Carlos Perez Marin

Before leaving Kassel in May I was questioned by Iswanto Hartono, Lara Khaldi and Chiara Ianeselli if I was going to stay till the opening and the three of them were surprised not just because I was leaving at the end of the month but overall by my lack of interest of staying. On one hand our budget could not afford me to stay longer but on the other I was not attracted by the idea of attending different openings of an event of this type, with (in theory) lots of exclusives parties and “very important people” everywhere, people who didn’t care about the idea behind ruangrupa, about approaching culture to society. However, after watching on the Internet the activities of the first days and reading the messages on our chat, I had to admit I was completely wrong. Laila confirmed us that the opening was completely different to any other event (art fair, biennale…) she had known because it was not conceived for the VIPs but for the people in general, with one stage in Friedrichsplatz (the main square in the city centre) and a karaoke for anyone who wanted to sing. It was a popular opening. Those hoping to attend luxurious and exclusive parties were disappointed as for the fact that the opening of documenta coincided with the one of Art Basel fair. This wasn’t a minor matter because gallerists and collectors took it as an affront, in addition to not having counted on them when making the selection of artists. They would later settle the scores using their contacts and influences among the media and politicians.

LE 18 explained in an introductory wall its proposal (press kit) and presented a series of activities during the two first weeks of the event with film screenings at Gloria cinema (by Farida Benlyazid and by Ahmed Bennys), performances (by Imane Zoubai) and talks, plus a discussion called undoing documenta where all the collectives were invited to share the process they followed till the opening. This was probably the most important proposal because it was going to arise key questions related to contemporary art and the way institutions and big events condition it. Otherwise, since the proposed dinner in Marrakech for the selected artists selected by LE 18 was a complete failure (only the members of the team and two artists appeared), it was appropriate to open the conversation to the lumbung community in Kassel. It was a pity because that conversation could explain the undoing process of LE 18 in documenta and I do not still understand how artists having participated in LE 18 events and programs do not behave reciprocally when organisers asked them for a favour. Undoing documenta had three sessions and I think only one of them was recorded, but only the sound. In the initial scenography project, I had  foreseen all the devices needed for a live broadcast but my friends thought it was enough with a sound recording. I insisted documenta was a unique opportunity and in the future they were going to regret not having done a better documentation, at least for their own archive. I was upset because in my opinion they were not aware of the importance of being in Kassel, a participation that was going to be part of the history of contemporary art in Morocco, furthermore, when I found out that documenta proposed them to record on video one of the sessions. I begged Laila to make a video of the discussion, even if it was with a phone in the same way we do the epilogues in Tighmert. I don’t know what they finally did but at the end of June I was in Marrakech and I saw Phillip van den Bossche that just arrived from Kassel. I was intrigued to know what he thought about documenta fifteen and about LE 18.  He told me he was skeptical before the opening due to the radical concept ruangrupa was developing, but after visiting the venues and attending several discussions, he was impressed. He went to WH22 for the undoing documenta sessions, if the first one the conversation seemed imprecise in the proposals, the second was more accurate and interesting, in fact, much more interesting. I was quite pleased to hear the opinions of someone who had not been involved in documenta, and who confirmed my expectations in the sense that this edition was going to be completely different.

On Instagram, I could feel how the energy of collectives spread over the venues during those first days but suddenly everything felt down. It was so sad to read on Internet the articles with the anti-Semitic accusations towards Taring Padi installation, People’s Justice, in Friedrichsplatz. I expected some noise since the documenta team warmed us in one of the majelis akbar (the lumbung community zoom meetings) of the increased pressure that we were going to suffer from extreme groups. They were used to suffer media attacks in every edition from a local blog, but this year they started to make anti-Semitic accusations with the nomination of ruangrupa as artistic directors and with the publication of the collectives and artists invited. They prevented us from talking to certain media and people whose objectives were none other than to create controversy. This year they went even further with the break-in into WH22 venue, making intimidating and threatening graffiti towards the Arab collectives that were settling there. They did it three days after my departure but it wasn’t till June when Francesca shared a video of our indoor space that I realised we have been also tagged. Despite the threats, documenta, as an institution, took no action to prevent other intrusions. Party Office, the Indian collective also denounced threats and humiliating treatment of its members in the streets after the parties they organised at WH22, but no measure was taken by documenta. The difference in the repercussions both in the media and in the members of the supervisory board was quite frustrating as we expressed to the Managing Director in an online meeting we had with her. I think it was the first time she deigned to speak to the participants and of course she was much more concerned about the anti-Semitic accusation than about the safety of the collectives, which to us was simply unbelievable. Some weeks later we learned that the supervisory board has been training artistic team and collectives with condescension, as if we, collectives coming from outside Europe, had to be grateful for participating in such an important event in Germany, without having the right to complain. I had already suffered from that superiority complex on the part of Spanish universities that came to Tetouan to show us how we had to teach architecture because we were in Morocco and we did not know their experience (discovering later that we had pedagogical methods that they had spent years trying to develop in Seville without success).

The controversy quickly turned into a storm with national medias, politicians and extremists groups lobbying for action against the exhibition (some of them wanted to shut it down) and demanding organisers to take responsibility for alleged mistakes, however, nobody wanted to understand the meaning of the art installation, neither its context, be it political, cultural or social nor its artistic message; two partial images were enough to qualify a work, and a whole exhibition, as anti-Semitic. After documenta fifteen, one of the member of Taring Padi, A. Supartono, explained People’s Justice in a lecture in Amsterdam.

