to people and what happens to the land is the same thing.” And this is what the work that follows weighs. The third volume of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind concerns the constant correlation among nature, capital, power, and language. The contributions that follow are documents of language, or hunger, or both. Why “language or hunger”? Consider the mouth a border, a boundary, a threshold: to swallow or to speak. Emptiness or language (or their meeting). On one side, inside, one feels physical hunger, a void; on the other side, outside, one puts forth language (into another void, perhaps). Hence language—being born with one, or finding it again, or creating one anew, a kind of lexicon—can be a means of nourishment, while hunger can be a form of resistance. Indeed, the new essays, poems, scripts, artists projects, and older manifestos and parables that together constitute this issue of South articulate the necessity of language, while considering consumption and hunger as political and aesthetic facts and fields that determined our past and will construct our collective future. “In contemporary times,” Nabil Ahmed writes, “emergent ecological crisis is a paradigmatic negative moment with regard to the unresolved dark twinning of capitalism and colonialism.” And it is this dark twinning that is our focus. If, as Ahmed declares, attentiveness to environmental violence is necessary for the “formation of an anticapitalist political ecology at once structural, social, psychic, and environmental,” we believe that an awareness of the role that language plays in this formation, as complicity or resistance, psychic or structural, is equally important. Language or hunger—a kind of border. A question (for you), also.
Nairy Baghramian, YSL / New Waves (2001), C-print, 90 × 75 cm
Silence as resistance; masks as resistance. Both, perhaps paradoxically, as means to act and to speak, as modes of aesthetic and political participation. If words and images can be put to the service of critical inquiry, silence and masks, while withdrawing the claim on self-evident truth, can help give sharp contours to political statement, testifying to the need to address the real—without, however, falling into the pitfalls of direct representation. In essay and allegory, artist projects and conversation, poetry and fiction, this second volume of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind explores issues of masking identity and silencing dissent, orality and recognition, indigeneity and exile, provenance and repatriation, and colonial and gendered violence. We examine and don masks, understanding them as historical and contemporary means of occlusion or subversion often employed to defy the ways in which our bodies are unequally accorded basic rights in the dehumanizing nexus and global economy of citizenship, geography, race, and gender. In parallel, we survey silence—one of the many masks of language—as a response to the empty authority and authoritarianism of so much communication, a long linguistic flood of nationalistic propaganda, neoliberal preaching, and coded violence. Indeed, we know silence as a necessary aspect of language, as a way to propose a kind of radical reception. For to be silent suggests not only resistance but recipience and recognition. As Stathis Gourgouris observes, “One listens to the universe before anything else.” Withholding or receptive, adorned and defiant, often displaced and transforming, the voices and bodies that fill this volume of South demonstrate that silence and masks are often the means by which aesthetics and politics, cultural production and political protest, meet and cross over. “But who is speaking in this room full of eyes?” Alejandra Pizarnik asks. “Who gnaws with a mouth made of paper? Names that come up, shadows with masks.” We wish you good reading.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nesting II (2000), Polaroid Polacolor Pro 20 x 24 photographs, triptych, 73.65 x 60.95 cm each (detail)
Possession and dispossession, displacement and debt—it seems like the stories that condition our present are inextricably born out of the stories that conditioned our past. The first of four special issues of South as a State of Mind, temporarily reconfigured as the documenta 14 journal, examines forms and figures of displacement and dispossession, and the modes of resistance—aesthetic, political, literary, biological—found within them. New essays, both literary and visual, consider dispossession as a historical and contemporary condition, and its connections to archaeology and architecture, coloniality and performativity, debt and imperialism, provenance and restitution, feminism and protest. Featured too are historical documents of displacement and debt, as well as a photo essay on the building and burning of knowledge that explores libraries and temples, our edifices of learning and power, as emblems of hegemony as well as shelters for ideas. While the intensity of our present political conditions and the challenges of our global economic world order cannot be overstated (“Am I exaggerating? Perhaps I am under-exaggerating,” as poet Bhanu Kapil writes in our pages), still the means of protest are rich, diverse. The collective of voices here, and the often dissident and marginalized histories they limn and draw from, offer an alternative cartography and chorus; in so doing, we imagine that they might allow us to delineate alternatives to our untenable present and unclear future. “The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot,” writes Audre Lorde. We hope so.
