“Whatifs and Whynots”: OFF-Playground”

Kassel, July 18 – September 25, 2022

The other OFF project takes place in the boathouse AHOI! on the banks of the Fulda river. Since Gaudiopolis in 2017, playing games, community building and free creation have been omnipresent in OFF’s activities, and so on the banks of the Fulda, we create a ‘construction site’ that has the potential of a playground while questioning its normative nature and its expectations of ‘how to play’. In a world of ‘whatifs’ and ‘whynots’, simple functional objects can become toys with the help of imagination, and a construction site can turn into aplayground. Collaborative creation that sometimes transcends – in fact, creates – reality and the translation of dreams into experience: these are the building blocks of this playground, which we build together with artists, architects, gardeners and children – as well as visitors. The buildings and installations created here are largely made from simple or recycled materials, mobilising the boundlessness of imagination, of the world of children, the liberating power of stories and fairy tales, in order to find a free world beyond the playground fence.

Artists: AUW (Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop) / Dénes Emil GHYCZY & Lukács SZEDERKÉNYI, Ádám KOKESCH, Eva KOŤÁTKOVÁ, Ilona NÉMETH, The Randomroutines / Tamás KASZÁS & Krisztián KRISTÓF, Recetas Urbanas
Collaborating institution: Unterneustädter Schule, Kassel
Curators: Nikolett ERŐSS, Eszter LÁZÁR, Borbála SZALAI, Katalin SZÉKELY (OFF-Biennale Budapest)
Special thanks: Thomas Engelbert; K&K Stauden plant nursery, Kassel; University of Kassel, Department of Landscaping, Landscape Management and Vegetation Development; Unterneustädter Schule, Kassel

OFF-Playground is a space that oscillates between a playground, a junkyard, a construction site—places of creativity, transgression, refuse, and regeneration. It takes you elsewhere: to realities in and beyond dreams. In and around the boathouse Ahoi, the space is being transformed by numerous actors—artists, collectives, architects, children communities, as well as the visitors—enacting construction, mobilizing the boundlessness of imagination, to find a different world beyond the playground fence.

The playground is a microcosm, a world of all spaces. It is a space that embraces a myriad of other spaces, depending on how the children playing there use it and what they think of it. It challenges and subverts prevailing social contexts, architectural norms, and notions of the continuity of space and time. Just like our dreams. Playgrounds are heterotopias, spaces that disrupt the continuity and normality of common everyday places, places removed from ordinary time and determined meaning. They are disjunctures that contest and invert normality and make intermediate worlds tangible.
For most of us, the playground is a space of freedom, experimentation, and risk-taking. On the other hand, it is also an institutionalized space where many children become acquainted with the rules of being in a community for the first time, and where security measures and safety instructions need to be met and followed. The playground equipment and games prescribe a particular mode of use, and in relation to this, as we know well, we constantly bypass and override them in the course of play, creating new games and new rules that understands the world along different correlations.

In a world of ‘whatifs’ and ‘whynots’, play—especially in its role-playing, “as if” guise—not only mimics or symbolizes, but also rewrites and prefigures the ways individuals or communities engage and work with each other, while creating and recreating the social domain, an interlocking web of interactions. Although the projects presented are mostly made from simple (construction or used) materials, they use the power of imagination (from daydreaming to social and ecological utopias), to experiment with models of collaboration and collective action—to explore their possibilities as well as their limitations.

Even before documenta fifteen, the Ahoi boathouse had a specific locality that was open to host new dreams, functions and uses of the space. The works presented in, around and over the building form a kaleidoscopic space that flips reality and puts it in our hands.

 

RECETAS URBANAS: Jumping in Hanoi (The Everything Brigde / Die Allesbrücke), 2022

On the playground we are elsewhere, outside the world we live in, yet at home. On the playground, like in a fairy tale, we have special abilities, we can be anyone and anywhere, we create the framework of the game. We imagine, for example, jumping over a building and landing at the end of the jump in a completely different place from where we started. Buildings are like rules: they are ordered, they are given, and sometimes they are exactly where we imagined something else to be. Buildings, even rules, can be bypassed, but what if we skip them now and build our own. Our own buildings and new rules, together.