If the authorities had taken the time to listen to the authors, perhaps the controversy would have taken another direction, but media pressure prevented that dialogue. Nonetheless the problem wasn’t just the traditional and social medias, but the attitude of the institution, always afraid of the capacity of the artistic directors and collectives to deal with the accusations since the beginning of the year. In April, they proposed a series of conversations, WE NEED TO TALK!, on the role of art and artistic freedom in the face of rising antisemitism, racism, and Islamophobia, but they decided to cancel it. ruangrupa and the artistic team wrote then a letter that now it could be considered a premonition of what would happen after the opening, a letter that was supported by a statement of the lumbung community.

As ruangrupa claimed, a debate on antisemitism is not welcome in Germany.  But it wasn’t just about antisemitism as I will explain later.

It was difficult to find articles on Internet about art and what the curatorial proposal had produced, everybody wrote only about the press release and the anti-Semitic accusation. Maybe the first journalist to examine the event globally was Siddhartha Mitter, he wrote for The New York Times: Documenta Was a Whole Vibe. Then a Scandal Killed the Buzz. I don’t know Siddhartha personally but one year ago he started following our Instagram accounts; Caravane Tighmert, Caravane Ouadane and mine. Then Laila told me she had met him in Dakar during the biennale (in which she participated) because they had friends in common and they met again in Kassel. Siddhartha told her that he had never seen such an energy in a contemporary art event and that he was quite impressed by ruangrupa’s proposition. His article, and few others, confirmed my thoughts, there was a kind of media war in Germany on a “local” topic, except that documenta was supposed to be a trend-setting event around the world and in this edition ruangrupa deployed a completely different vision of what contemporary art (and culture) should be, its relation with societies and even the way these societies organised themselves to solve problems through culture. At that moment, we were losing control of the narrative and during one of the online meetings we agreed we needed to counteract public opinion, if not in Germany, then at least in the rest of the world, writing articles and talking to journalists in our countries about what was really happening in Kassel.

Three days after the official opening, the artwork People’s Justice was deinstalled, several statements where published to apologise, by Managing Director of documenta, by Taring Padi collective and by the artistic directors and artistic team. Then, ruangrupa was called to explained themselves in the committee on culture and media in the Bundestag in Berlin.

On July the 16th, the Managing Director of documenta resigned as german politicians had been asking and the statement of the Supervisory Board recommended the creation of a committee for studying if there were other anti-Semitic images in the exhibition. In theory, the Managing Director was the person in charge of relations with the shareholders, that is to say, the politicians (local and regional), once she resigned, it was the artistic directors who had to deal with them. The 17th, we had an online meeting to decide how we could respond the Supervisory Board. We organised ourselves in different working groups and a Google document was shared to write a letter, which was sent (once it was supervised by legal advisors) by each collective to the board on July the 18th. As it became public in the German media, only partially, we decided to sent it to the international press:

During our meetings we discussed the consequences that could have the intentions of the Supervisory Board if they became a fact; the meddling of politicians in a curatorial project; the submission to the power of social media and media over reflection and dialogue. I expressed briefly that we couldn’t forget that the art world was watching us (it wasn’t just a German matter), that the aim of extremists was to shut down the event and that we had to involve the European Union since extremism and racism was a growing problem in Europe. We also learnt, thanks to German collectives, that there was an underground dispute between politicians from the city, the region and the central government to control documenta, and its budget. With this information it was easier to understand some of the declarations they were making in the media. 

Once my friends came back from Kassel, at the end of June, we did not talk too much except for our position and reaction to the statements. They took a few days off after so many months of intense work for documenta, in addition to being psychologically exhausted after having lived through all the controversy with Taring Padi work. One day, I reminded them of what had happened to Kamal Hachkar’s film, Tinghir-Jerusalem: Echoes from the Mellah, in the Trans-Saharan Film Festival in Zagora (Morocco).  Face to the pressure made by extremists, authorities decided to cancel the screening, not because they founded problematic the work of the jewish and French-Moroccan filmmaker, whose family was originally from Tinghir and who wanted to show the roots of Moroccan jewish families that moved to Israel after the independence, it was just to avoid the controversy in Moroccan media. In that case, extremists won by just spreading fear, the same thing was happening in Kassel and Germany. Kamal’s film was screened some months later in Tangier during the National Film Festival, and there was no controversy. This is one of the reasons I couldn’t really believe what was happening, a personal blog published rumours and false accusations and then all the media and politicians followed him… 

The last weeks of June and beginning of July were weird, in the lumbung community because nobody knew what was coming next (maybe new anti-Semitic allegations, ruangrupa resignation…) and LE 18 collective did not decide yet what we were going to do in August. In Kassel, they talked to el-Warcha about the possibility of relocating the public program to Tunisia. I was worried for several raisons; I had already paid for my flight tickets to Kassel; I have been working with the Dortmund University in a workshop; I thought we absolutely had to support ruangrupa with our presence. Time was running out and due to the lack of communication caused by the vacations that some of the members of the group took, I decided to write this email which was followed by others written by Laila and then Corinne. 

Finally we agreed we should be back in Kassel for the second part of the public program.

Credits texts, photos and drawings: Carlos Pérez Marín