Richard Finlay Fletcher: Okay, so welcome to minus plato? I just thought you could briefly introduce yourself and then tell us a little bit about your relationship with documenta 14.
Fil Ieropoulos: My name is Fil Ieropoulos. I live and work in Athens. I am an artist and filmmaker and researcher as well. My relationship with Documenta was primarily by being at the other side of it, in the sense of being one of the people that formed all the way through a fairly firm critique. Sometimes a little bit hysterical, sometimes firm and I guess more political critique of the Documenta project as part of primarily a project called Documena, which is a fake ancient Greek remaking of the word Documenta, which opened up a number of discussions in terms of some of the topics that Documenta was bringing to the fore. At the same time, my background has to do with queer art and queer communities. Again, Documenta had some thematics of that ilk and this is something that, again, I was discussing with people back then. Some of those things also happened in another formation I was part of called Waiting for the Barbarians, which was a pre-Athens Biennale group, sort of collective, that was formed to prepare for the next Biennale in Athens. Of course, this idea of the barbarian and who and so on was something that was discussed in this pre-Biennale event. I guess I was part of a number of projects. Some of them were more institutional, some of them were more underground and mostly they involved a sort of critique of Documenta, I would say.
RFF: Great. Thank you. Well, welcome, Fil. As I mentioned before, this reborn minus plato project really is a kind of offering this platform as a space to have conversation about the exhibition from this temporal distance as a way to look forward to the 10-year anniversary of it in 2027. My main aim is to just have my guests tell stories, share experiences about it, but also thinking about the time in which we’re speaking now as well. I think one reason it’s great to talk to you now is that you told me that you’d been at the Athens screening of the film by Dimitris Athiridis, Exergue on documenta 14.I was just wondering if we could start there with your experience of that film or part of that film and how that brought you back to your experience of documenta 14 and then anything that you want to start with about sharing that experience of the exhibition.
FI: I mean, obviously, it’s a very ambitious project. Its 14 hours and it’s very difficult to have a 100% complete opinion about that whole project.However, being at the recent screening in Athens, I had the feeling both the context and sort of the film wants to somehow make documenta 14 be this kind of martyr that really tried to enlighten us with its anti-neoliberal critique and really tried to enlighten us, the southerners, I guess, whatever is us, or the audiences of the film, with how difficult it is nowadays to try and create a different political framework within big institutions. And I think, in a sense, it kind of succeeds to do that. I think that the film very clearly shows some of the problems that the Documenta people had, both from the Greek institutional side, but even more so from the German institutional side, this continuous critique of we’re spending so much money and why are we throwing money to Greece? And, in my opinion, the context of the time was this whole idea that the South is bleeding money from Europe.
And there was a lot of that. And because this was the context for me, I wasn’t immediately negative to the idea of Documenta coming to Athens. I thought it’s a good idea to look into these northern-southern European relationships. What do they mean? What is the meaning of Europe? What is the meaning of a form of European neoliberalism? And so on. But I felt all the way through, and I still feel that in the film, that there is a sense that this was a project of some leftists who really wanted to do their best and they weren’t really allowed so much, but look at them, how they struggle. And yes, I do agree with most of the politics of documenta 14, but at the same time, I find it a little bit difficult in a city where people struggle to make films and there’s almost no budget to make nothing. Queer arts are in a very difficult place. Airbnbs are taking the space of everybody, especially since Documenta came to Athens. I find it really difficult to be watching something that really makes such an underground hero of this multi-million exhibition. It’s a difficult one. I think one of the reasons Documenta was housed in Exarcheia, which is the anarcho-Bohemian area of Athens, was so that they can get this kind of vibe. But it’s almost like they forgot halfway through, and I think the film kind of also forgets that purposefully, that they’re not some kind of random anarchist kids from the street.They’re not some kind of queers from the local squat. We’re talking about a big institution. And so, yes, I’m not saying that big institutions cannot be radical, but I think there needs to be more self-critique.
And I didn’t think it was there, and I didn’t think it was in the film either. I know a lot of different projects, apart from the ones that I’ve been connected with. I know a lot of different critical local projects that were happening, and they didn’t find themselves in the film, or at least they weren’t invited to talk or anything like this. So, 14 hours and there are no local art groups forming a critique. To me, that’s a real problem.
