Platforms

As a fundamental and central feature of the dynamic process of creating Documenta11, Okwui Enwezor will develop, together with his co-curators, a series of Platforms. The Platforms will introduce a variety of complex topics, at selected locales and in cooperation with chosen partners. These highly involved issues will inform the exhibition Documenta11 in Kassel, June 8-September 15, 2002, the final Platform. Therefore the discourse of the Documenta11 begins way ahead of the actual opening of the exhibition. Platform1, Democracy Unrealized, took place in Vienna, Austria, from March 15 to April 20, 2001 in Vienna. It continued from October 9 to October 30, 2001, in Berlin, Germany. Platform2, Experiments with Truth: Transitional Justice and The Processes of Truth and Reconciliation, took place in New Delhi, India, from May 7 to May 21, 2001, and consisted of five days of public panel discussions, lectures, and debates and a video program that included over 30 documentaries and fiction films. Platform3, Créolité and Creolization, was held on the West Indian island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean between January 12 and January 16, 2002. Platform4, Under Siege: Four African Cities, Freetown, Johannesburg, Kinshasa, Lagos, was held in Lagos from March 15 to March 21, 2002, and engaged the current state of affairs of fast-growing African urban centers in a public symposium, along with a workshop, “Urban Processes in Africa,” organized in collaboration with CODESRIA. Over the course of one year, more than 80 international participants across many disciplines—philosophers, writers, artists, architects, political activists, lawyers, scholars, and other cultural practitioners—contributed to the evolving, dynamic public sphere that spelled out Documenta11’s attempt to formulate a critical model that joins heterogeneous cultural and artistic circuits of present global context. Platform5, the final platform is the exhibition Documenta11 in Kassel, from June 8-September 15, 2002.