Pélagie Gbaguidi,
Richard Fletcher (aka Minus Plato)
Forget What Did:
Our documenta14 Afterlives
Pélagie Gbaguidi, Iris de Lucy, 2015

A workshop in three parts, Forget What Did: Our documenta14 Afterlives is a collaboration between writer Richard Fletcher (aka Minus Plato) and artist Pélagie Gbaguidi about the ongoing resonances of the 2017 exhibition documenta14. Their contribution is split in three parts, including a video reading performance by Fletcher, a live online conversation with Fletcher and Gbaguidi, and an online participatory performance with Gbaguidi and students from the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (Germany), the Athens School of Fine Arts (Greece), and the Ohio State University (USA).

Forget What Did takes its name from a poem by the British poet Philip Larkin. Both a profound and moving lyric poet and a miserable racist and misogynist, Larkin’s poem about stopping his diary (which he describes as “a stun to memory” and “a blank starting”) presents several key questions about daily life, art, care, violence, and memory in the wake of the controversial documenta14 exhibition, split between Athens, Greece, and Kassel, Germany, in 2017. Squarely committed to de-colonial critique, alternative modernisms, feminism, Indigenous knowledge and post queer politics, Adam Szymczyk’s exhibition provoked strong reactions at the time and its ongoing legacy still reverberate around the art world amid the current global crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and White Supremacist authoritarianism and fascism.

Tuesday, 3 November 2020, at 16:00 Leipzig & Brussels / 17:00 Athens / 11:00 Ohio USA

Part I. A Blank Starting: Minus Plato’s Documenta 14 Video Diary

Part II. A Stun to Memory: Conversation with Pélagie Gbaguidi and Minus Plato

Part III. Praxis De-colonial: Online participatory performance with Pélagie Gbaguidi and Clara Guixer