Coda: Kassel 150 Kilometres Away

By WAC | 4 OCT 2022

The former Linden brewery hosts the ZFIL - Centre for International Light Art in the German city of Unna. Since 2001, it exhibes a collection focused on the binomial art and light, buried in the cavities of two thousand six hundred square metres and the works that form the backbone of it are designed for each of the nooks and crannies that the physiognomy of the factory provides.

As with Fridskul, several questions arise: What gives life to the collection of installations by thirteen of the world's most renowned "light artists"? What does this collection promise us? Does it communicate the affections, emotions or contradictions that come from being a participant in one's surroundings? If art offers —as we believe— an experience that serves to make the severity of individuation bearable, then Mario Merz, Joseph Kosuth, Mischa Kuball, Rebecca Horn, Christina Kubisch, Keith Sonnier, Jan van Munster, François Morellet, Christian Boltanski, Brigitte Kowanz, Olafur Eliasson and James Turrell contribute to reaffirm our belief.

One hundred and fifty kilometres from Unna, documenta fifteen inaugurates with fanfare a new era —advocated by the institution that organises this quinquennial event- and heals —according to the wishes of ruangrupa, artistic direction of the 2022 edition— the wounds of the present that we share, some of these provoked by late capitalism, by episodes of colonialism and by the patriarchal bias present in too many mechanisms, processes and structures.

The question is whether collaborative rationality is capable of generating not only a critical mass, but an artistic substrat of such magnitude that both oneself and any aggregate of individuals could do without even the light. We will pay attention at least for the next five years.

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