oral history – The History of the Wagon Sites in Kassel
Concept: Bernadett Settele

The project is intended as an offer to a group of political activists who have fought / are currently fighting for alternative living-space concepts in Kassel in the past and present. The act of experimenting with living forms is guided not least of all by the idea that micro-practises are what constitute everyday life, and that changes in everyday life are what provide the impetus for major changes in society. This logic also proceeds from the assumption that life and existence are not to be thought of in “big” categories. In the context of a critical look at the documenta’s exhibition practises, the history of the past – and future – project failures is to be retold, drawing from personal recollections, as a means of uniting the struggle for the idea with the struggle for actual space in an artistic form.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Talking and breast feeding
Concept: Marvin Altner

The STILLPLATTFORM is a facility for parents visiting documenta 12 with children of their own under 12 months. An unusual group of people is to be added to the visitors. This group provides an image of integration – there is space in the exhibition for those traditionally excluded, and the parents involved find their own specific take on the results of the creative artistic act coloured by their experiences with the beginnings of a human life.

The art education programme encompasses a joint circular tour of the Aue-Pavillon. Ellen Kobe will record the STILLPLATTFORM and the conversations taking place in the exhibition on video to create the video work SPRECHEN UND STILLEN (“talking and breast feeding”).
 
This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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KNOW GERMAN
Concept: Sophie Goltz, Angelika Bartl, Andrea Hubin, Susanne Hesse

“Every five years, one of the most important exhibitions of modern and contemporary art takes place in Kassel. What is the name of this exhibition?” This question forms part of Germany’s first naturalization test and the ability to answer it correctly is a prerequisite for becoming a German citizen. Knowledge of the documenta thus becomes a core element of “German identity” while at the same time implying that migrants have some catching up to do. With a view to the exhibition itself as a medium, the third leitmotif of the documenta 12 – “Bildung: Was tun?” / “Education: What is to be done?” – declares aesthetic education a place of social negotiations and the creation of community. Due to the fact that neo-colonial processes inscribe themselves in educational processes – in some cases even literally constitute those processes – the present-day practises of art mediation and aesthetic education also warrant questioning. This topic will be examined with regard to anti-racist and post-colonial political practises in two workshops carried out in the education tent of the documenta 12 advisory board and led by //Ljubomir Bratic// (philosopher, Vienna), //María do Mar Castro Varela// (political scientist, Berlin), //Nikita Dhawan// (philosopher, Berlin). On that basis, concrete mediation formats will subsequently be developed in collaboration with //kanak attak// (Berlin).

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Hidden Theatre
Concept: Claudia Gaida

At the end of the 1950s, at the Teatro de Arena in Sao Paulo, a new folk theatre concept was developed which was soon the talk of all Latin America. That concept is closely associated with the name Augusto Boal. In the theatre school he founded, plays directed towards people living in circumstances of extreme hardship were collectively written and rehearsed. Boal performed these plays in rural villages, for illiterates, in the city slums, etc. as a means of showing them their own situation.
He invented new performance techniques which liberated the members of the audience from their passive role and turned them into active protagonists by having the “disguised actors” reproduce the audience’s social situation, thus provoking the audience in the process.
The tradition of “involving the audience” which Augusto Boal established as political theatre can also function in the art context. In view of the fact that contemporary artistic approaches are associated with a number of clichés, the documenta is virtually predestined to serve as a field of action where these clichés can themselves be investigated and processed. 
The Hidden Theatre works with two categories of participants:
a.    the actors – interested teenagers
b.    the visitors to the documenta 12

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Queer Activism and Artistic Strategies – A Meeting of Queer and LGBQT Activists of Germany and Poland
Concept: Ina Mertens, Sandra Ortmann

With a critical look at various artworks at the documenta 12, queer, gay-lesbian and trans* activists of Poland and Germany will discuss feminism, queer visibility, hetero-sexism, radical social criticism, institutions and political strategies. Several of the aspects will be presented at the Lunch Lecture on August 5 and can be accessed in the Internet as a podcast under www.hr-online.de.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung
and the Deutsch-Polnische Jugendwerk (german-polish youth network).

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“Your Own Life – A Workshop”
Concept: Tina Oberleitner

“What is bare life?” is the second leitmotif of the documenta 12. This question revolves around the exposure and isolation of human life, and forms the conceptual basis of a project involving up to ten persons who are unemployed in the broadest sense of the word, or presently in unstable employment circumstances. The question as to the extent to which private, intimate and public life reveals itself in art will be discussed on the basis of a visit to the documenta 12 as well as in the participants’ own practical work. Where does the “bare life” we are all living manifest itself?

