I.

It’s been nearly three years since we first embarked on the journey toward South as a State of Mind, the magazine of documenta 14, edited and produced in and out of Athens. The issue you hold, our fourth and last, coincides with the imminent ending of the documenta 14 exhibition in Kassel in September 2017, more than a month after it came to a close in the capital of Greece. It is a strangely quiet and pensive moment for all of us, some few hundred cultural workers who have, in our many roles, fully dedicated our lives to the project—the preceding years of working and thinking together for and in documenta 14 and the exhibition itself, whose two acts spanned two cities and a total of 163 days. We are deeply thankful to all the artists whose contributions gave documenta 14 its liquid shape, to all our collaborators in both cities, the team of documenta 14 that made it happen for real, and to our institutional partners, as well as to the many individuals and noninstitutional entities that supported and critiqued us, as we moved forward. If there was anything we missed during this process, it was boredom and indifference. Judging from the scale, variety, and intensity of the heated response we have received from our audiences and the accompanying voices of the media in Greece, Germany, and internationally, we strongly feel documenta 14 has hit a nerve, or many nerves at the same time, as we honestly and passionately attempted to question the stale and self-perpetuating business of exhibition making as it is presently construed, and to directly participate in the often-dramatic and difficult developments of our time, globally and locally, with their accompanying debates.

As editors of this magazine, offered to us for four consecutive issues by its founding editor, Marina Fokidis, we often found ourselves in the position of anticipating rather than commenting on the ever-evolving concept of the exhibition, and its actual making, in real time, while also trying to hold together the two overlapping and crisscrossing timelines of the project, which developed in two cities over a period of time. A present temporal order that has been and remains to be, it seems, marked by eruptions of all forms of violence, including the return of political violence and its attendant reactionary discourses around the globe: a violence inflicted on bodies of refugees and minorities, and a violence of capitalism in its current highly accomplished formation that knows no alternative, often (but not exclusively) termed neoliberalism. Our concern has been how to work in a meaningful way in and through conditions marked by such violence. Marx’s famous 11th thesis from his “Theses on Feuerbach,” written in 1845—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it”—seems to maintain its attractive, persuasive power. But it is, in the end, the work of interpretation that needs to be done in order to understand and set the conditions in which actual change can take place at all. It may seem an ambitious endeavor for a magazine—to interpret and debate some of the darkest and most disturbing movements of history that inevitably press humanity toward an even darker future—yet it proved humbling and in many ways fulfilling. And still, Marx’s challenging proposition keeps looming over our efforts. Aware of the magnitude of the task that needs to be confronted daily and through practice, we have made some small steps. We engaged, by all means. The writers and artists of the four issues of the documenta 14 South as a State of Mind kept us company (and kept us amazed by their efforts), as we examined together the obscurity of this confused era, and that which would remain concealed under mediatized, overexposed images and inflated phrases that have come to perversely define the political and social life of the moment that is ours and that we must transform. 

This is a hesitant farewell to that project, and we are thankful for being entrusted with the work it took to pursue it. Our editorial work on South, alongside and with the two main publications of documenta 14, the documenta 14: Daybook and The documenta 14 Reader, has proven larger and more intense than we could ever have expected. In light of this, we hope that South as a State of Mind will soon sail again (in spite of the uncertain waters that it will surely traverse, and the rocks it will have to circumnavigate, the economy being one of many) in a different form and to unknown destinations. We strongly feel it is important to maintain the direction and depth South has charted since its inception, and we hope the editors to come will be able to continue that which, to us, seems as difficult as it is necessary—a magazine that speaks from and for the Global South, conceived and produced in Athens, Greece.

South as a State of Mind is itself a much-discussed title that was never meant to fake any purportedly “Southern” way of thinking and writing—as if those could follow any defined geographical directionals—but rather to open up the possibility of speaking on disparate terms and from a different standpoint than that of the globalized art world as we know it today: that is, a refusal to speak from only the position of power. This last appearance of the magazine under our editorial direction addresses, as did the previous three documenta 14 issues, a pair of terms. In this case the working theme is “violence and offering.” We sought for terms that located the matters we felt needed to be questioned into a framework that is not exactly dialectically organized in order to find a way out of falling into limiting resolutions bound to binaries, and instead favored a route that could switch between forking paths and navigate tangential, conjectural modes of questioning, thereby complicating the received map that keeps producing its own territory. 

Deterritorialized and drifting, the essays, poems, and images collected here establish their own erratic topography of elective affinities, much in the vein of the entire project of documenta 14, in its many folds. These include the Continuum, as a mode of receiving (the artists and other practitioners) in the early phase; the transgressive Parliament of Bodies, as a mode of interrogating and evading being framed in existing forms of political representation that can emerge in the improbable context of an art exhibition; the intention and practice of Learning from Athens, which also served as a provisional working title of the exhibition in both cities; and aneducation, which proposed a way out of one-way teaching by opening up to polyphonic learning processes, attended to by the Chorus—and many others. 

II.