RFF: Yeah, I definitely hear what you’re saying. I mean, could you take us back a bit to that time in Exarcheia? So you mentioned you were part of Waiting for the Barbarians and the project looking Forward to the next Athens Biennale, and your offices, you kind of shared offices with documenta 14, too.
FI: It was a funny one, because we were on two floors. And the initial discussions with Athens Biennale were done with the director of Athens Biennale, Poka Yio, and my understanding was, and still is, that the Athens Biennale was going to be part of documenta 14. And then somewhere along the line, this just didn’t happen. And so it was a very strange feeling of being left behind. The Athens Biennale sort of collapsed for a bit. And then at some point, some of us gathered and we said, okay, let’s make an Athens Biennale that talks about what it is like to be this kind of, I don’t know, this kind of local institution or local players that are looking at someone coming from outside to talk about Athens. You know, because the whole ‘Learning from Athens’ thing, we didn’t really feel that this was really happening. There were Greek artists involved, but in terms of research, in terms of, you know, going around and like talking to people and so on, not a whole lot of that happened. And I think it purposefully didn’t happen, because I think some of the earliest discussions, I was involved in discussions with documenta. I actually spoke to Pierre Bal-Blanc one day for six hours. They invited us at the Polytechnion and I had a very long discussion and I proposed all my critiques and even ways in which we could still collaborate despite the fact that we disagreed with a lot of their program. But that never happened. But I mean, that collaboration is not so important anyway, but the critique was not really heard. And I think the critique was not heard because Documenta came to Athens and to Greece in general with a predetermined notion of what Athens is. For Documenta, for Germany, for Europe, there was a very clear decision that Athens was going to be this kind of, I don’t know, radical imaginary, almost like, you know, the savages, kind of the art savages kind of place. And that’s when I started thinking, there’s something colonial about the way they approach it.
And they have kind of covered it in a full circle. The ‘we are here to learn from Athens’ spin, but which didn’t really actually happen. So that’s when we thought, OK, since this is happening, maybe the Biennale could be this place where we are like, I don’t know, almost like keeping tabs with what was going on. Then there was another project called Learning from Documenta, which is a more academic project that kind of ended up being the one that kept a diary, essentially, of everything, an academic diary of everything that was going on. But we thought maybe we can have the creative response to this. But it was all in totally in good spirit, obviously, in the idea, you know, we were, as you said, we were sharing offices and we thought, OK, surely if Documenta wants to have a political, you know, a political one, and usually Documenta is a political one, wants to have a political showcase in Athens. What is best, better than us providing a kind of political kind of counterpoint, basically. So, yeah, this is what happened there. Eventually, the Biennale took a much longer time to develop and turned into something else. By that time, Documenta had left. And so, you know, it became something else. But for a while, it was, this was the discussion that was going on in Athens.
RFF: This is admittedly a generous reading, but I sometimes get the impression that one of the aims of especially the ‘Learning from Athens’ working title was to actually put in place some of these kinds of frictions, offering a caricature of Athens that was manifested in Germany. And also, I don’t know if I mentioned, but I used to be a classicist, so I used to have this kind of conception of what ancient Greece is, that is very much framed by British and German frameworks. And so part of the generous reading was always that there was this kind of projection that was on purpose, like letting that play out, letting that projection play out. And so that means that what you and your collaborators were doing is actually invited on a conceptual level. But one question might be, even if you’re invited on a conceptual level to have this artistic critique of the, as you describe it in your writings, the queer Indigenous Greek subject, that even if it’s offered there conceptually, what I’m hearing from you is that it wasn’t really engaged with in a concrete sense.
