(100 volumes in three formats from 16 to 48 pages, €4/6/8)
Would 100 notes and thoughts be enough to account for the complexity put into play by Carolyn Christov Bakargiev in the rhizomatic conception of dOCUMENTA (13)? The series of notebooks, which work as a prelude to the exhibition that will be held in June of this year, actually allows gradual access – customizable and intense – to various types of texts (collections of notes, essays, conversations, drawings) that reflect the interests and fields of the various authors involved in the project: artists, anthropologists, scientists, philosophers, economists, poets, activists... Publication of the notebooks started April 2011. Edited by Bettina Funcke at the invitation of the artistic director and Chuz Martinez, agent and member of the dOCUMENTA(13) working group, they "explore how thinking emerges and lies at the heart of reimagining the world… in a continuous articulation of the emphasis on the propositional".[1]
A look at the 55 titles published to date reveals a 360° proactive approach. There are commissioned texts, interviews and projects by artists and authors involved in the complex conceptual process of a dOCUMENTA – which, on paper, is expected to be transnational and transdisciplinary – but one also finds reprints, among which the famous Note G by Ada Lovelace, daughter of Lord Byron and mathematics scholar who developed an algorithm that was considered to be the first computer program in history (No. 055); a selection of notes on the Parisian arcades (No. 045) handwritten by Walter Benjamin; notes by Salvador Dali about immortality and the discovery of DNA (No. 039); and a draft entitled Sociology of Art by Györgi Lukáks (No. 005).
Even in their form, the notebooks express the polyphony underlying the publishing project. In fact, the publications have three different formats and variable numbers of signatures. They were presented in various cities around the world during lectures involving the authors of some of the volumes. And it was precisely during the recent 10 January presentation in Mumbai that the nature of the series was defined. "The function of notes, and of a collection of notes, is to experience the condition of being free as a tangible reality since They embody the sense of archein [to lead or to begin], setting in motion the intercourse between senses and ideas, self and others. Released into the world with a note is the unexpected, the unanticipated, the unpredictable. Notes are located at the other end of the odds of certainty, without evident causal antecedents, teleology outside, but also outside any immanent or objective process.The notes are an irruption of novelty."
What emerges from reading the numerous and varied notes are many visions and possibilities for re-imagining the world from a perspective that draws on irony and desire (Bifo-Franco Berardi, Ironic Ethics, No. 027), or on the reactivation of the repressed in the bodies of the oppressed, not due to opposition or resentment but to the presence and strength of inventive imagination (Suely Rolnik, Archive Mania, No. 022). This ability emerges forcefully in some artists' notebooks, like Mariana Castillo Deball's (No. 024) conceived in collaboration with anthropologist Roy Wagner, which depicts – in drawings and words – a dialogue between a man and a coyote on the very essence of vision, representation and language. Or in Mario Garcia Torres' "autobiographical" notebook that retraces places and experiences of hospitality conceived in the past by artists (Boetti, Buren, Ruppersberg, among others) as a metaphor for the relationship between artist and curator, between artist and viewer, and that works as an ideal invitation to the next dOCUMENTA. "If it is clear that all this is more questions than answers, at least I can hope, in the most honest way, that this text is a summons for what is to come, to call, to check in, to dwell, and an invitation to feel at home in someone else's thought and to stop and spend time in what others have to share". [2] Anna Daneri
1. Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, Letter to a Friend, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen -100 Gedanken No. 003 (p.12)
2. Mario Garcia Torres, A Few Questions Regarding the Hesitance at Choosing between Bringing a Bottle of Wine or a Bouquet of Flowers, 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts / 100 Notizen -100 Gedanken No. 026 (p.15)