100 Notizen – 100 Gedanken / 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts, presentation of dOCUMENTA (13) notebooks. Mumbai, January 10, 2012, 6:30 pm

Notes are the opposite of sedentary living.

 

They are at the core of fabrication and, nonetheless, they challenge the values of permanence, stability, and durability in favor of the virtues of abundance. Notes are wandering speculation, capable of connecting local technologies – the realm of the personal and subjective – with the vivid life and worldly conditions with which the individual writes those notes. They are linked with an ecology of knowledge transmission. They adopt given languages, forms and images, and ideas while, at the same time, they invent them during the recording done by the hand on a piece of paper. Notes are different from text, dissimilar to drawing, incongruent as theory. They are in motion, newcomers in the world of ideas, not yet part of any system or ideological taxonomy. The function of notes, and of a collection of notes, is to experience the condition of being free as a tangible reality since they embody the sense of αρχειν (archein – to lead or to begin), setting in motion the intercourse between senses and ideas, self and others. Released into the world with a note is the unexpected, the unanticipated, the unpredictable. Notes are located at the other end of the odds of certainty, without evident causal antecedents, outside teleology, but also outside any immanent or objective process.

 

Notes are the irruption of novelty.

 

dOCUMENTA (13) Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group Chus Martínez, will introduce the series 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. This is the eighth public presentation of the dOCUMENTA (13) 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series, following a premiere in Cairo and presentations in New York, Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, Paris, Oslo, and London. Following this introduction, there will be a conversation with Nalini Malani and Arjun Appadurai, authors of the 23rd notebook in the series.

 

Venue: Jnanpravaha, Queens Mansion, 3rd Floor, G. Talwatkar Marg, Fort, Mumbai. In association with the Goethe-Institut Mumbai.

The notebooks appear in three different formats (A6, A5, B5) and range from 16 to 48 pages in length. Contributors hail from diverse fields – art, science, philosophy, psychology, anthropology, political theory, literature, and poetry. The third round of notebook authors include Ida Applebroog, Walter Benjamin and Nikola Doll, Jill Bennett, George Chan and Fernando García-Dory, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Salvador Dalí and Ignacio Vidal-Folch, Dietmar Dath, Jimmie Durham, Nawal El Saadawi, Matias Faldbakken, Édouard Glissant and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Avery F. Gordon, Boris Groys, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Sonallah Ibrahim, David Link and Geoff Cox, Ada Lovelace and Joasia Krysa, Stephen Muecke, Ingo Niermann and Chus Martínez, Ana Prvacki and Irina Aristarkhova, Andrew Ross, and Enrique Vila-Matas on Thomas Mann and Theodor W. Adorno.

 

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13) Artistic Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev together with Head of Department, Member of Core Agent Group Chus Martínez, this series is edited by Head of Publications, Bettina Funcke. The 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series is being launched at various places and in various moments, each accompanied by a discussion on the nature and the aim of this publishing project. You can acquire individual notebooks or subscribe to the entire series of 100 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions at www.hatjecantz.de/documenta13