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09.19.2017

documenta 14, April 8–September 17, 2017, in Athens, Kassel, and beyond, has reached more people than ever before

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.

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News

Listening to Matanzas

by Neil Leonard and Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons

The former plantation of Álava in the Matanzas province of Cuba evokes sound before one hears it. In January 2017, we went there to record local musicians and were told to meet them near the bell tower…

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Notes

Anna Halprin

Anna Halprin’s dance deck was built in collaboration with Lawrence, her husband, the landscape architect, urban designer, and ecologist, between 1953 and 1954, in the redwood area of Kentfield, California…

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Artists

This Is Not the Place

by Diana Taylor

2006: Visit to Villa Grimaldi with Pedro Matta 

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…

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South Issue #9 [documenta 14 #4]

Working Group Distomo

with Argyris N. Sfountouris and Margarita Tsomou

In Greece, June 10 is the most significant day of remembrance for victims of the Nazi regime. On this day in 1944, an SS massacre took place in the village of Distomo: The entire village was burned to…

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Calendar
New York
Athens
New York
Kassel

The documenta 14 Reader

The main book of documenta 14 takes the form of a Reader, evoking the various meanings associated with the term…

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Publications

Coastline

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…

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Venues

Alexander Kalderach

Very little is known about Alexander Kalderach, who was born in Hamburg in 1880 and died in Bern in 1965. The acme of his painting career was in the 1940s, when his work was included in the Grosse Deutsche…

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Historical Positions

Ballhaus

The Ballhaus—Leo von Klenze’s first authored building—stands next to the Schloss Wilhelmshöhe, the neoclassical palace of Kassel, inside the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe. It was built in 1808 by Jérôme…

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Venues

So Many Hungers

by Natasha Ginwala

It is believed the spotted hyenas of Harar came to roam the city during the Ethiopian famine of 1888, surviving on organic refuse and human remains.1 Traveling through Ireland preceding the Great Hunger…

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South Issue #8 [documenta 14 #3]

Keimena #4: La Mort de Louis XIV

by Albert Serra

Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV is an exquisite meditation on death, dignity and voyeurism that unfurls like a baroque tapestry. Visionary Catalan filmmaker and artist Albert Serra is contemporary cinema’s master historicist…

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Public TV

Keeping Score: Notation, Embodiment, and Liveness

by Hendrik Folkerts

To approach a definition: the score is a notational device that connects the material of a ­discipline—ranging from music, dance, and performance to architecture, linguistics, mathematics, physics—and…

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South Issue #7 [documenta 14 #2]

In Between
Image and Movement

with Alexandra Bachzetsis and Lenio Kaklea

Reflecting on the process of becoming a dancing body and on the paradoxes of inventing an autonomous gestural language, Alexandra Bachzetsis performs her first piece Perfect, conceived fifteen years ago…

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Calendar

Material Matters Library

The “Material Matters” library is a collection of objects and sounds that have been entrusted to aneducation by documenta 14 artists…

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Public Education

Restif de la Bretonne’s State Brothel: Sperm, Sovereignty, and Debt in the Eighteenth-Century Utopian Construction of Europe

by Paul B. Preciado

In 1769, a few years before the French Revolution, Nicolas Edme Restif de la Bretonne published his epistolary essay Le Pornographe.1 Its subtitle, as rendered in English: A Gentleman’s Ideas on a Project…

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South Issue #6 [documenta 14 #1]