FI: No, and I mean, you know, I come from this background, so I have this sort of knowledge of the critique in terms of the queer subject that you mentioned had to do with a parallel program that was devised by Paul Preciado. And as a queer theorist, we were hoping that he would really engage with a lot of the things that were happening at the time in Athens, the queer scene and how he was struggling with local institutions and so on. And of course, what was very complex for them, and I’ll come back to your point about the German critique of German newspapers and so on, and, you know, the image of Greece from abroad and so on. But in terms of the queer stuff, what I think they really didn’t like, and they steered kind of away from that very clearly, was that as queer subjects, we weren’t going to offer a patriotic narrative. I think what they wanted was they wanted the Greeks to be this kind of land of unity and vision and non-neoliberalism and freedom and blah, blah, blah, blah. But this was, of course, not our experience. We live in a country that is very homophobic and it’s very racist and it’s very sexist. And we have our own very complex critique and relationship with the place where we live. So the vision of queerness that we wanted to offer, which was complex, as I think it should be, as I think all queer approaches usually are complex around the world, did not really fit with how they wanted to play the card of North versus South, with Germany being the bad guys and Greece being the good guys. We were like, well, yes, but it’s actually much more complicated than that because, first of all, we’re not the Global South. We’re a part of the European Union. The way Greek society has been formed has also been affected by the way Europe works as a concept. We cannot pretend to be Mexico or something like this. It’s actually a much more difficult place. And at the same time, there is exactly what you said about the classical understanding of Greece and how even Greece as a nation, it’s a fairly new concept. I mean, people always think ancient Greece and so on, but actually, you know, Greece was created in 1821 and this was through the imaginary of various Northern Europeans. They almost projected this place that would separate West from the East and they put it in that particular point of the map. And so, and of course, the Olympics and all that very much, again, plays with this imaginary of what Athens is. So, for us, being used to feel very oppressed by a lot of those kind of, you know, fetishistic antiquity narratives, it is very difficult to think about horses galloping through Europe from Greece or a Parthenon of books. All this, for us, would be very paganistic and nothing to do with contemporary freedom in any way. So, we had this fairly complex narrative and that complex narrative did not work. And why it didn’t work? Because to go back to your previous point, the main thing that Documenta wanted to do was to say, the German newspapers are vile, they are horrible, they are building a picture of Greece, which is like these people who are bleeding money. And they are essentially, it’s almost like it’s an interesting thing, because it’s almost like they predicted this kind of far right-wing turn that is happening in Germany now. And that was one of the reasons why it was difficult to criticize Documenta, because they were like, wait, but we’re the good guys.
We are the ones that want to work against what neoliberalism does to your country, they would say, for example. Yeah, but do you do that at all costs? Do you do that and just do not really ask the locals anything? Because I think this is what essentially happened. And I think they were probably successful in criticizing German society about their understanding of Greece. And I think it was useful to do that at that point for German society. But in terms of ‘Learning from Athens’, I’m not sure about that, maybe reframing Athens, re-understanding our research of Athens, maybe, or re-using Athens as our own radical weapon, maybe, all that stuff I can see. But actually looking at the complexities of contemporary Greece, no, I wouldn’t say they did any of that.
RFF: It’s really interesting to me that you mentioned two artworks what you just said: Marta Minujín’s The Parthenon of Books and also Ross Birrell’s The Athens–Kassel Ride: The Transit of Hermes. In my work, one thing I’ve done is, after the experience of the exhibition, both in Athens and in Kassel, I quit Classics and moved to the Art Education department and I used documenta 14 as a kind of foundation for my transition. And what this meant was that I kept studying it, right? I just kept studying it after the fact.So, while I had these experiences of certain artworks there, I also kept learning about it and communicating with the artists who were part of it. And I think I became very, what’s the word, not protective, but kind of, you know, I felt like the artists in a lot of the reviews of the exhibition, a lot of the artists were thrown under the bus a little bit for the conceptual project or for the critique. So, for example, Ross Birrell, who’s now a friend of mine (I’m half Scottish, and I go back to Scotland a lot), and now I know that the concept around that ride had a lot to do with a story back in South America in the 1930s, of Aimé Félix Tschiffely who did a ride through the continent, actually, across through South into North America and there’s this connection with the Scottish writer R. B. Cunninghame Graham. And so there were personal and political reasons for him doing that, because actually it was taking place during the mid-1930s, amid the rise of fascism and what it meant to be doing this ride at that time? And then Marta Minujín, also, again, a work that was in, you know, Argentina under the dictatorship.And so you have these nuances so that the more you learn from the artist’s perspective, some of these things make more sense. But as a Greek person, an artist on the ground, when you’re watching the horses leave, how are you meant to know the background to both works.