Recetas Urbanas is an international community that builds different buildings, schools, community centres, in collaboration with the citizens who will be the future users of the buildings. They seek answers to local needs together, they play together, with great dedication, responsibility and joy; in other words, freely.

This bridge was built by the students of the Unterneustädter Schule, Kassel with the help of their teachers, the children’s families, friends and many helpers, mostly from recycled materials.
It not only crosses the building, but also, if you like, the river Fulda. It can link cities all over the world, be two pillars of a time-travel journey, or stand with one foot in the realm of reality and the other in the realm of fantasy. And after the 100 days of documenta fifteen, it is being redesigned with the help of the children of the Unterneustädter Schule, to enrich their world for the long term.

Recetas Urbanas: Santiago Cirugeda, Alice Attout, Carlos Vázquez Gardón, Garazi Merodio Ayarza, Ania Jaca Sanz de Arellano, Jorge Barroso (Bifu), Martina Helmke, Emilien Le Goff, Mario Bestion, Isadora Grumiaux

Production of documenta fifteen and OFF-Biennale Budapest

In collaboration with Unterneustädter Schule, Kassel
With the Support of: Acción Cultural Española

 

ÁDÁM KOKESCH:

Untitled (Caravan), 2022
The caravan, like a playground, is a space of freedom, of being elsewhere. We are at home in it, while we are on the move, different dimensions of time and space meet in it, giving us the possibility to be in all of them and none of them at the same time. Our possibilities are multiplied, the unexpected and the accidental become the keystones of reality. The caravans of the eighties are now run out of dreams, most of them at the end of their lives, many of them led by their own mortality back from their adventurous journey to a boresome reality. There are exceptions, however, for example, when a change of location is not even necessary that the kaleidoscopic interplay of different realities and spatial slices start a new journey, this time from inside, from the space of the caravan.
In the white, dreamlike and fragile space, exposed to time, there is a mirror installation where the surfaces, mirroring each other, set up a space trap. They make the space splintery and ungraspable, which carries the possibility of experiencing reality as something else, but – for lack of access to the space – fragmentary, as in dreams. Peeping from the outside makes us curious, like children we build our world from fragments, which reflects the outside world, but it’s okay if it’s different at the end.

Production of documenta fifteen and OFF-Biennale Budapest
Supported by Kisterem Gallery, Budapest

Untitled (Meander), 2021
The installation is a floating series of tiny building blocks, fragments, everyday pieces of material given new possibilities, which, as they are densified and distanced, form momentary assemblages. It is a continuous series of thoughts setting off while we are half alsleep, scribbles and notes, world models, a piece of an infinite game that can continue in any direction and in any way.

 

ARCHITECTURE UNCOMFORTABLE WORKSHOP (AU Workshop: Dénes Emil Ghiczy, Lukács Szederkényi)? The House of Councillor Krespel, 2022
installation (pinewood, tin, gravel, sand, glass, chipboard, EPDM rubber, beeswax)

In the sandpits of the playgrounds children use sand—a material regularly used in building constructions—to build castles or fortresses, make-shift and make-believe buildings for their role-playing games. Yet, whenever they have the opportunity, children also use real-life construction sites as playgrounds. They roam and play around piles of building materials, climb up the scaffolding; they explore, take risks, and rewrite the conventions and rules set by the strict regulations of the adult world.

The same curiosity, and the same transgressive and world-creating, world-transforming creativity characterized the titular character of the short story Councillor Krespel by the 19th-century German Romantic writer, E.T.A. Hoffmann, which has been a source of inspiration for the Budapest-based architect duo Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop (AU Workshop) for many years. The story begins with the construction of Councillor Krespel’s own house, which, without plans, evolves as the building progresses. He instructs the workers, with whom he works on the construction site with impulsive, constantly evolving ideas. He only determines the foundation and the materials used, besides that, the builders are given a free hand through the process. The construction takes place in a cheerful atmosphere, and in the end they create an unusual, asymmetric, yet homelike building.

