It was a joyful moment when I rediscovered my old notebooks. I would not have searched for them without the dOCUMENTA (13) notebook publishing project. When reading these old notes now, I am surprised how many ideas they already contain and how they developed, building unconsciously one on the other. I had no memory of the level of detail in which some of these ideas had already been analyzed in the early notebooks. The books I found cover a three-year period beginning in late 1992. In my scientific life, this was a crucial time. It was the time when key steps ...

What is printed in this notebook is film material, if not in the physical sense of celluloid, chemicals, video cassettes. For me, film material is everything that accumulates during a film project and accompanies it. That includes rejects or what was merely thought of and remained notes. Many things shape a film, not just the script but also the working environment and production processes, self-censorship and prohibitions. Certain of one’s aims remain unfulfilled, falling victim to constraints, or only in post production is the right tone found. The script is the working template for director, cameraman, and actors during shooting. Why was ...

It has often been noted that the collapse of the socialist system did not result in research activities that could be compared to postcolonial studies. As Ewa Thompson has observed, “Unlike Western colonies, which have increasingly talked back to their former masters, Russia’s colonies have by and large remained mute.” Instead, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, opinions have been expressed from within different research fields regarding the appropriateness of thinking of post-Soviet societies in terms of postcolonial studies. Nevertheless, asserting that postsocialism continues to remain a useful category for researchers, Caroline Humphrey notes the existence of a growing ...

I actually went to work in the mines in Carbonia to run away from a girl I had got back from prison camp on August 29 I had got back home from Germany I had a bit of a holiday at home I was really emaciated I was really down I stayed at home all the time I didn’t do anything I read some newspapers some books some stuff I found lying around I passed the time like that but then I needed money and I couldn’t find any work and so I went to sea I traveled around just ...

In the last weeks preceding the collapse of his rational powers, Nietzsche wrote, “I am a rendezvous of experiences”; the word is indeed rendezvous. He meant that he had spent his life running toward the world and that the world had been running toward him.This double attraction, this movement, had been central. The immense generosity of his mind had made him the meeting point of cosmic forces, of the social currents of his time, and of the ideas that he seemed so often more to capture than to create. This generosity was a form of love. He showed us in ...

In his contribution, philosopher Éric Alliez visually translates his planned book on diagrammatic thought and its implications for the field of contemporary art to the design of the notebook and its text. It is his response to the format of this German-English publication series, for which usually texts of 3000 words were commissioned. His contribution consists of three parts: in the first two originally French parts, only some of the words are legible in their English translation (or in original German), while the rest of the original can be deciphered from underneath the grey bars that cover it, so that ...

For this artist book, the Chinese conceptual artist Song Dong had an untranslatable sentence about the act of doing nothing translated into English by various people, companies, a translation office, and Google Translate. The Chinese characters are identical on each paper, but each translation varies a great deal. The sentence and its interpretations circle around notions of doing something, doing nothing, wasting and not wasting, each containing an individual perspective on the value of human activity. With each letterhead, color, and signature, the connotation of the line shifts, and Song Dong’s own handwritten decryption oscillates between doing nothing and common ...

Notebook 089 is a result of the immense changes that have taken place in the world since 1989. With the end of the Cold War, the utopian neoliberal fantasy of a global capitalist expansion, unfettered by the limits of any borders (psychic, physical, ethical, national, or ecological) and governed through an extension of credit/debt coupled with correlated “structural adjustments,” assumed a new function for nation-states around the world, as a privatizer of gains, and a socializer of costs. In a span of twenty years the insolvency of this paradigm has become evident; not only has an entire world been gripped ...

With a radical imagination, the work of Erkki Kurenniemi (b. 1941) refutes a common sense that bases technology in frigid thought. A mathematician, nuclear physicist, and expert in digital technologies, Kurenniemi established the electronic studio at the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961–62. He collaborated with the composer Terry Riley on the first Happening to take place in Finland, with the artists group Dimensio and protagonists of the underground music scene, such as M. A. Numminen and the band Sperm. In the late 1960s, he made non- narrative short films that he hesitated to call art; a kind of ...

An organic notebook is as good a way as any to commit events and objects to memory. Fallen leaves, bark, twigs, and decaying branches are records of the past. Glistening water moves through grass-lined channels, emerging in bubbling rivulets that slow and subside over terraces, briefly creating a mirror of the sky that soon tarnishes as the earth drinks. The flow, measured by the shadows, is directed by the gardeners’ long-handled shovels. Imagine it as ink, while fallen leaves and twigs form words, and the earth provides pages around which enclosing mud walls form a robust binding. Like the worn cover ...

—What should I do? We anticipated atrocities, mayhem, chaos. All there was, was a strange stillness lingering over violence from the night before. It doesn’t matter where or when this was. There were, there are, many nights. The calmness was sincere, not eerie as one might imagine. Blood shed in peace, startles. It felt welcoming, enough to want to be there, amid anyone. We walked among people, tents, clusters of conversations, we gave out newspapers, shared news and oranges we had bought. Nine floors up, in a balcony, overlooking freedom, journalists propped their cameras for an uninterrupted airing of a live ...

There are two short works that date back to the late 1960s that should be reread and approached today. The extreme encounter that I would like to address as an artist is that between Clement Greenberg, the most famous American art critic, and Mario Tronti, the most radical Italian political philosopher. I thus put two works together on my table: “Recentness of Sculpture” by Greenberg, from the 1967 American Sculpture of the Sixties catalog (with its original silver cover), and “Lotta contro il lavoro!” by Mario Tronti, from his famous book Operai e capitale, published in Turin in 1966. I believe ...