Documenta Fifteen: Handbook (The Exhibition Companion)

Under the guiding principle of lumbung, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa is less concerned with individual works than with forms of collaborative working. As a reference work, companion, and innovative art guide, the Handbook offers orientation for these comprehensive processes; it is aimed at visitors to the Kassel exhibition as well as those interested in collective practice. All the protagonists at documenta fifteen and their work are presented by international authors who are familiar with the respective artistic practice and cultural context. Entitled "lumbung," the book introduces the mindset and cultural background of documenta fifteen illustrating the artistic work processes with numerous drawings. A chapter on Kassel presents and explains all the locations of the show, including the artists and collectives represented here.

Subversive Film

When Beirut was besieged by the Israeli army in 1982, a flourishing environment for political artistic practices in the Palestinian revolution collapsed. A growing archive of internationalist militant cinema since 1968 was seized and later abandoned in a secret military store. The cinema research and production collective Subversive Film investigates ways of retracing and re-distributing this lost archive of silenced revolutionary images.

Always in movement in between Ramallah and Brussels, the collective’s Reem Shilleh and Mohanad Yaqubi restore the equally besieged relations of transnational solidarity between different liberation struggles by instituting archival practices otherwise. Whether reissuing militant images  or texts in their raw form in new publications, or curating screening cycles, Subversive Film not only holds space for the unearthed archival material to speak for itself, but again facilitates the circulation of seized material and its unresolved narratives, aesthetics and politics.

For documenta fifteen, Subversive Film has curated a cinematic program around the screening of a recently restored film, shedding light on the overlooked and until now still undocumented anti-imperialist solidarity relations between Tokyo and Palestine.

After meeting in Tokyo with Masao Adachi, acclaimed director of different experimental agit-prop films and former member of the Japanese Red Army, Subversive Film was entrusted with a collection of 16mm films and Umatic tapes, dozens of posters, and a full wall library safeguarded by a Japanese solidarity group in Tokyo. The material, considered either lost or unknown to the public, was sent to Japan in several waves from 1967 to 1982. The centerpiece of the collection, on display during documenta fifteen, is a speculative documentary collectively made by British, Italian, German, Palestinian, Egyptian, Iraqi, and Japanese filmmakers. The imperfect aura of the film is witness to the changing political attitude of the internationalist solidarity movement taking center stage during the long sixties.

In Kassel, the solidarity relations between Tokyo, Palestine and the world unfold in a nomadic film program around different disassembled fragments of the restored film, interlaced with a live symposium. With this open invitation in ways of facilitating assembly through forms of assemblage, re-assemblage and montage of a restored film, Subversive Film proposes to collectively reflect on possible processes of unearthing, restoring and momentary disclosure of the imperfect archives of transnational militant cinema. By bringing back into circulation these moving images, they all the while carefully re-activate present-day solidarity constellations, reflecting the lively utopia of a worldwide liberation.

El Warcha

Strongly rooted in the heart of the Medina of Tunis, El Warcha is a collaborative design studio with trans-local tentacles, spreading over three continents. Whether working in cities such as Lisbon, Nefta, London, Accra, or now in Kassel, their designs unfold in relation to their immediate surroundings, with the rhythm of daily life in different neighborhoods.

Founded by the French architect Benjamin Perrot in 2016, their practice has taken shape through various participatory forms. Using simple materials, El Warcha devises intuitive interdisciplinary assemblage techniques to make urban furniture and art installations. In their works, the process of collaborative design developed over time as a sustainable practice with performative and narrative elements. The results allow for inclusive and intergenerational social dynamics that improve daily life in various inventive ways.

For documenta fifteen, El Warcha has experimented with new ways of occupying and inhabiting the space of the Fridericianum museum and its surrounding neighborhood. They have constructed an open and welcoming space that enables collective playful practices where everyone can contribute to live projects by prototyping their epiphanies in three-dimensional sketches. By drafting a friendly, fun and festive space during documenta fifteen, El Warcha works in the hyphen between Kassel and Tunisia, improving existing prototypes inspired by themes emerging through the facilitated collaborative processes.

The wooden boxing ring constructed earlier in Hafsia square for a televised quiz could be transformed into a stage where artists can challenge each other. The floating cinema built for a theatrical procession in the coastal town of El Kram could be adapted to drift on one Kassel’s rivers. Even the lighting props for motor bikes initially made to question structural water shortages in Nefta, the land of the palms in the south of Tunisia, could be improved with the insights gained around the dining table in the self-made prototyping factory.

Rather than showing pre-existing artworks, the museum space has been transformed into a dedicated and noisy workshop, allowing for a collective work-in-progress full of possibilities to emerge. Day by day, meal by meal, experiment by experiment, the pile of wooden sketched furniture and prototyped installations constructed with various found source materials have been rearranged in a library. The library eventually constitutes the perfect image for El Warcha’s collaborative design practice, where knowledge formation does not happen through books, but through the very practice of making as a form of language and a tool for mediation.

SIWA

Initially conceived as a nomadic program for exchange between artists and thinkers from Tunis, Baghdad and Paris, Siwa Platform is now taking root in the mountainous and arid region of Gafsa, Tunisia. Under the mediating impetus of Yagoutha Belgacem, since 2011 it has worked collaboratively with the inhabitants of Redeyef. By undertaking a collaborative renovation of L’Economat, the mining settlement’s earlier central colonial general warehouse, is now converted into a laboratory activities, breathing life into possible common futures.

Through a collective proposal articulating a set of interventions, installations, images, drawings, and performances, their work for documenta fifteen bridges the Fridericianum with one of the most isolated regions in Tunisia.

Redeyef is the center of one of the world’s largest phosphate basins, but remains one of the most marginalized towns in Tunisia. Its inhabitants are mainly miners and unemployed youth, with a strong trade unionist tradition. Precarious living conditions contributed to a spirit of revolt that gained momentum in 2008, anticipating the worldwide uprisings of 2011.

The visual installation of Haythem Zakaria and Okacha Ben Salah draws a topography of the luminous desert landscape, dried up and gutted by phosphate mining. Different radio transmitters broadcast the recordings of Loup Uberto, narrating a scorching desire to burn national borders. In a sound installation[Nantes – Redeyef], Guellaa, a young rapper from the region, recounts his perilous journey over the Mediterranean that brought him to France. A video [Elli issîr issîr, by Saif Fradj] follows Mouna, a young woman from Redeyef, who bypasses the desert frontier to take part in a wedding ceremony in Algeria. In a filmed performance [Limadha], Tahar improvises a dance in the phosphate slag heaps surrounding the town. Edited notebooks formed by texts of the inhabitants of Redeyef, collected by Jean-Michel Diaz, form the bed of another thorny travelogue. In a theatrical performance, Hamouda Jarrarrecounts the story of his famous grandfather, El Hedi Ben Salem, who was born in the region of Gafsa and worked with German filmmaker Rainer W. Fassbinder. Finally, Muntasser, a young man living near L’Economat is present in Kassel, as sort of ambassador, peddling hydrating stories from the desert. Stories—and ways of telling these stories—form the raw material of the bridge between Redeyef and Kassel, built by Yagoutha and her curatorial team. Bypassing the tenacious global frontiers, Siwa challenges inhabitants of Redeyef to host the hospitable space created at documenta fifteen.