Taking Hoffmann’s short story as their vantage point, AU Workshop have recreated this imaginary building in the area around the boathouse Ahoi. Their starting point is to look at construction sites from a new perspective: using the creative potentials that are inherent in the building process and in the materials lying around, also inviting the builders to participate in their creative process. The House of Councillor Krespel consists, for the most part, of leftover materials coming from the workshop of the architects that were previously used during their past building projects. Having been “freed” from the confines of their original purpose, these materials are now ready to be reused by the visitors. According to them: “The building site of the house of Councillor Krespel was completely devoid of the predestination of planning. It was shaped by the momentary feelings of the environment and the people in it, creating an aura of open and free building play. This is the atmosphere we want to capture and create on the banks of the Fulda river in Kassel. A construction site that includes already finished architectural elements such as walls, roofs, towers, shutters, eaves, which can be freely reinterpreted by the materials (gravel, sand) and tools found in the area. In this way, the sounds and atmosphere of the site are evoked during use.”

Special thanks: József Elek (tinsmith), Vencel Kustra, Bendegúz Szederkényi, Boldizsár Szederkényi, József Szederkényi, Zsombor Tóth, András Zoltai

 

RANDOMROUTINES (Tamás Kaszás, Krisztián Kristóf):

Signal Jamming Station, 2022
Welded steel, paint

“This lucid thing wasn’t supposed to be illegal, but everyone in it treated it if it were…”

Dispersed all around the space, the video-installation tells a story about the sect of Lucid dreamers, who practice semi-somnambulate techniques in their mutual and conscious dreams. Lucid dreamers experience a hybrid form of existence; during the course of lucid dreaming the sleeper is not only aware of being asleep, but also capable of making conscious decisions in specific situations and creating an effect within their own dreams, on the dreams of others who they meet in the shared dream space, and even on the awaken part of life. While surrounded by an air of implicit illegality, here in the realm of dreams actions have a different value, they are more thoughtful, they take higher stakes, and as opposed to being awake, they are not influenced by external circumstances or interests. During a lucid dream one is inescapably self-identical.

By stepping out of the private corners of the dream space, dreamers are able to connect their different dreamscapes and form a new shared landscape, which is on the one hand a space of infinite fantasy without fears or imprints of past traumas, but also a violent, frightening and oppressive space, full of revenge-dreamers and fleeing hordes.

During the narration we can follow how a collective evolves, how the individual dissolves into it, and how both become unfulfilled promises by the end.

The theme of possibilities, detours and dead-ends of collectivism continues beyond the isolated dreamscape of the screening room. Stepping out from the dark, we can see a more than eight meters high steel sculpture – a wobbling human tower – and chairs in different arrangements. The motifs on the chairs are based on the artists’ collection of various everyday creative solutions and decorative motifs made from reinforcing bars, that spread during the period of socialist shortage economy and can still be spotted today. Sitting on one of the chairs we again see a fictive group of people, whose members are climbing up on each other’s shoulders in an attempt to repair and hold the shattered, soon-to-fall sky.

Production of documenta fifteen and OFF-Biennale Budapest
With the Support of: Kisterem Gallery, Budapest

Special thanks to:
Katarína Klusová, Judit Reszegi, Tamás Shvella, Róbert Sós, Margit Valkó

A Dream on Lucids, 2016 – 2022
Video-installation

Cast:
Female voice: Jessica Lea Miley
Male voice: Gábor Erlich
Pit-man: Péter Tomaj
Anaesthetist: Viljami Wager
Camera-head: Lasse Poser
Whisperers: Tamás Kaszás, Krisztián Kristóf
Poetry reciter: Owen Good

Music:
Sleepwalking theme, Rebar harp theme: Marci Kristóf
Memory excercise theme: microsamples from L’Histoire du soldat by Igor Stravinsky
Peripheries theme: Randomroutines, cello by Gyöngyi Barta
All other samples by Randomroutines

Special thanks to:
István Csákány, Csaba Farkas, Fanni Hegedűs, Dóri Kangiszer, Viktor Kotun, Janka Sulyok, Borbála Szalai, István Szívós, Ninni Wager

 

EVA KOŤÁTKOVÁ: Daydreaming Workstation, 2022
Installation with sound

After waking up and before falling asleep daydreaming allows you to step out from daily routines, from hectic and stressful situations, not as a way to escape into safer, distant lands, but to disrupt those normative and harmful categories, that otherwise seem to be solid and non-modifiable, in order to be able to critically and creatively reconsider the world around us and open the mind’s eye to a different future.

