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.…
I often wonder what people mean when they say Kassel has changed over these past two years, during what has been called the “refugee crisis.” Has the city become more diverse? Are social and cultural…
Angela Y. Davis, the African-American activist, feminist, academic, and writer, was born in 1944 in the southern city of Birmingham, Alabama. A student of Herbert Marcuse at Brandeis University, she also…
Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that the chronotope connects temporal and spatial relationships of language to the ideological and political context that has produced them. Time, Bakhtin says, “thickens, takes…
Originally designed in 1866 to host finds from nineteenth-century archaeological excavations, the museum’s collections—the most extensive in Greece—date from the sixth millennium BC to late antiquity…
The brutalist Neue Hauptpost, renamed the Neue Neue Galerie by documenta 14, was inaugurated in 1975 as Kassel’s main post office and mail distribution center. In the wake of the partial privatization…
It’s easily the oldest house I’ve ever lived in—known in Kassel, until I moved into it in August 2015, as the Brothers Grimm Museum. The address is Schöne Aussicht 2, hence the building’s “official”…
In December 2011, ten German intellectuals met in Berlin to discuss the current political crisis: how democracy had been undermined, weakened, hollowed out, and perverted by the so-called free market and its functions…
Is it possible to transform the role of a museum and provide it with an educational remit distinct from that of the university? Can we change the consumerist imperative of the museum and re-implement its…
This performance is inspired by all those people who at some point, in some place, in some way reacted to what was putting them down by posing thousands of questions. By all those who, if only for a brief…
The mechanism of forgetfulness has ramifications far beyond the importance it has played in psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud notes that forgetfulness is not “left to psychic arbitrariness, but that it follows…