Marta Minujín at Documenta 14 in Kassel
In 1983 Marta Minujín had erected in Buenos Aires Partenón de libros prohibidos: a sculpture in which 20,000 volumes were stacked and put to the fore by the military dictatorship. On the occasion of Documenta 14 in 2017, entitled Learning from Athens, the artist reconstructed the monument in a dialogue between two ideas of Europe. Thanks to crowdfounding, 100,000 books were collected, then assembled in Parthenon of Books. This remake was arranged in the Friedrichsplatz in Kassel, where, in 1933, thousands of “degenerate” texts had been burned by the Nazis.
The monument was built with the help of local university students, who helped Minujín draw up a list that includes at least 170 titles that, during the history of civilization, were banned, censored and burned.
It is an epoch-making but not eternal work: from the closing day of «Documenta», on 17 September, anyone could take a volume, saving it from dismantling the installation. A political but not an ideological work, which condemns all the censorship of thought, the paper temple of Marta Minujin has had a symbolic value that has been able to go beyond conceptual art and intellectual provocation.
