Fabric @ documenta 14 South Issue #9

Adam Szymczyk, director of documenta 14, refers to Hybrid Space Lab’s documentary Fabric in the documenta 14 magazine South.

Publication South issue #9, Katerina Koskina, Adam Szymczyk, Domenick Ammirati @ documenta 14, Kassel/Athens, 17 September 2017

Documenta

Documenta is an exhibition of contemporary art which takes place every five years in Kassel, Germany.
Documenta was founded by artist, teacher and curator Arnold Bode in 1955 as part of the Bundesgartenschau (Federal Horticultural Show) which took place in Kassel at that time. It was an attempt to bring Germany up to speed with modern art, both banishing and repressing the cultural darkness of Nazism. This first Documenta featured many artists who are generally considered to have had a significant influence on modern art (such as Picasso and Kandinsky). The more recent editions of the event feature artists based across the world, but much of the art is site-specific.
Every Documenta is limited to 100 days of exhibition, which is why it is often referred to as the “museum of 100 days”. Documenta is not a selling exhibition.

Fabric

Katerina Koskina and Adam Szymczyk in conversation with Domenick Ammirati

“One can trace fascinating routes in terms of the economic interest that impels travel—and documenta, though much smaller than many other types of economic players, is now one of these interests. For centuries, especially in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, Asia Minor and the whole basin of the Mediterranean was a place of frenetic traveling by families and businesses that were established in places like Constantinople, Alexandria, Odessa, and so forth.
This history can be, of course, romanticized, via ideas of curiosity and discovery. For example, the Sikiarides family, the great Mediterranean traders of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, organized a new business of selling second-hand hats from Manchester to Istanbul after Kemal Atatürk came to power and decided to ban the fez. Coincidentally or not, the site and buildings of their Athenian textile factory became the government’s property when Sikiaridis went out of business and were given to the Athens School of Fine Arts in 1992. Seemingly paradoxical, the history of trade and industry allows us to understand the current predicament quite precisely.”
Adam Szymczyk, documenta 14