FI: But that’s the problem with the whole mixing up of the South of Europe and the South, you know, and the global South. And this is a real, real problem that you just cannot do. You cannot just transfer one place to the other, because South as a state of concept is something that just somehow clicks, you know, as a sound or something like this. It’s not, South is not a state of mind. It’s not a concept. You know, there are different things that are South for their importance of what they are. And I understand that most of the works that were chosen in documenta 14 do have political backgrounds. And I know that a lot of these artists have had, you know, political lives and decisions and were important for another context and so on. However, taking the horses and placing them at the beginning of a big German institution, the biggest German institution in the world, the biggest art institution in the world, the biggest German art institution, and placing them onto beginning from Athens, also giving them looks that were fairly pagan, I would say. I mean, I don’t want to like, just like focus on one artwork, but just like looking at that whole thing and how it was, it was done as a starting point and all that just, it screams kind of Leni Riefenstahl style fetishization and, you know, Greece is this imaginary place of birth of democracy and this and it’s just very difficult to see that. And also, you know, not just as a Greek artist or as a local, but, you know, as just someone who is firmly grounded on reality here, you have this comment about movement of Europe. And at the same time, you know, we live in a country where people, where migrants drown every day. The same thing happened again so many years later and it was already happening then. So many years later, we have the same thing again and again and again. And I’m thinking, really, is that like the best we can do in terms of what is happening to Europe now? I’m not too sure about that, but I don’t know. I mean, I wouldn’t want to go into specific artworks because I think, I can’t imagine how difficult it is for an artist to decide what they’re going to show in a context like this. A very epic kind of context, a very difficult context for something to not look like artwork, but some sort of like spectacle out of a prog rock band kind of thing. It’s very difficult to maintain the smallness and the beauty of works that have been important when you contextualize them like this.
So, a lot of the problems maybe had to do with how artworks were presented, with how works were placed and what kind of context they were given. For me, there was continuously this strange very vague relationship with the concept of North and South. I think this was always very abstract and not really well thought out. I think the queerness thing really was just like used as a kind of toothbrush sort of thing, without really that much context and definitely a fetishization of ideas of Greece. So, for example, there was this article that I remember, I think it was by Paul Preciado about how we’re not interested in the word freedom because it has been tainted by free market and stuff like that. And then they said, OK, we’re going to use the word ‘Eleftheria’, which is the Greek word for freedom.
But then that’s the word that we use for the free market. And it’s a word that has been abused in lots of different ways, like the English one, like a lot of the alt-right is talking about freedom now and so on. So of course, the same complexities go to Greece, to the Greek language. You cannot just project a problem with the English language on another language and just pretend that everything is sorted. That looks a little bit like how the Westerners discover the ‘Oriental worlds’ and they pick up a word or a phrase that suits them and takes it completely out of context. Of course, it’s not as problematic because it’s a European country, but still there was this very abstract fetishization and almost like a get out of jail card. Greece was used a little bit like that, like we didn’t do our research really, but it’s OK, we’ll use the Greek word and it’s going to be OK. Or we will use a reference to Rebetika and it’s going to be OK. It was always like this kind of use of local knowledge.
And what I think is a real pity is I think a lot of the things had to do with bad communication. So, I think there would be a completely different, I think, if Ross Birrell had the opportunity, for example, to have a real good discussion with Eva Stefani, who’s a Greek artist who was in documenta 14. She isn’t even an underground artist, she was in Documenta and she could explain a little bit to him about the Acropolis and when horses landed to the Acropolis and when the Nazis kind of were taking photos with the Acropolis and so on. Like how this, the concept of horses through Athens is a bit… it’s a bit icky, it’s a bit politically iffy, it’s a lot of different things. I think maybe a different kind of work might have emerged or maybe something that is more critical, something that actually takes into consideration what is there. I think this is in a way for me the problem. That was the problem with Documenta, that it didn’t really create connections. I think this is for me the biggest failure. Not necessarily that I find the program appalling or something like this. I have a lot of differences and objections, but I didn’t think it was an appalling program. I just didn’t think it communicated with Greece in a meaningful way. And I didn’t think that it created a framework, the framework that it claims to have created for discussions to happen.
