One of the most noted failures in modern times is the 1978 Jonestown incident in Guyana. When Rev. Jim Jones managed to convince a large number of people to follow him to a remote area in Guyana to establish a new society based on Christian fundamentalist dogma, they did not foresee the catastrophic result. Eventually journalists and politicians from the United States came to visit the site, but things turned paranoid. Amid the fear of outside intervention, almost all of the approximately 900 members of this so-called Peoples Temple committed suicide, were murdered, or were forced to kill themselves. Soldiers arrived on the scene to find over 900 bodies rotting in the subtropical forest. The outcome of a perhaps once beautiful idea was a tragedy.

As I see it, this experiment contained at least one contradiction: leaving the California coast, all of their belongings, and their friends and family, these people also abandoned their pasts. A new history was to be written from year zero. The contradiction can be detected in one of the photographs from this event. Above the stage in a meeting space in Jonestown appears is a large sign emblazoned with the famous Santayana quote “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” The questions provoked by this statement are quite obvious: What past? Whose past?

Here’s an example. The very short history of electro-acoustic music has been written and rewritten. It hasn’t been a difficult task for a few musicologists to investigate and research this rather narrow cultural field. Pierre Schaeffer founded the “musique concrète” tradition, and the Cologne school founded the electronic music all triggered by composers such as Edgard Varèse and Leon Theremin. These facts are widely known. A year ago, however, Else Marie Pade released a CD, and suddenly a new branch on the tree of electronic music pioneers became visible. Apparently Pade’s earlier works date from the 1950s and onward. She visited France and Germany, and her music was performed along with Schaeffer’s, Stockhausen’s, and so on. The history of electronic music had to be rewritten once again.

The large Documenta exhibition could work as a space for re-investigating the past. The title of the exhibition would be something like:

Those Who Do Not Remember the Past Are Condemned to Rewrite It (New Stories)

I’d invite 10 artists; those 10 would invite 2 each; those 20 would invite 2 each; and this would continue until there are 5 invites. The sum of invited artists would be 320.

The exhibition would be divided up into 5 parts. One show, including 64 artists, would be held per year. Each invited artist would be asked to submit one work. It should deal with this subject: their history of the 20th century. The work the artist submits could also be developed by someone else. Fantastic events generated by extreme people color their surrounding community and vary depending on the location. Every artist has encountered such people — it’s a part of their history. There are as many of these histories as there are artists, and even if coincidences appear everyone has a different story to tell. This “someone else” the artist is encouraged to invite to participate can be from any discipline: visual art, sound art, literature, film, etc. All will be accepted — even the artists that normally wouldn’t be fitted into the category of art.