Graziela Kunsch

Between 2001 and 2003 she opened her house as a “public residency” and hosted residencies, exhibitions, workshops, a restaurant, and a library. Kunsch was also a member of the Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare/Free Public Transport Movement), of the community design project USINA and co-founder of the Public Clinic of Psychoanalysis. She worked as a teacher at the Federal University of São Paulo and at the State University of Rio de Janeiro and has taught at a theater school, working in collective artistic projects with children, teenagers, and adults.

At documenta fifteen, Kunsch opens a Public Daycare, inspired by the pedagogical approach of twentieth-century Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler, in the Fridericianum. The daycare is open from 10 am to 5 pm, and is free of charge for babies aged 0 to 3 years and those responsible for them.  It is intended as a space where we, adults, more than teaching their babies, can learn with them.

Visitors without babies have access to reading and video rooms. On the walls, they can see photographs by Marian Reismann, who for decades documented babies playing, and the relationship between babies and carers, at the Pikler-Lóczy residential nursery, in Budapest, Hungary. In the library, in addition to books on early education, there is a Library of Playful Objects. Videos show recordings the artist made of her daughter’s free motor development. After 6 pm, any visitor can circulate throughout the whole area and see furniture designed for babies’ growing autonomy and environments set up for play, with open-ended materials and no predefined use.

The transformation of the monumental museum building into an everyday living space is a collaboration between Kunsch and Elke Avenarius. Avenarius worked as a civil engineer before becoming a mother and co-founding Kleine Entdecker (Little Discoverers) in Kassel, a nursery that recognizes the child as the protagonist of their own development.

Among Kunsch’s group exhibitions are the Oslo Biennale (2021), for which she edited the sixth issue of Urbânia magazine, focused on the notion of “public as mutual”, and the 29th and 31st São Paulo Biennial (2010 and 2014). She was a resident at the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art, Warsaw (2018) and at The Grand Domestic Revolution project at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons, Utrecht (2010 and 2011).