On the one hand, everyday life is recorded jointly in workshops, on the other hand individually in texts, in writing, in images, etc. and subsequently presented for one week in an exhibition at the Salon des Refusés. The common point of departure for all participants are empty calendar pages for August, covering the hours from 8:00 am to 6:00 pm, leaving space for “important appointments and tasks” and an “OK” box for checking off …
… does the calendar show us how important these aspects have become in the everyday life of the present?

In order to spark public discussion of this theme, in collaboration with Nanne Buurman’s project “Arbeitslose als Avantgarde” / “Unemployed Persons as Avant-Garde”, a public picnic will take place next to the Aue-Pavillon at the end of August, also providing scope for commentary by experts.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Points of Intersection
Project coordination: Sara Hossein, Deniz Sözen

The project ties-in with the curatorial concept for the migration of form, which envisages establishing interrelationships and formal parallels between examples of carpets from different origins and contemporary art at documenta 12. This educational project in Kassel uses locally found carpets as the basis for aesthetic education. The project is intended to promote the cross-cultural transfer of knowledge.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Between National Identities: Russian women of German origin in Germany   
Konzept: Kea Wienand   

Between National Identities: Russian women of German origin in Germany
Project coordination: Kea Wienand

A meeting of documenta 12 educators with immigrant Russian women of German origin (Russland-deutsche) who are prepared to give their own accounts of their experiences of life in Germany and a sense of identity caught between two nationalities, a position that goes largely unnoticed in the dominant discourse. In return, an offer has been made to invite these women to documenta. The women are also to be given an opportunity to consider to what extent they would like to use documenta to generate a form of political visibility for their own history.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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The Unemployed as an Avant-garde
Project coordination: Nanne Buurmann

In a trans-local exchange of knowledge key issues for documenta 12 are to be transferred from Kassel to Leipzig and addressed in a workshop for the unemployed on the basis of a number of questions. This is to be followed by a group visit to documenta 12 to consider art works in the exhibition in a context of the questions and answers gleaned from the workshop. It is safe to assume that the number of unemployed will rise in the future, meaning that the unemployed of today are a new avant-garde.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Self-Education through Aesthetic Experience?
Concept: Maike Aden

This project is directed towards formerly long-term unemployed participants in a qualification programme carried out in child day-care centres in Bremen (“Pro KiTa”). For these persons, the visit to the documenta is to serve – above and beyond competitive learning situations – as a stimulus for sensual experience, for confidence in one’s own stance and for speaking up and voicing one’s opinion without fears or inhibitions. Far from complying with banal-economic imperatives to the effect that the best possible use be made of education, the project will moreover endeavour to apply aspects of these aesthetic experiences to future life, including future professional life. In summary, it could be said that this type of encounter with art is to provide the participants with an opportunity to take various perspectives themselves and tolerate those of others without being afraid of the consequences.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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National Identity – Between Construct and Real Experience 
Concept: Anna Ewa Dyrko, Polina Stroganova 

In a workshop carried out in several sessions, attended by Polish and Russian immigrants of the parents’ as well as the children’s generation, we would like to pose the question of national identity and discuss the attributions associated with that topic from various perspectives. Taking our own migration backgrounds as a point of departure, we hope to enter into a personal exchange of views with the participants concerning experiences, perceptions and projected hopes in connection with immigration. By discussing the topic of “national identity” in a group consisting of persons of two different nationalities, we would like to promoted the recognition of similarities and differences in the experience of immigration and expose – and question - the mechanisms of identity formation. In a second phase of the workshop, we will take selected documenta 12 artworks as a point of departure to pursue questions concerning the construct of national identity in connection with art and its reception.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Body Images “Kassel Apollo Meets documenta 12”
Concept:  Aikaterini Dori

This project engages with the representation of the body in art. The aim is to connect the art of antiquity to contemporary art. It explores the notion of "antiquity", a term used in one of the documenta 12 leitmotifs, and aims to establish visual and aesthetic parallels between art works made at very different times. A group of physically challenged participants are to pursue the question, over a number of days, of how what is beautiful in art is defined.
A small group (approx. 10 Personen) meets regularly at the various documenta 12 locations (a further get-together in the Antiquities Collection in Schloss Wilhelmshöhe is planned) to look at selected artworks and exchange thoughts and views on the body in paintings, sculpture and everyday life. The focus is directed towards artworks as well as the perception of one’s own body and the ways in which body and society intermesh. Do physical experiences and body images have anything to do with what appears in the artworks?
Within the framework of a two-day writing workshop, we will subsequently reflect on the encounters creatively. The texts thus produced (reports, diary entries, short stories, poems, etc.) will be compiled in a reader and presented to the participants.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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On Dealing with Bare Life: between professionalism and anxiety
Project coordination: Britta Janssen, Meike Günther, Anna-Lena Wenzel

