Starting this Saturday, June 18th in Kassel (Germany), Erick Beltrán will be participating in documenta fifteen, whose artistic direction is taken in charge by Indonesian collective ruangrupa.
Since 1955, documenta takes place every five years during 100 days. For the fifteenth edition, Erick Beltrán has been invited to develop a project that will inhabit Kassel’s Museum for Sepulchral Culture. “Manifold: Unity and Multiplicity” researches the ways in which unity and multiplicity are understood and represented in social contemporary psyche –through the imaginary and the iconographic realms–, and at the same time explores the conceptual differences between both. The quest for a form or a body is the attempt to differentiate the whole from its parts; individual will and the invisible order of the collective. How do we decide what we see? Who is telling the story? What is power and who is in power?
This project is articulated around notions of time and space. It draws on knowledge and methodologies belonging to mythology, social critique and mathematical analysis. The first step was based on field research carried out in Kassel, through which 80 street interviews were compiled in order to explore the way in which different individuals visualize power. In a second stage, Erick Beltrán investigated multiple characters and figures from the German collective imaginary, since the Medieval period and the Early Renaissance until today: beings which are made from a multiplicity of smaller entities, and which reveal a connection between the appearance of the multiple as a body and the development of our notions on ideology, politics, and the masses. This work’s third step consisted in cross-reading the first two parts of the research, to show how many of these images appeared repeatedly throughout the interviews- a recurrence that speaks about collective ideological structures, specific to the context in which the project was carried out.
Though a series of diagrams, murals and sculptures, the exhibition questions notions of perception, form, body, political structure, and value. The artist proposes a way of visualizing the structures –usually invisible– that organize a “body”, and hence power.
The Jakarta-based collective has based the fifteenth edition of documenta on the values and ideas of lumbung, the Indonesian term for a communal rice barn. As an artistic and economic model, lumbung is based on principles such as collectivity, communal resource building, and equitable distribution, and is realized in all areas of collaboration and exhibition conception.
Erick Beltrán has been named as Artistic Director of documenta fifteen editorial project, which was conceived as a collectively run offset print shop designed for lumbung members and lumbung artists, as well as members of the Artistic Team. Beltrán is also in charge of a journal and the edition of three books that will compile every publication of lumbung press.