Over the past year, we have repeatedly found ourselves reaching for books and texts about violence. Perhaps with the urge of understanding that which swells like waves around us, threatening to take us under in all its manifold, rising forms: economic violence, linguistic violence, political violence, environmental violence, gender and racial violence. Indeed, in this fourth and final issue of the documenta 14 journal South as a State of Mind, it seemed necessary to name it, finally, as one of the structuring devices of our world. Achille Mbembe, conjuring Frantz Fanon’s thinking, has written of the colony as a place where the experience and spirit of violence is built into the very structures and institutions of life. Though it is “implemented by persons of flesh and bone,” as Mbembe notes, “it is sustained by an imaginary—that is, an interrelated set of signs that present themselves, in every instance, as an indisputable and undisputed meaning. The violence insinuates itself into the economy, domestic life, language, consciousness.” He adds, definitively: “It produces a culture.” In our neocolonial, globalized present, predicated on fear, exploitation, displacement, and the police and security state, Mbembe’s reading of systemic violence is all the more germane.

To which we ask (and ask): What might counter this culture of violence both of spirit and of action? What apposite force? What to generate in the face of it? We are writers and artists, after all. Our question remains; yet in considering it anew, we realize that this is the query that has guided our editorial vision of the documenta 14 journal, and its four special issues of South, forward. Under the dark star of this question—what might we offer, and what forms might these offerings take?—this issue’s working theme is “violence and offering.” If the latter term implies both a gift and a sacrifice, it likewise describes a different kind of relationship to one’s community, society, or other. Thus does the work in this issue of South examine how violence structures our relations in and with the world, as well as the disparate offerings—linguistic, visual, auditory—continually created as a cultural movement of opposition to it.

In the following pages arise architectures of violence—prisons, sites of state torture, occupied territories—which are then deftly deconstructed by, among others, performance historian Diana Taylor and artists Ahlam Shibli and Yael Davids. The power and accuracy of thought in their writings and images stand as poetic acts of self-determination and resistance by those voices and bodies that would be concealed and muted, corralled and controlled. Likewise, the virtuosic prison letters of Rosa Luxemburg and Angela Y. Davis published here testify to a patently political genre of literature and personal protest that is age-old and yet not often explored. Luxemburg’s letters from a Breslau prison—in which she writes poignantly about the natural world and all that threatens it—punctuate Sean O’Toole’s essay on gender violence, image-making, ecology, and memory, in which the earth-body works of Ana Mendieta and the writings of John Berger also play a role in O’Toole’s examination of how state and sexual violence against women (and the land) go hand in hand. Meanwhile, Davis’s letter from the Marin County Jail, in which she decodes American racism and the prison-industrial complex from a starkly intimate position, is paired with James Baldwin’s famous “An Open Letter to My Sister, Angela Y. Davis.” His opening lines could have been written today and resonate unfalteringly:

Dear Sister:
One might have hoped that, by this hour, the very sight of chains on Black flesh, or the very sight of chains, would be so intolerable a sight for the American people, and so unbearable a memory, that they would themselves spontaneously rise up and strike off the manacles. But, no, they appear to glory in their chains; now, more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.

How to measure our safety in other ways, for example in the care and life of our community and society and world, sans chains? Is there a way to accept risk as being part of life, as the recently passed philosopher, psychoanalyst, and editor Anne Dufourmantelle so authentically wrote about and practiced? One possible answer might be found here in John Miller’s photographs, taken over half a century, of Māori resistance movements in New Zealand, documenting the decolonial social history of this small island nation. The connections between coloniality and expression, place and power, are also teased out in essays, stories, paintings, and photographs by artists Vivian Suter and Lorenza Böttner, and writers Jane Bowles and Gene Ray, as well as in Richard Fletcher’s essay on Simone Weil’s considerations of the Iliad at the time of colonial uprisings in Tunisia. Finally, poems by Robin Coste Lewis and Kim Hyesoon reveal how sexism and racism and language—both visual and textual—are laced together, while demonstrating how poetic and ethical virtuosity can unravel the violence built into linguistic structures. Lewis’s poem, comprised of found descriptions of female blackness in the history of Western art, and Kim’s poem on whiteness in the charged Korean-feminist imaginary, might both be construed as offerings working in solidarity alongside each other—rituals that counter the violent myths of racial and sexual difference and how they are codified in art and language.

Antonin Artaud once wrote: “There aren’t enough magazines, or if you will, all existing magazines are useless. We are appearing because we believe we are responding to something. We are real. This excuses us from being necessary. There should be as many magazines as there are valid states of mind.” Perhaps reconsidering, as he was wont to do, Artaud amended his praise of small magazines, adding: “They all have the serious defect of being edited by several people.”

This magazine too has been edited by several people, all real. In 2015, when we began editing what would become the documenta 14 issues of South as a State of Mind, we did so because we believed we were responding to something. Perhaps, as Artaud notes, this belief excused us from being necessary. But we believed then, as we feel now, that there should be as many magazines as there are states of mind, Southern and other. The documenta 14 journal has been the manifestation of one (or many) of them. We thank all of our contributors and editors for their exemplary work in these pages. We thank Marina Fokidis for allowing us the room of this magazine, which she founded in Athens in 2012, to think and create over the past three years. (The magazine, in all its states of mind, is now returned to her editorship and will continue publishing next year in something closer to its previous form.) And we thank you—our readers, our sisters, our brothers, our both and our others. 

As a tribute to Iranian poet and filmmaker Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), we dedicate this issue to those whose house is black.