Adam Szymczyk and documenta 14

The slogan, “Von Athens lernen/Learning from Athens”, remained valid to the end. The signet of the exhibition was the proverbial owl of Athens.[16] What we can learn from Athens was made more concrete by Szymczyk in the foreword to the Documenta reader. By being active in Athens we could learn “iterability and otherness“, which might be translated here as reproducibility, differentiation and the diversity of cultural structures and experiences. “The decision to conceive documenta 14 as a ‘Theater and its Double’ (Antonin Artaud) in Athens and Kassel – and with it to shift its geographical and ideological centre from its home in Germany – came from a feeling that it was necessary to act in real time and in the real world. The world cannot be exclusively explained and interpreted from Kassel – from a perspective that is solely situated in Northern and Western Europe […] By moving the documenta to Athens, from which we wish to unlearn what we already know instead of teaching lessons to the inhabitants, we intend to open up space for new potentials. The old world is based on concepts of belonging, identity and roots. Our ever-changing new world will be a world of radical subjectivity. […] That said, artists can show us a way to teach us what it means to learn, to ‘learn from below’, as described by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak; or in the formulation by Souleymane Bachir Diagnes, to learn from others in order to live together. Learning from them will enable us to conceive of a symmetrical situation, a meeting between equals, instead of having an asymmetrical power relationship between a sovereign and his subalterns. Artists – and that means authors, filmmakers, sculptors, painters, actors and all those who were once refused entry to the Republic – can teach us that we must first learn to be alien to ourselves and thus experience a de-creation (as posited by Simone Weil), instead of continuing with overproduction. They can show us how the foundations underlying our positive and passive understanding of the world can be shattered. They can teach us how to abandon the cities and then re-inhabit them (here Kassel and Athens are pertinent examples), and how we should value the way in which we work and what we make from the fruits of our work.”[17]