RFF: Yeah, that’s really important. And I think, you know, again, it’s another parallel move, where it’s like they go just so far as to make the point, but not far enough, you know, like with the Eleutheria sentiment. I’m really interested in how mediation happens, especially in exhibitions, like, how certain people are kept away from other people and all of that. And documenta 14 makes these very important claims about it belonging to nobody. It’s open and while there’s this tension between the commons and the public, there’s also this sense of the artists interacting and engaged with each other, right. And there are some beautiful moments when that did happen. And I have seen them in really intimate moments in the exhibition. But what you’re describing is also that that could have happened at the level of this ‘Learning from Athens’ question in terms of the Greek artists. Now it wasn’t about it being an exhibition of Greek artists, however, the networks that those Greek artists had, and the knowledges that those Greek artists had, and this comes back to this question of Indigeneity, which, you know, on one level, you know, there’s a big issue with European Indigeneity. We can talk about the Sámi, we can talk about Gaelic culture, for example in Scotland, we can talk about the Basques. And on one level, we can talk about Greeks, we can, I mean, there’s a way of talking about it. But at the same time, that subject…
FI: Although contemporary Greeks are mostly Ottoman, but okay.
RFF: Sure. These are complex issues around European indigeneity. But I think what would have got very quickly into that question is immediately ask, who is Greek? You know, like, what does that mean? Who makes these claims on behalf of Greece as Indigenous? And that’s why your artistic project was so important, because it was like, okay, you want us to be this role, we’ll play this role. And we’ll project it back to you.
FI: And you don’t necessarily like it. And actually, I’ll tell you about this. We created some artworks as part of the Docoumena, which were sort of flirting with a very totalitarian kind of understanding of Greek traditional paganism, and so on. And often we staged them near something else that was happening in documenta 14,.When many of them were online stuff, but some that were in person, they were staged near other Documenta things. And journalists were there. And frequently, they came and spoke to us, and they wanted to get an affirmation from us that what we’re doing is definitely critical. Otherwise, they wouldn’t write about it. They couldn’t risk that we are just some crazy people who actually believe in the superiority of Greece or something like this. And I understand that, you know, going back to Copenhagen or whatever, to a leftist magazine and saying, I’ve got these guys and they’re doing overidentification of something that they see as poisonous, just to throw it back to Documenta. Can I support this? I see that we were doing some dangerous work that they couldn’t show. But also there were occasions where we weren’t necessarily so edgy.
And still, people came back to us and said, your take is too critical. Like our editor didn’t like it. And I think this is, you know, it seemed almost like the art world has bigger fish to fry than to listen to some local queers complain about Documenta sort of thing. It was a bit like that. But then, of course, that takes us back to the question, then why have it in Athens? Then why have it in Athens? Why don’t you just do it in Kassel? And in my opinion, a lot of the things that were left purposefully unanswered in Greece came out in the next one. I think the next one is a great example of discussions that weren’t had, that didn’t happen, you know.
RFF: Can you go into detail? Because I’m really interested in that. There are failures. How do you understand those failures?
