100 Notes – 100 Thoughts. Now available: The first 17 notebooks in both printed and e-book editions. www.documenta.de

 

In the act of writing it is natural to begin with a subject close to one’s interests. Through writing, one also becomes aware of the fact that it is possible to compartmentalize oneself in many different ways. The problem then is not so much one of how to integrate the fragments, but of how to understand the migration of thoughts into forms, images into words, and intuitions into notions. It is this continuous movement from the precision and concreteness of one form of life, transmuted or imported into another, that a notebook registers.

A notebook is a computing system, a third space between the utterly private and the entirely public, where infinite surveys of the self in relation to the world occur. Notes have a talent for empirical and empathic research. Using a term Jorge Luís Borges borrowed from the family of Uto-Aztecan languages used by the Hopi Indians of Mexico, notebooks constitute an uqbar, a ‘third world’, a state where the concept of ‘subject’ does not matter. Here, plagiarism makes no sense, since appropriation rules, and the notebook becomes atemporal and anonymous even to the writer.

What, then, is so political about notes?

Maybe the answer lies in their indifference towards their function in consumption.

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Artistic Director of dOCUMENTA (13), will present the first 17 notebooks during a talk in the Open Forum programme of arteBA in Buenos Aires,  May 19, 2011, from 4:45 to 5:45 pm. This is the third public presentation of dOCUMENTA (13)'s 100 Notes – 100 Thoughts series, following a premiere in Cairo on April 21, 2011 and a presentation  in New York on May 10, 2011. www.arteba.com

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 studies, and poetry –  and include Etel Adnan, Kenneth Goldsmith, Péter György, Emily Jacir, Susan Buck-Morss, Alejandro Jodorowsky, William Kentridge, Peter L. Galison, Erkki Kurenniemi, Lars Bang Larsen, György Lukács, Christoph Menke, Paul Ryan, Ayreen Anastas, Rene Gabri, Vandana Shiva, G. M. Tamás, Michael Taussig, Jalal Toufic, Ian Wallace, and Lawrence Weiner.

 

Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13)’s 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. For further information about dOCUMENTA (13), including the publications, visit www.documenta.de.