Song Dong, Doing Nothing Garden

If we had to define Documenta 13, we might have to resort to certain spatial metaphors, since the very fact of opening the event to cities like Kabul, Cairo-Alexandria and Banff, in Canada, makes clear the ultimate intentions of the organizing team: it's not just about staging the most banalized form of the so-called 'globalization' -mixing a bit of everything-, but it's about reaching the places and, even more, about reflecting on the places in the places themselves. It is a decentralizing approach, moving from the macro-scale of Kabul to the micro-scale of Kassel, literally 'taken over' by the artistic event. In addition to the classic enclaves where the works have been shown in most of the editions (Fridericianum, Documenta-Halle, Ottoneum, Neue Galerie or even Karlsaue Park or the old station), Documenta 13 has expanded to places far from the center and that from many points of view summarize the spatial metaphor to which I alluded, a metaphor that from the simple physicality goes through a symbolic path...[+]