A video reading performance of Minus Plato’s documenta 14 diary from the book No Philosopher King: An Everyday Guide to Art and Life after Trump (AC Institute Books, 2019; 2nd Edition 2020). Featuring original photo documentation by Minus Plato from the exhibition in Athens and Kassel. Recorded live on October 8th, 2020 at Zoom.
Part of Forget What Did: Our documenta14 Afterlives. A workshop in three parts with Pélagie Gbaguidi and Richard Fletcher (aka Minus Plato) for p o s t documenta: contemporary arts as territorial agencies is an educational and artistic research program of intercultural exchange among students and academic staff from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig and the Athens School of Fine Arts. Conceived as a platform for experimental modes of art education, research, production, and dissemination, the program engages with the challenges of our current condition through collaborative praxis and critical discourse.
A workshop in three parts, Forget What Did: Our documenta14 Afterlives is a collaboration between writer Richard Fletcher (aka Minus Plato) and artist Pélagie Gbaguidi about the ongoing resonances of the 2017 exhibition documenta 14. Their contribution is split in three parts, including a video reading performance by Fletcher, a live online conversation with Fletcher and Gbaguidi, and an online participatory performance with Gbaguidi and students from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Germany), the Athens School of Fine Arts (Greece), and the Ohio State University (USA).
Forget What Did takes its name from a poem by the British poet Philip Larkin. Both a profound and moving lyric poet and a miserable racist and misogynist, Larkin’s poem about stopping his diary (which he describes as “a stun to memory” and “a blank starting”) presents several key questions about daily life, art, care, violence, and memory in the wake of the controversial documenta 14 exhibition, split between Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany, in 2017. Squarely committed to de-colonial critique, alternative modernisms, feminism, Indigenous knowledge and post queer politics, Adam Szymczyk’s exhibition provoked strong reactions at the time and its ongoing legacy still reverberate around the art world amid the current global crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and White Supremacist authoritarianism and fascism.
Part I. A Blank Starting: Minus Plato’s Documenta 14 Video Diary
Part II. A Stun to Memory: Conversation with Pélagie Gbaguidi and Minus Plato