Sven Stilinović, Marx and Stilinović (1980), three black-and-white photographs, sheet of paper with text, corduroy cover (detail)
South as a State of Mind is a magazine that was founded by Marina Fokidis in Athens in 2012. Beginning in 2015, the magazine temporarily becomes the documenta 14 journal, publishing four special issues biannually until the opening of the exhibition in Athens and Kassel in 2017. These special issues are edited by Quinn Latimer, documenta 14’s editor-in-chief of publications, and documenta 14 artistic director Adam Szymczyk. The documenta 14 South is conceived as a place of research, critique, art, and literature that parallels the years of work on the documenta 14 exhibition overall, one that helps define and frame its concerns and aims. As such, the journal is a manifestation of documenta 14 rather than a discursive lens through which to merely presage the topics to be addressed in the eventual exhibition. Writing and publishing, in all their forms, are an integral part of documenta 14, and the journal heralds that process. The online edition of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind features select content from the print magazine, as well as occasional additional commissions specifically conceived for the digital platform.
South as a State of Mind #9
[documenta 14 #4]
Editors
Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
Founding Director
Marina Fokidis
Managing Editor
Katrin Sauerländer
Associate Editors
Domenick Ammirati, Ben Eastham, Laura Preston
Greek Editor
Dimitris Politakis
Editorial Assistant
Dana Schütte
Picture Editor
Jonas Raam
Copy Editors
Hannah Gregory, Sriwhana Spong
Proofreaders
Sriwhana Spong
Communication
Henriette Gallus
Translation
Jack Zipes (Lācis, A Memoir)
Design Printed Magazine
Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam
with Marius Schwarz
Lithography
Printmanagement Plitt GmbH, Oberhausen
Printing
Fotolio & Typicon S.A., Athens
Concept South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Born,
Henriette Gallus, Quinn Latimer
Design Adaptation South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Novitch
Realization
Systemantics
Online Editor
Jill Winder
Copy Editors
Dimitris Politakis (GR), Katrin Sauerländer (DE)
Assistance/Proofreading
Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Lenia Mazaraki (GR), Daniela Weirich
Picture Editor
Jonas Raam
Published by
documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH
Friedrichsplatz 18
34117 Kassel
T +49 561 70 72 70
F +49 561 70 72 739
www.documenta.de
Chief Executive Officer:
Annette Kulenkampff
Supported by
documenta 14 is organized under the auspices of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, a non-profit organization owned and 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.
© 2017 documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, the artists, the authors
All rights reserved.
South as a State of Mind #8
[documenta 14 #3]
Editors
Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
Founding Director
Marina Fokidis
Managing Editor
Katrin Sauerländer
Associate Editor
Domenick Ammirati
Greek Editor
Dimitris Politakis
Editorial Assistants
Annie Buenker, Laura Preston
Picture Editor
Jonas Raam
Copy Editors
Ben Eastham, Sam Frank, Laura Preston, Sriwhana Spong
Proofreaders
Liz Allan, Annie Buenker, Sriwhana Spong
Communication
Henriette Gallus
Design Printed Magazine
Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam
with Marius Schwarz
Lithography
Printmanagement Plitt GmbH, Oberhausen
Printing
Fotolio & Typicon S.A., Athens
Concept South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Born,
Henriette Gallus, Quinn Latimer
Design Adaptation South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Novitch
Realization
Systemantics
Online Editor
Jill Winder
Copy Editors
Hildegard Hogen (DE), Cordelia Marten (DE), Dimitris Politakis (GR), Antonia Rahofer (DE), Katrin Sauerländer (DE)
Assistance/Proofreading
Annie Buenker (DE), Melissa Gronlund (EN), Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga (GR), Lenia Mazaraki (GR), Laura Preston (EN), Daniela Weirich (EN/DE)
Picture Editor
Jonas Raam
Published by
documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH
Friedrichsplatz 18
34117 Kassel
T +49 561 70 72 70
F +49 561 70 72 739
www.documenta.de
Chief Executive Officer:
Annette Kulenkampff
Supported by
documenta 14 is organized under the auspices of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, a non-profit organization owned and 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.
© 2016 documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, the artists, the authors
All rights reserved.
