In the spirit of sustainability, documenta fifteen offers exhibition materials to interested parties.
At the close of the exhibition on September 25, 2022, documenta fifteen will give away exhibition materials that are no longer needed free of charge to non-profit initiatives, in line with the idea of sustainable material cycles. Interested projects can apply for exhibition materials via the email address materialcycles@documenta.de. Ideally, the items can be collected directly from the 32 documenta fifteen exhibition venues after the end of the exhibition.
Since November 2020, documenta fifteen has already been a member of the Aktionsnetzwerk Nachhaltigkeit in Kultur und Medien (Action Network Sustainability in Culture and Media), which is funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media. The aim here is to learn from each other and develop this sector as a whole through active exchange on a sustainable future for the cultural sector.
Furthermore, since July 2021 documenta fifteen has been part of the network Initiativen für Materialkreisläufe (Initiatives for Material Cycles – IfM), the umbrella organization currently being set up for Germany-wide material distribution and logistics initiatives. Given the project nature of exhibitions, there is usually a short-term need for resources. The goal is to build a network of collectives and initiatives involved in the distribution and reuse of these materials. In this context, it is not only the sharing of material resources that is central here, but also the exchange of knowledge, motivation, and experience. The prelude to this was a symposium hosted by documenta fifteen in July 2021 at ruruHaus with participants from 19 initiatives across Germany. The event is documented here.
The assembly of documenta fifteen was supervised together with the network Initiatives for Material Cycles. Now the dismantling is being prepared accordingly. Practical strategies are to be tested to ensure the resources of a temporary exhibition are fed into existing cycles wherever possible. In this context, documenta fifteen offers a platform for experimentation.
The Initiatives for Material Cycles were given a presence at the exhibition venue Hübner areal in Kassel East, among other places. Here, the network Initiatives for Material Cycles offered an oversized dog made of theater props for adoption in order to address material cycles in the cultural sector. The so-called Moondog from a performative concert of the same name at Schauspielhaus Bochum has since found a new home at the Wilhelm-Leuschner-Schule Niestetal in Kassel. Transportation of the former “Krümel” stage set to the school of culture marks the start of the transfer of material to schools. In the spirit of sustainable use of resources at documenta fifteen by the IfM and the Kassel initiative MvK – Materialverteilung (MvK – Material Distribution), the topic is being communicated to Kassel schoolchildren in a proactive and illustrative way.
The following organizations are represented in the network together with documenta fifteen: Bauteilbörse, Bauteilsichter:in, CO2-Rechner, Haus der Materialisierung (HdM), Helmholtz-Klima-Initiative, IfM – Initiativen für Materialkreisläufe, Institut für angewandte Heterotopie (IFAH), kollaborativ, (Material-)Komplizenschaft, Koproduktion, Kreislaufwirtschaft, Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Materialinitiativen, Materialkreisläufe, Netzwerk, Obsoleszenz, Plattform and Suffizenz.