Thursday > Sunday, 8/11 September 2022

Kassel, documenta15

I am [ilenia] at documenta15 to join a workshop that weaves together theories and practices about artist making other-institutions, Practitheorizing Counterinstitutions, organised by the IMAGINART research group, based at the University of Amsterdam, consisting of researchers, artists and activists. We are at WH22 (AKA), in the space of the Palestinian artists, who have been under attack, together with the curatorial collective ruangrupa, since the opening of the exhibition. In our days there, the attacks are renewed – the German government has set up a 'scientific' commission to assess the pre-assumed anti-Semitism of the exhibition. The assumption is: anti-Zionism and criticism of the state of Israel = anti-Semitism. For months the artists have been denouncing censorship and attacks, even physical ones, in a general climate of Islamophobic aggression. On 10 September, they issued a letter, in which they open up very important issues for the art world: forms of racism and discrimination, control over production and works, mobilised knowledge. WE ARE ANGRY, WE ARE SAD, WE ARE TIRED, WE ARE UNITED. documenta15 has been a collective process of multiplication, starting with the call of the ruangrupa collective / a collective of collectives, of artists and groups that in turn have called other groups and other collectives, in an exponential mechanism that has populated the artistic direction and the very concept of curating, also through a principle of redistribution of funds and resources.