The Daydreaming Workstation creates space for collective and individual daydreams and visions. It takes the form of a large textile and rope installation with various hanging pillows, sleeping bags, cocoon-shaped formations, places for sitting and lying down or for resting the head. Part of the installation are audio stories of mostly children narrators, at the same time, the voice of the daydream guide sounds at regular intervals, helping visitors in guided daydreaming with the aim to open up steady modes of perception, to activate the imagination and to engage the senses. The installation also works for “live daydreaming”: in the form of educational programs, workshops and different sharing formats with the help of dream facilitators. The daydreaming workstation shares stories and at the same time collects them, keeping its archive alive and growing. It focuses on stories that disrupt the current setting of the world, which divides its inhabitants into privileged and oppressed, healthy and sick, normal and different, functional and useless. These stories reveal a dreamscape, where freer, more inclusive and empathetic ways of existence are feasible.

We are a daydreaming work station and we invite you to join us!

Co-creators: Mína Basíková, Alice Louise Bransten, Sophie Louise Bransten, Jonáš Chadim, Johana Chadimová, Alma Fuxjäger, Kira Fuxjäger, Vincent Jedlička, Egon Jiřička, Johan Jiřička, Anna Kosatíková, Cecílie Kotecká, Václav Skála

Production of documenta fifteen and OFF-Biennale Budapest

With the Support of: Hunt Kastner Gallery (Prague), Meyer Riegger (Berlin), Tschechisches Zentrum Berlin

 

ILONA NÉMETH: Future Garden, Healing Garden

Two small gardens are on two islands of almost identical size, floating on the river. They remind us of how we have created controlled territories for centuries and, at the same time, how we have lost the illusion of control in the context of the ecological and economical catastrophe.
As much as being isolated, gardens—places of man-made care and creativity—are also integral parts of the surrounding environment: roots extend freely through garden boundaries to mesh with the soil, just as environmental factors are not modified by the boundary of this allocated area. Gardens disrupt normality of everyday places and they also can be perceived as alternative realities offering new perceptions and perspectives.

The Healing Garden consists of herbs and vegetables from local organic gardening that are not only beneficial to humans but also to the growth of plant symbiotic populations. In the Future Garden, there are plants for the future climate: plants that clean the soil of toxic substances and plants that have appeared in the area and adapted to the global weather changes. Its soil and vegetation are a combination of wild urban and cultivated vegetation that are temporarily replanted from a research field at the Department of Landscaping, Landscape Management, and Vegetation Development in the University of Kassel.

Each garden needs special attention and care but in a different way because the plants are dissimilar and the rules of their coexistence are not the same. They are sensitive and adaptive ecosystems with their own living conditions, requiring maintenance based on cooperation between the carer and the cared for. It is adventurous gardening where we can experiment with a small-scale model of our living environmental system not only for the present but also for the foreseeable future. What will happen to the gardens during the 100 days of documenta depends on those dedicated applicants who are renting them for free in exchange for care.

Production of documenta fifteen and OFF-Biennale Budapest

Courtesy: Collection/Třebešice Castle and the artist

The Future Garden is cultivated by: Benedict Maurer and Valeriia Hulkovych

The Healing Garden is cultivated by: Barbara Siebert

In cooperation with:
Architect: Marian Ravasz
LABAK landscape architects / Michal Marcinov, Katarína Stanislavová; Prof. Dr.-Ing. Stefan Körner, Dr.-Ing. Florian Bellin-Harder Fachgebiet/Landschaftsbau, Landschaftsmanagement und Vegetationsentwicklung; Maximilian Mechsner, gardener, Edible City; K&K Stauden plant nursery, Kassel.
Supporters:
Slovak Institut in Berlin, White Night Slovakia, Collection/Třebešice Castle.
Supported using public funding by Slovak Arts Council.

Ilona Németh created the first version of the Floating Gardens in 2011 in Budapest, Hungary, applying two remarkable examples from the history of garden design: the French and the English style.