Enrique Vila-Matas - The Illogic of Kassel

A pity, I said to myself, that at the last minute I’d packed Journey to the Alcarria instead of the book on joy I was going to bring. Nevertheless, just thinking of that “book about walking and seeing,” as the author himself called it, reminded me that my stay in Kassel had the structure of a stroll, during which I was contemplating the natural as well as human landscape, while not neglecting to also study the landscape’s theoretical heft, something that, by the way, was conspicuously absent in Cela’s book.

Art about walking and seeing, I thought, while we continued strolling toward the cheerful terrace of the Orangerie bar. We were heading that way, but hearing what was coming from Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s loudspeakers, we ended up acceding to their demands and taking a path that led us to an area with a large lake. (This was where the bombardment seemed to originate.) It was a beautiful place, this lake with a small romantic temple, surely the finest part of Karlsaue Park, with a vibrant nature reserve full of birds on one side. On the other, I was at last able to see what looked most like a forest, most like the leafy area that in Barcelona I had imagined I’d see all the time I was in Kassel.

For me, there’s nothing as German as this forest, I said to Pim, who didn’t answer, or preferred to refrain from making any reply. Even better, she pointed to a water fountain at a bend in the path. I must have had a sign on my forehead saying I was dreadfully thirsty and that was why I said crazy things, revealing what felt like a hairy bear living inside me. In any event, I drank water like never before, feeling, in addition, that the fountain was a perfect miracle on our way. I drank for a long time, like someone who has been hypnotized by water.

Then we resumed our walk somewhat uncertainly toward the clamor of war. Little by little, the sounds issuing from the loudspeakers grew louder, and you were better able to appreciate that they were re-creating the din of an immense battle: it sounded like shells were dropping all through the forest. The birds in the nature reserve were going crazy. Pim ended up explaining to me — she seemed to have been there before with other writers and it bored her to have to say it again — that we were heading toward FOREST (for a thousand years. .) . The title, she said, referred to the thousand years that Hitler proclaimed the Third Reich would endure and perhaps also to the thousand years of age the city of Kassel had reached when it was almost entirely destroyed by British firepower.

I remembered Janet Cardiff was part of the holy trinity in Alicia Framis’s email (“Make sure you see the work of. .”), but I didn’t expect that any installation would shake me up the way that one did. I was struck — hard to forget it — by the discovery of a group of about forty people in the middle of the forest. They were sitting on tree stumps — forty mute, emotional people — terrified but secretly conspiratorial at the same time, as if a subversive, invisible thread passed through them, an immaterial impulse, an infinite breeze reminiscent of Ryan Gander’s: forty people sitting in the great shade of the trees, listening to the brutal sound of an aerial bombardment that, thanks to the speakers installed in the tops of the oaks, created the compelling sensation that it was all happening right there exactly where we stood.

That was, without doubt, the most impressive thing. You ended up believing yourself the target of the bombs because you felt them approaching by an auditory sleight of hand; you felt the very real sensation of being in the middle of a battlefield. You heard everything as if it were actually taking place beside you: the hair-raising yells of men in hand-to-hand combat, the overflying airplanes, the breathing, the shouts, the footsteps through dry leaves, the nervous laughter, the wind, petals blown on the rain and squall, the enigmatic rustling in the forest, thunderstorms moving off, the din of ancient battles, bayonets tearing through the air, shots, explosions, shrapnel. .

And then, suddenly, came the heavy blow of silence, and with it the reflection on the rediscovery of music: a classical symphony issued from the loudspeakers and allowed for pondering and recuperation. After the intellectual impact of the bombardment, there followed minutes of meditation and powerful recovery after the great collapse; during these minutes I was able to think things over and put an end to any further questions I might still ask myself about the possible, or impossible, relationship between innovative art and a bottle of perfume belonging to a Nazi woman, about the possible relationship between innovative art and our historical past and present. I seemed to guess that I wouldn’t revisit the matter for a long time to come. It had become clear to me that art and historical memory were inseparable.

Any activity connected to the avant-garde — assuming the avant-garde still existed (which I doubted more with each passing hour) — must never lose sight of the political dimension : one that required us to bear in mind that perhaps nothing would do us poor mortals more good than for the avant-garde to disappear, not because it was worn out, but because, through an invisible current, it had turned into a source of pure energy, transforming itself into our own fascinating life.

For a moment, I thought I saw the invisible impulse cross the area and flow through that community of strangers seated in the middle of the forest. I remember thinking of the efforts of popular revolutions trying to make a name for themselves, while secret groups like this one in the woods in Kassel, or those formed during sporadic bursts of fighting, had, by contrast, never tended to be photographed or to leave a trace. I recalled Sebastià Jovani, a writer from Barcelona, who said that revolutions spawned postcards and all sorts of souvenirs, while guerrilla warfare and spontaneous groups involved in clandestine struggles — volatile groups, situationists if you looked at them that way — generated emotions, common feelings that didn’t require a picture framed up on the wall. Jovani also said, if I remember rightly, that it was worth asking if anyone would really want a signed urinal in their living room. Perhaps, in that question, the difference between art exhibited in museums and art without a fixed home — art that is out in the open, so visible in Kassel, in more than one installation — couldn’t be better summed up. Art of the outskirts. Or of the outskirts of the outskirts. Like Huyghe’s work, with his humus and pink-legged dog, with his remote quagmire, where there was no organization, no representation, no exhibition — although I suspected things were more interconnected there than they appeared to be.

And while I was thinking about all this, I realized how that silent revolt of the spirit was making a move at that precise instant and letting itself be seen, too: the almost imperceptible was making everyone suddenly get younger on the spot .

This reminded me of that episode in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past where you see members of the old aristocracy grimacing in a Paris salon, getting older on the spot, becoming mummies of themselves.

For a while, I didn’t stop looking around me. The music’s attempt to get us over the collapse seemed very fortuitous. That motif of death Schubert had placed at the center of Winter Journey , which we were all listening to there in shy silence, collided head-on with the idea of that voyage. Each of us allowed ourselves to be assailed by our solitude, which expanded timelessly in the evening light, the sun reflecting among the clouds, and it did so like the nightmare I most feared, the one in which I felt at constant risk of seeing everything invaded by frost and dead nature.