FI: Well, I mean, when Documenta came here, we sat down with some friends of mine and colleagues and so on. And we started thinking long before we formed the critique and everything, we started thinking what could be topics that could come up. And for us, the topic of antisemitism versus Islamophobia in contemporary Europe was like, surely this has to be the topic, if not, let’s say, one of the five topics, something like this. To us from Greece, the idea the Germans are coming to Greece, which has this strategic position in a time where the whole Middle Eastern thing was not where it is now, but it was like not going too well. There were wars and so on, refugee influx and stuff. And knowing from the inside that Greece is still a very antisemitic country. I come from the north of Greece and Thessaloniki had one of the biggest Jewish populations in the late 19th century, and it was completely wiped out. And that’s a story that was only told fairly recently. I didn’t even learn about that at school. And I come from like 50, you know, 40 miles away from Thessaloniki, where all this was happening. So we knew that the relationship between Greece and Germany is really a hotbed for very intense political discussions. And then we started seeing that there was this kind of sort of like ostrich behavior of like, no, no, no, that’s too hot. We’re not going to touch it. For example, we’re telling them about the Greek far right and the relationship to the German far right and stuff like that. No, no, no, no, no, too hot. We don’t want to touch this. So there were a lot of these things that we were thinking, this is supposed to be like this political discourse kind of art place, but they’re not really touching a lot of the things that are the hottest things. So when they said, oh, we’re going to do, you know, when they came out and said what the next Documenta is going to be, I immediately thought this is not going to go well. I immediately thought that the stuff that the groups will bring will be, I don’t know, too difficult for Documenta to handle because they just don’t want to have the discussions. And maybe this just shows the limit of such a big institution. When you make an exhibition that costs five million euro or however much it costs in the end, it means that you get a lot of money out of big German institutions. You cannot expect, at least not anymore, maybe in the sixties it might have been possible in the golden age of the social avant-garde, but nowadays it doesn’t seem to be the case anymore that you can just do something very political, open up these big topics. So I think they tried after Athens, they tried to go even more ambitious with their post-colonial project. And of course, but in my opinion, they hadn’t really properly dealt with their colonial approach towards Athens and that kind of bit them back in the next exhibition, I think. It’s a very difficult one. It’s like, you know, how do you control something that is so big? Maybe it’s too big. Maybe it has become too big of something to be managed. I don’t know.
RFF: I think a lot of the, and this is about a colonial approach too, which is a lot about the rhythm of Documenta is about forgetting. It has to forget. It can’t build on problems and issues or even success, the things that went well in one edition. I mean, you can look back and see trends and see like relations, but there’s no continuity. There was an artwork, like a poster of a burnt out car saying: documenta 15, yearning for Athens. And for someone like me, who has made this commitment to the good, bad and the ugly of this exhibition, because I felt it was, it kind of justified it, because of the scale, because of how many people involved the issues that were being raised all in their complexity. This is a better foundation than the British-German model of the ancient Mediterranean cultures for sure that I’d trained in. So, and then it’s like, okay, you’re just going to forget Athens, you’re just going to forget it. Like, and even if it’s just, you know, how would ruangrupa, how would the Indonesian collective like, have registered like, okay, maybe we should have a Greek collective come and do their work here and now in a different way.
FI: Which does not even sound like something so difficult to think about, surely. It’s just like the minimum amount of continuity you can give to something that claims to, you know, to really hold something about the continuity of fine art discourse or something like this, because it does have this pompous idea of itself. And in a way, it has been historical. It still is historical. I don’t think that that Documenta coming to Athens is unimportant. I don’t think it’s trivial for Athens even, despite the fact that I disagree and despite the fact that I don’t like the way that its history is being told now. But still, I think it is interesting that they did it. And I think it’s important to not completely lose the option to have some proper money going to the arts, because we’re going into a very dark era. I know that in this dark era Documenta is not my enemy, for sure, we’re going into something much, much more, much worse than what we know. And like the whole arts are important for society and government should subsidize it and so on seems to be finishing. In Germany, something major is happening at the moment where all the arts funding is being cut. So, in a way, you know, one can say that Documenta, I don’t know, maybe caused a little bit of that, which I’m not saying is a bad thing. I’m not saying that it shouldn’t be edgy, because then Germany will cut the funding. But on the contrary, I just mean that Documenta is political and is important. And that’s why, in my opinion, I was more so disappointed and hurt by documenta 14, rather than actually think that it’s not an important place or an important moment, something like this. And a lot of the things that I think could have been discussed would have made a much better exhibition. I remember there was this one event in which Paul Preciado was presenting one Greek artist, a sort of like post-Rebetika artist from the 50s and 60s called Sotiria Bellou. And she has a very deep voice and presented her as a proto-queer kind of icon. But a friend of mine had written like two articles in the musicology department about her being a proto-queer icon. And when I told Documenta about this, they didn’t invite him to present it because it seemed like this was an idea that Paul Preciado wanted to champion. So, but imagine how much more complex it would have been, because this friend of mine also had connection with a little institute that was working on, that was doing work with her in New York. And like immediately, these kinds of connections could have made a much more complex case and could have built research projects that would last for years. Like the ideas that documenta came with were flawed, but were also very interesting in terms of opening up research projects. And I think the fact that very few stayed and very few research projects happened of it shows that it wasn’t really about ‘Learning from Athens’, it was about telling the Germans off or something like this, which I think they did successfully.