South as a State of Mind #7
[documenta 14 #2]
Editors
Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
Founding Director
Marina Fokidis
Managing Editor
Katrin Sauerländer
Associate Editor
Domenick Ammirati
Greek Editor
Dimitris Politakis
Editorial Assistants
Annie Buenker, Laura Preston
Picture Editor
Jonas Raam
Copy Editor
Ben Eastham
Proofreaders
Annie Buenker, Laura Preston
Communication
Henriette Gallus
Translations to English (Print)
Regina José Galindo, Moni Oseida, and Nora Perez (Galindo); Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier (Senghor); Sandra Reid (Benfodil, Deliss/Keck); Yvette Siegert (Pizarnik); Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Devi)
Design Printed Magazine
Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam
with Marius Schwarz
Lithography
Printmanagement Plitt GmbH, Oberhausen
Printing
Fotolio & Typicon S.A., Athens
Concept South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Born,
Henriette Gallus, Quinn Latimer
Design Adaptation South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Novitch
Realization
Systemantics
Online Editor
Jill Winder
Copy Editors
Hildegard Hogen (DE), Dimitris Politakis (GR), Katrin Sauerländer (DE)
Assistance/Proofreading
Annie Buenker (DE), Lenia Mazaraki (GR), Maria-Louiza Ouranou (GR), Laura Preston (EN)
Picture Editor
Jonas Raam
Published by
documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH
Friedrichsplatz 18
34117 Kassel
T +49 561 70 72 70
F +49 561 70 72 739
www.documenta.de
Chief Executive Officer:
Annette Kulenkampff
Supported by
documenta 14 is organized under the auspices of documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, a non-profit organization owned and 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.
© 2016 documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH, the artists, the authors
All rights reserved.
South as a State of Mind #6
[documenta 14 #1]
Editors
Quinn Latimer, Adam Szymczyk
Founding Director
Marina Fokidis
Managing Editor
Katrin Sauerländer
Associate Editor
Domenick Ammirati
Greek Editor
Dimitris Politakis
Copy Editors
Domenick Ammirati, Emily Votruba
Proofreaders
Abraham Adams, Richard Beck,
Cordelia Marten
Design Printed Magazine
Mevis & Van Deursen, Amsterdam
with Marius Schwarz
Concept South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Born,
Henriette Gallus, Quinn Latimer
Design Adaptation South Online
Laurenz Brunner, Julia Novitch
Realization
Systemantics
Project Management South Online
Henriette Gallus, Katrin Sauerländer
Translations
French/English: Sandra Reid (Bal-Blanc); German/English: Christopher Jenkin-Jones (Cahn), Lisa Rosenblatt (Friedl); Greek/English: Evi Chantzi and Ian Warner (Antonas)
Published by
documenta und Museum Fridericianum gGmbH
Friedrichsplatz 18
34117 Kassel
T +49 561 70 72 70
F +49 561 70 72 739
www.documenta.de
Chief Executive Officer:
Annette Kulenkampff
Supported by the Goethe-Institut
© 2015 documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, the artists, the authors
All rights reserved.
To visit the archive of South as a State of Mind’s past issues, which were edited by founder Marina Fokidis, please visit southasastateofmind.com. Fokidis published five issues from 2012 to 2014. From 2015 to 2017, when documenta 14 opens in Athens and Kassel, South temporarily acts as the documenta 14 journal. The online editions of the d14 South, edited by Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk, can be found here.
South as a State of Mind is available for purchase at select bookstores worldwide and can be ordered through your local bookstore as well. Points of sale in train stations throughout Germany can be found here. Should you require more detailed information as to where to find the magazine in your area or to order it directly online, please contact our distributor, Buchhandlung Walther König.
Book trade worldwide:
Verlag der Buchhandlung
Walther König, Köln
verlag [at] buchhandlung-walther-koenig.de
Newsstands:
Germany/Austria:
DPV Deutscher Pressevertrieb GmbH
www.dpv.de
Greece:
Milkro Hellas Publisher Services Ltd
c.paleologou [at] milkrohellas.com
Europe/Asia/Latin America:
Export Press
www.exportpress.com
South as a State of Mind is on sale at the following bookstores in Athens:
Colibri
Kyriazi 14–16, Kifissia
T: +30 210 801 8687
Evripidis
Kifissias Avenue 310, Kokinaras, Kifissia
T: +30 210 807 5792
Evripidis
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T: +30 210 680 0646
Fotagogos
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T: +30 210 383 9355
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Presspoint Papasotiriou
Athens International Airport
T: +30 210 353 2395