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- Written by Edvardas Giedraitis
Beneath the I is multiplicity.
To assert the I is to react. It is the strategy which is infinitely deferring its object of desire: the fully erected and shining golden I.
I is threatened from all the sides by all kinds of enemies.
I is sad. I is grumpy. I is angry.
I constantly reflects upon itself, perpetually adjusting/re-adjusting its image to fit own and others' expectations.
I is a reactive machine with the desire to control.
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- Written by Otto Karl Kamal
[reloaded with English version. original text in German - below]
If we talk about Kassel and documenta, we must also remember that the place itself is a really important location for the German arms industry: since several decades it has been re-established in this historical place. The tactical proximity between war and culture is in no way new situation of geopolitical strategies. By means of the example of Kassel, we realise how cultural politics (on both global and regional level) crystalize as a part of hegemonic power structures, sometimes more visual, sometimes more sublime, but constant nevertheless. The most important armament players in the Kassel region (business volume of several billions of Euros):
Wenn wir von Kassel und der documenta reden, müssen wir auch immer im Hinterkopf behalten, dass wir hier von einen Ort reden, an dem ein wichtiger Standort der deutschen Rüstungsindustrie seit vielen Jahrzehnten wieder platziert ist. Die Nähe von Krieg und Kultur ist kein neuer Zustand geopolitischer Strategien. Anhand des Beispiels von Kassel wird deutlich wie die Kulturpolitik (auf globaler/sowie regionaler Ebene) sich als Teil hegemonialer Machtstrukturen herauskristallisiert, mal deutlicher, mal versteckter, aber durch die Zeit hindurch konstant. Die derzeit wichtigsten Rüstungs-Player in der Kasseler Region (mit milliardenschweren Umsätzen) sind:
Rheinmetall Defense, Krauss-Maffei Wegmann und Eurocopter1
The leitmotif of Christov-Bakargiev about the reflection of the past is going beyond. “Kassel is the city which was destroyed and rebuilt”, says the boss of documenta. “And in the middle of the wreckage (ruins) the documenta was initiated. This aspect brought me to follow one question/idea: when I look at the present situation, I have a problem to comprehend with the simultaneousness of collapse and recovery. For Afghanistan, both counts: the state of things after and during the war. And that is very curious. The war ended in 2004, everybody came back and the war seems to be over. At the same time, everyone said the war is still going on there. The difference between now and 1945/46 is that crisis and no-crisis can now exist side by side. […]” (http://www.3sat.de/page/?source=/kulturzeit/themen/160698/index.html)
What Christov-Bakargiev is instigating here is namely that the war was over already in 2004 - while all the facts speak about proportionately more casualties in the time after 2004 than in the duration of 3 years prior to the “end of the conflict”.
Here I am “only” referring to the military casualties. The number of civil victims must be multiplied by thousands (just in the sole year of 2010 there were over 10.000 civilian deaths) (2)! The Allied troops from 2001 till 2004 reported exactly 200 deaths, and between 2005 and 2012 (…), there were 2944 (3). Bearing such numbers in mind, it is either sarcastic or aggressively naïve to speak about this aforementioned “no-crisis”, or “end of the war”. And the person, who is digging the history of last centuries' Afghanistan, will find no difficulty to nail down the colonial causalities and effects from these approaches that triggers bigger or smaller armed conflicts. Considering this, the “no-crisis” idea of Christov-Bakargiev is extremely problematic to digest (4).
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- Written by Yakizdat
The group Lipovy Tsvet from Belarus during the DAMTP conference in Alytus did a situationist-linguistic-surrealist strike uder the code name: "BLA BLA BLA - MY IDENTITY". The you can see the following report of their on-situ activities - the whole text of Mbaku Fidelis Mbabit is included as also some more visual presentations of other psychic workers and lipovy Tsvet themselves.
Со стороны участников группы Липовый цвет на этой конференции в течение 2-х дней происходила языковая ситуационистская забастовка с кодовым названием "bla-bla-bla - my identity". Результаты этой забастовки приведены ниже. 
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- Written by Francisco José Avestruz
http://www.archivioalighieroboetti.it [Kabul, 1971]
[updated! - English version included. Original-german - version to be found bellow]
Ten years after the surrender of the Nazis and the digestion of the German people about the insane adventure of the National Socialism, the first documenta in Kassel in 1955 came into the world. In the same year Kassel welcomed the former armed forces member (1939-1945) and First Lieutenant (1944-1945) in the Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler, FJ Strauss (CSU party member - Christian Social Union). He arrived in order to accelerate the reconstruction of the defense industry in Kassel in the postwar period (the barely 10 years since asleep the surrender of the Nazis) - as a former party chairman of the CSU, atomic Minister of the Federal Republic of Germany (1955), who later became defense minister, Prime Minister of Bavaria and candidate for Chancellor of Germany. Then the Bundeswehr (German Military) was re-established on the 5 May 1955. Since the fifties, Strauss was a key lobbyist regarding NATO and open advocate of the McCarthy era. He has also advanced the witch-hunt of dissidents (1) in occupied Germany. His efforts in cooperation with the cultural and economic institutions were for the awakening of the dormant war production as early as the second half of the fifties, a success. There we have the two Henschel successor companies (2) (6 generations and Nazi regimes with more than 6000 forced laborers), also Wegmann (3), Rheinmetall (4) and Krauss-Maffei Wegmann (5), who in the 50's re-entered with a bang into the weapons business .
1955 was the season of awakening for Kassel after the end of World War II in a decade of despair, hunger, guilt, and resistance to rebuilding the machinery of war, persecution of pacifists of the left and religious (6) spectrum - which called the soldiers killers, denunciations, reinstatement of former Nazis (7) in national security and politics go hand in hand with the occupying forces. These turbulent times, the platform for the development of the first Documenta were to simultaneously, so to calm the turmoil. Reconstruction, restoration, creation ...
Again, again and again, that's part of the motto, which has Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev dedicated their Documenta 13 "collapse and reconstruction." Breakdowns and disasters from natural processes (meteorites, earthquakes, tsunamis ...) with their self-regeneration / healing of nature are placed in parallel with human-made disasters (pogroms, wars, displacement, exploitation, enslavement ...) each with their reconstruction / self-healing are presented with a holistic relation to the same level along the different venues documenta for a clientele of more than 750,000 "refined", privileged visitors. The message of her diffused concept Non-concept and its presentation is read by a mass mainstream audience. As a natural process, as were war and neo-colonialism to a natural behavior of our existence as a group disasters of war with exploitation, delusion, torture, expulsion, racism and all the symptoms of diseases such as hatred and violence would then be natural processes that should happen in our existence. As with any environmental disaster and colonial processes and exploitative behavior would mean unavoidable and natural processes (the process functions like a sedative).
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