RFF: I think so. I mean, I do, I do find, you know, that example that you just gave is informative to me, because I think that Preciado was going to have like a whole like society of her, like named after her as well. And that didn’t kind of like pan out.
FI: Discussions already exist here. I mean, local people are not totally blind, you know. Her name, Sotiria, which is her name, they, some of her friends were calling her Sotirakis, which is like the name that you would call like a little guy called Sotiris. It’s called, you know, like her friends were calling her with like he, him pronouns. And so, so it’s kind of known that this is a proto-queer character and, and it’s been discussed even on, not much, but it’s been discussed on academic circles also.
RFF: But I think that this is what’s important in the kind of aftermath, or in the moving forward of this. And this is why I want to be doing this, my somewhat perverse or obsessive, keeping returning to this. One way is it is for these paths to find these paths to the scholars, to the people that are already engaged in work that for, you know, for whatever reason, Preciado or other members of documenta 14, or art is part of it, or educate is part of it, didn’t follow those paths. But they’ve been opened up in a way that a more responsible, grounded, engaged type of research and engage, it can happen because, and I’m not saying because of documenta 14, but because these stories need to be the basis for anything that would be described as education, not the skimming of the top of it, right? It needs to be the deep dives into it. So I think that’s really vital. And so yeah, there are missed opportunities by the exhibition. But there’s also this, you know, lifelong learning, that kind of idea that it doesn’t stop. I mean, it needs to keep going. And therefore, part of my commitment to this exhibition is a commitment to a process of learning that, that Documenta by leaving a certain comfort zone, enabled to happen. And that is why I identify with it, right, I left a field that, you know, and I was engaged with contemporary art. So I was in this like classics and contemporary art, you know, I’m talking about, you know, I collaborated with an artist, Paul Chan on the Deste Foundations, you know, I was doing all that, that stuff, right. And there was an exhibition of Liquid Antiquity, you know, all these kinds of things. And these were two, really privileged spaces, contemporary art and classics. And suddenly, it was just like documenta 14 for me was like, I got to drop one of these. Yeah, also, like, on some level, now I’m in a process of dropping both. But it’s dropping both because of conversations like this, whereby you’re kind of reminded of how instrumentalized people’s, like, you know, really engaged and embedded and grounded practices are done when, you know, when certain pressures are forced upon them, and they make choices.
FI: This idea of missed opportunities is not, it’s not just, Oh, what a pity that it actually, it actually can be quite politically worrying. What I mean by that is, for me, this Documenta was a space where we could have had an interesting discussion about this triangle of art and antiquity and national identity, with a flirtation to queerness throughout, could be so fruitful. And what happened, for example, with the Paris Olympics, is actually exactly a sort thing we should have been prepared for how these sort of people are saying where there is this discourse about higher art and how it shouldn’t be dirtied by, you know, queerness. And we’re really going into a very, very, very scary territory at the moment. I don’t know how fast we’re going there, but it’s really happening kind of everywhere. And it’s even happening in, I don’t know, in arty France. And, you know, one thinks, surely there, I don’t know, you know, I mean, aesthetics, they usually like to be groundbreaking in this. And now, OK, there can be also quite conservative in many ways. But what I mean is, you know, I think a lot of the things that the documenta 14 sort of raised but didn’t actually discuss are things that are going to bite us back and are already doing so. And that’s what I mean, that I feel that the missed opportunity of what is European identity, of the discussion of what is European identity and how art has played an important role in that, it’s a real, real pity. In Italy at the moment, my friends are telling me that there is a big futurist exhibition presented. And for the first time, it’s a big scandal there because for the first time, the exhibition sort of says that they joined fascism and good for them. Like it’s a sort of, you know, it’s the first kind of that, you know, it’s not anymore the dirty laundry of the futurists that they became, you know, Mussolini’s buddies. But actually, it says, “and they made this political decision, which was an interesting decision,” kind of thing. So a lot of revisionist and strange kind of times we’re living in, I think, in terms of art’s importance in keeping a kind of, I don’t know, a morality of old aesthetics or something like that. So all these works, whether it is Ross Birrell’s work or The Parthenon of Books are actually absolutely in