The aim is to have a group discussion of the documenta 12 leitmotif Bare Life with people who are confronted by death in either their professional or their private lives, people who do not usually encounter one another in an everyday context. The aim is to show different ways of dealing with death, as well as showing and discussing different developments in the "culture of death" in our time. Art works at documenta 12 provide the basis for a discussion devoted to this leitmotif. The results are to be collated and made accessible to the public.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Urban Ghosts
Concept: Anne Fäser, Michael Duke

About 10 youths aged between 15 and 19 from different social and cultural backgrounds and an assortment of neighbourhoods in Kassel are to be invited to focus on individual works at documenta 12, and to view these in relationship to their hometown.
What can the artworks at the documenta 12 tell us about the current situation in the city, about our own urban situation? What does this all have to do with young people, their friends, their lives and their surroundings in Kassel? The young participants will express themselves in musical and verbal statements made audible by way of temporarily installed sound boxes at selected sites in Kassel.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Seeing at the edge of chance – intervention as a means of active art reception
Project coordination: Claudia Hummel, Anette Krauss

The educational process in art mediation at an exhibition on the scale of documenta 12 is, as a rule, dominated by the spoken word. However key to every learning process is also a situation-specific physicality. The project explores the physical aspect of the learning process during a guided tour of the exhibition, while also introducing an aspect of irritation. 

This project is supported by the embassy of the Kingdom of Netherlands, Berlin

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Building Bridges – virtual education between Kassel, Lima und Trujillo
Concept: Hansel Sato, Nora Landkammer

Intended is to build an intellectual bridge between documenta 12 and students of the art academy in Trujillo. With the aid of the internet, a camera and a microphone educators become intermedial, providing a transfer of knowledge all over the world. As well as organising an educational conference, a homepage is to be produced where exhibition views and commentaries can be called up 24/7. The aim is to generate a sense of immediacy, which can dispel the mystification or idealised perceptions of art events.

This project is being realized in collaboration with the documenta 12 art education programme and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof e.V. with support from the Fonds Soziokultur e.V., the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung and the Hesse branch of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung.

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Talking about Art at documenta 12
Concept: Teresa Distelberger, Alexander Henschel, Julia Ziegenbein

The act of speaking about art and the linguistic space of documenta 12 are at the core of this project. Language experts, art educators and art works are to be brought together for a three-day event that begins with a tour of the exhibition. Following a group discussion, the results are to be communicated to visitors in the course of a non-stop discussion. This public discussion is held in cooperation with the documenta 12 Art – Language – Publicity/Communications Space project by the German faculty at Kassel University.

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Guided Tours in Sign Language
Concept: Sarah Harms, Henrike Plegge, Simone Wiegand

Selected works at documenta 12 are to provide the basis for a series of guided tours promoting a naturally communicative situation in sign language. The tours are to be given by educators who are also involved in a dialogue with pupils and teachers at the Hermann-Schafft school in Homberg, Germany, to develop a format together specially for deaf school groups and others with hearing disabilities. The aim is to address specific forms of perception, and to work as a group on the mediation of aesthetic experience.

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Education, Knowledge, Being White
Concept: Stephan Fürstenberg

For a teacher or speaker, being involved in educational processes can imply the reproduction of typifications, classifications and categories, but also of prejudices, stereotypes, attributions and dominant narratives. The project ‘Education, Knowledge, Being White’ addresses the issue of involvement in the production of normativities and dominant patterns in educational work. Not only are ethnicizing and racist images of the ‘other’ constantly being developed, but apparently naturalized dichotomous classification categories such as “man and woman” are also often reproduced. In a workshop conducted by the Anti-Bias-Werkstatt, these processes and dynamics – which are quite commonplace within working practises – were discussed, along with strategies for countering them in the everyday professional context.
Anti-Bias can be understood as one of the most productive approaches to anti-discriminatory education work. Bias means prepossession, tendentiousness, prejudice. Anti-Bias aims to rebalance leanings and proclivities which have come about through one-sidedness and prejudice, and to reduce discrimination. The goal of the Anti-Bias work is the intense, experience-oriented, critical examination of power and discrimination as well as the ‘unlearning’ of oppressive and discriminatory forms of communication and interaction. The concept proceeds from the assumptions that every individual has prejudices and that prejudices and discriminations are not to be understood as individual misjudgements but as ideologies which have been institutionalized by society and are learned by society’s subjects. The respective behavioural patterns can accordingly be ‘unlearned’; institutionalized, oppressive ideologies can be exposed and challenged.
The workshop participants included documenta 12 art mediators as well as teachers (in the broad sense of the word) who were approached by the documenta12 advisory board and the Kulturzentrum Schlachthof. In addition to offering them anti-bias training, it was thus possible to initiate an exchange between persons involved in various fields of local educational work in Kassel. A joint visit to the exhibition and the discussion of individual artworks also helped to spark the critical investigation of the images we carry around – usually unquestioned – in our minds.

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