We’re all slightly jittery and uncomfortable. A circle made up of empty chairs inside our chalk circle signals it is open for people to join. There is Tone, Shakira, Sara, me - the women from Trampoline - and there is Anna, Helen, Martin, and Tim from Project Art Works. Annis and Sara will join us in a while if they can - as there’s another big Project Art Works workshop going on in their Stadtmuseum space all morning and they have to run it.
Kate couldn’t join us this time, as she’s had to stay in the UK to take care of a loved one and provide support. The news that Kate couldn’t make it to Kassel for the documenta finissage and our last workshops came late and were pretty hard on her but also on all of us - obviously, we had all been looking forward to sharing this time together, but not only that: the Cosmologies are diagrams that were born out of Kate’s life. Somehow, running the workshop without her is both an act of trust and a leap of faith on her part, and a big responsibility for the rest of us. In the May workshops, she was a vital facilitator in the process of generating a collective dialogue to talk about asylum, people, freedom, build relationships and create something bigger than the sum of its parts. This time though, her absence means that we will be lacking a reference point in the room. Suddenly, the cameraman will have to become a mediator, the curators artists, the activists presenters, the project manager a facilitator, the artists chefs, and the audience activists and artists. I can see some colleagues who are not used to speaking in public pacing around the room reading and memorising scripts, looking terrified.
As Sara has written down in her notebook for the day, the question we had before September was: ‘how to inhabit an exhibition space? How do we interact with our communities and documenta audiences in a meaningful way? How can we translate processes that have been born and developed inside specific emotional and physical spaces into the context of a mass-scale exhibition like documenta? In short, how do we translate, and not extract?’ With Kate’s absence, which adds up to an absence we already knew we would have to work with - that of the people from the house, who have all the knowledge and the experience to ignite Kassel, but they can’t leave the country - the translation of our joint endeavour into the exhibition space is a double challenge. Not only do we have to translate people’s voices and concerns into the exhibition space - for that, we have video, a pile of recommendations for a better asylum system coming from house users with migration experience; and we have Shakira as a facilitator, with her experience in the camps, her powerful presence and her piercing voice, along with whomever else might join us today. Now, we also have to translate the cosmologies - a methodology that is collective but that stems from a person's life and artistic vision on struggles shared with many others - into a totally collective enterprise.
We are both excited and concerned. Will passers-by stop? Will this work? Will Will the collaboration be understoond? Will the space generated be ample and generous, like the one in Copenhagen? Will audiences understand that we couldn’t bring our people to Kassel, and also, that we didn’t want to put a group of local refugees in the place Trampoline House users, because this space isn’t a house and they are not interchangeable? We hope that people see that we wanted the experience of the people in Denmark to be a guiding reference for people to build on. We wanted to welcome and informally invite people with refugee experience to the workshops - but we did not want to act as if groups of people are interchangeable. That has been a constant in our 100 days of public programming in Kassel, and something we’re proud of, despite challenges from the Artistic Team and our own self-doubt. We need to reach Kassel audiences and get the message across, and these are tools that we have: ourselves, people’s voice, and each other.
Last night, we all had dinner together - the Trampoline House team and the Project Art Works team with some of their artists and their families, who had travelled all the way from Hastings for the finissage. We had ambitious plans to have a fancy dinner somewhere but, in the end, what with being over twenty people and having different schedules, energy levels, budgets, and dietary requirements - and also having to go through our two-day schedule last minute, as it always happens - we ended up having dinner just before midnight in the dark, carpeted lobby of the Hotel Hessenland. We proceeded to the dining room under the slightly surprised, welcoming gaze of the two rather quirky receptionists who had been taking care of us for the entire week. As it was so late in the end, we ended up sharing some bits and bobs of Thai food that the only organised people in the group - parents with cars, of course - had got hold of. Obviously, it wasn’t enough, so Anna’s mum - who had driven all the way from England to Kassel and therefore had her car there with her - offered to drive back out to the only open Thai restaurant in the city to get food for the rest of us. Eventually, her and Anna came back with a beautiful set of Anna’s tin lunch boxes, filled with deliciously hot Thai food. Accompanied by a generous helping of chips from Lidl and some supermarket wine, dinner was more than enough - it felt like a hug.
After dinner, our teams got to work. I was very happy to see Anna so involved in the workshop and the topic of asylum. She shared a reference with Shakira: Wendy Ewald, American artist who has been working with refugees in Calais. Shakira said she’d look it up. They made a shopping list: they'd be cooking together to make lunch for everyone today. It’s vegetarian, and Anna showed meticulous care and interest in choosing ingredients, making sure that everybody can eat, whatever their requirements. Shakira and Anna only met this week, but I’m delighted to see their complicity radiate out to the table. Anna compliments Shakira’s rich English, and Shakira explains how she basically learned it in the camps to survive, because she had to spend ten years there. Camp English, they called it - now, we also call it Trampoline House English. The two women are only some years apart, but their lives seem to have been very different, in many ways. Anna is here with her parents, who came to support her as she delivers on her role as Project Art Works artist; at one point, her mum sweetly reminded her that it was getting quite late and rest is fundamental for her, and she agreed and eventually left, because today will be a long day and it’s difficult for somebody with autism to be ‘on’ for sixteen hours straight. Shakira is here with Taufiki, her 14 year old son, who I’ve recently seen grow from a sweet lovely kid to a mysterious and cryptic teenager who obviously does not want to be in this art thing for a week, but he knows that it’s time to follow mum and so he does, collapsing onto every soft surface he comes across throughout the day and frequently checking his tiktok.
As we began to finalise the details for today’s workshop - name rounds, how we’ll talk to people, what we’ll say - Anna shared some of her ideas for people to feel comfortable in a public space where they’ve just arrived, that we added to our usual House facilitation methods. We were all extremely tired, but something happened there - Anna picked on it and decided to immortalise the moment. Promptly, she asked us for our emails and sent us all the group photo on the spot - as she remarked then, it was very important.