the ballpark of the discussion. But the discussions were not actually happening because maybe they were just too, I don’t know, too hot. For me, for me, doing a Documenta in Athens and engaging so little with the refugee crisis or with the rise of the far right in Greece is kind of a failure, to be honest, because these were, these are massive things for local history and not just for local history. Because I think, and you know that as a former classicist, Greece/Athens is useful for defining the border with “the Other”, and is very much instrumentalized for throughout centuries for purposes that have to do with, whatever is necessary, you know, aesthetics or racism or the East-West divide or this and that. So it’s a pity. And I think Germany is what was always very, you know, like the modern Greek nation had a German king. I mean, you know, it’s a German construction, you know, and Leni Riefenstahl with her, you know, adoration of the Greek beauty and this and that. So a lot of missed opportunities for things that I think could have opened up research projects that might still have been valid today and not just valid artistically, but actually give us tools to understand what is happening, for example, at the moment with the aesthetics of the alt-right, because we seem to have completely forgotten about propaganda and we seem to have forgotten that Europe is like the place of propaganda and that, you know, there are all these histories of propaganda happening here that are very dangerous and that are not really that far away. We live in this kind of post-60s bubble of thinking that we’re still in this kind of, you know, open society, but I’m not too sure that this is true any longer. And that’s why I think Germany coming to Greece to discuss neoliberalism, but also identity in a deeper sense, that was the missed opportunity. They really focused on the money and the whole narrative of how the South is bleeding money from the North, which I understand is an important thing to focus on, but really missed the opportunity to look deep into what I see as the European crisis. You know, what is this idea of the European crisis of identity that, you know, a lot of these white lobbyists are talking about? This is something that we have to, like, we cannot actually just, like, let it pass. We have to look into that because otherwise something very terrible is coming. And we always forget that, you know, the 1940s happened only 20 years from a very progressive era, the 1920s. So, you know, very bad things can happen anytime. So, yeah, anyway, it opens up a whole other discussion. But in my opinion, a lot of interesting things that could have opened up in documenta 14 didn’t really. To be fair, maybe it’s not possible to open up everything. Maybe moving here was something that they thought would be easier than it was. Like, I understand that there can be reasons. I’m a little bit disappointed that they didn’t create, not just with the way the film shows history, but also they themselves did not really feel that they should create a small archive of the people who were not for their project, of the people who were critical of their project.
RFF: Because that’s so important. The archive question is so important to me because I’m not going to the Documenta-Archiv. I’m not going to Kassel to learn about what the exhibition was in Athens. And now I’m thinking, you know, just the idea that minus plato? for me, I want this to be a space of an archive if possible, like conversational. But I also, speaking to what you were just saying, like, I’m sitting here in Ohio with Trump about to come into power, this kind of cycling back to 2016. And the projection of Europe here is a projection of, not of crisis, it’s a projection of aspiration. It’s a projection of like, you know, I sit here with this accent in the Midwest here, and I’m like a model, you know, and that’s obscene. It’s like really obscene.
FI: And it’s just simply not, yeah, it’s simply not true. No, it’s actually, you know, it’s not even a, it’s not even a reading. It’s just simply not true, in many different ways, in, you know, in financial ways, and in, you know, moral ways and in terms of morale, you know, in terms of where, you know, where people are, like, if you go to Hungary, you see, everybody’s unhappy, you know, like they say, there’s a real, real tension in the streets. And, yeah, it’s a country that has been completely, you know, taken over by the far right. And, so I mean is that it’s no surprise that the next Documenta that went back to the same questions, and it will keep going back unless it really keeps a proper archive, both of itself, but also of its, you know, of its failures and of its lack of dealing with issues.
RFF: Well, thank you so much for talking to me. This has been, you know, again, you’re the first guest in this new format. And I think it just laid the groundwork for so many conversations to come that I hope kind of build from this position of critique and disappointment, but also of, you know, how work needs to keep being done. Like, it’s like, it doesn’t just kind of stop because it moved on and all this kind of thing. So, Fil, thank you so much for speaking with me.