The quiet documenta

Tomorrow is the day. After five years, documenta 15 will become part of the world art exhibition series. Visitors will probably not know the details until tomorrow at the earliest. What can be expected, however, is that it will be different from the usual. The leading collective, ruangrupa, has given documenta 15 the motto lumbung - a communally used rice barn. The surplus harvest stored inside will benefit the community.  

It will be a documenta that eschews highbrow, pure aesthetics and hard-to-digest theoretical underpinnings. Instead, ruangrupa adorns Kassel with organic art in which life finds itself. Visitors become users: An intact composting toilet near the Orangerie, accessed by a spiral staircase, is not pure art. Those who want to may actually dare to use it. The compost heap in the Karlsaue also ties in with this ecologically productive idea. It already functioned as an art object in 2012 and has now been reactivated.

It continues in the same way. There is a Vietnamese sauna, concerts, workshops and communal cooking. Even though some of the works are critical of society and the economy, shedding light on beekeeping and dairy farming and offering suggestions for the collectivization of fields and forests, a communal living room with sofas, homemade shelves and a play area for children is being created in the Fridericianum, the documenta center. Without performance pressure and with a lot of lumbung.

According to Zeit editor Hanno Rauterberg, documenta, which he describes as »wildly experimental, »should be understood »as an attempt to build an Ekosistem, as they call it, according to its own rules, a form of circular economy, just and as independent of the state as possible.«

There are 32 exhibition venues at documenta 15, according to the manual - in unusual places like underpasses and a bridge. Speculation about the artists involved varies between 1,500 and 1,700, perhaps due to the myriad collectives the ruangrupa selected to mirror itself. In any case, the highest number of participants so far was in 1977, when there were just over 600. The art event expects about one million visitors. That's close to the 900,000 or so who attended the last two documenta editions.

The day ticket costs 27 euros for adults. Rauterberg emphasizes the »taint« born of the gap between price and lumbung concept: »Where ethics and aesthetics, life and art fall into one, existence itself all too easily becomes a voyeuristically gazed-at object.« There is a fear that rich people might marvel at and applaud the »suffering-ready sincerity,« and that the ruangrupa might be understood as the »authentic voices of war-torn regions.«

The ruangrupa itself, however, already sees its mission as accomplished: Lumbung had already experienced them during the preparation, they had shared experience, money and contacts in advance.