Two opposite vertices and a façade of an imaginary pyramid were constructed in three underground locations in the city of Kassel. They do not surface above ground. The visitor of dOCUMENTA 13 needs to search for this simulacrum of an archaeology of which consists Renata Lucas’ Yesterday, quicksands.

The artist juxtaposed the plan of a large pyramid on top of Kassel’s city centre, dislocating its vertices just a bit from the main exhibition venues. The visitor finds parts of these inaugural “remains” or newly built “leftover” in the basement of the Fridericianum, in the underground level of the Kalfhof department store, and in the basement of artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s house (former house of the Grimm Brothers, not open to public visitation). The fourth element that buttresses the pyramid is found in the underground parking lot located at the Friedrichsplatz, in the form of six video monitors displaying images of a Kassel stripped bare and under a sand storm, as if depicted in real time from security cameras.

The images of the city that Renata Lucas manipulated in the videos are fictional – they were snapped shot by the artist and acquired on the internet – and the pyramid, a solid geometric figure mathematically calculated, is built with plywood and applied concrete. However, the security camera monitors suggest the images’ veracity, and the careful installation of the three “remains” of the pyramid attest to them always having been there.

Yet, you touch them, and the thin plywood sheets and concrete make a hollow sound. You go up the stairs, and Kassel is filled with a large crowd of art visitors and displays the grand infrastructure that hosts the biggest contemporary art exhibition in the world. The bulky scale at which Renata Lucas’ piece starts – the city, the pyramid and the exhibition – nevertheless renders an almost invisible and a piercingly subtle effect. The artist puts us in a place of a strange notion of time; perhaps a familiar one, which simultaneously escapes from us, but that intimidates and scares us with its inexorable presence. The artist catapults us right into the now, reminding us that the contemporary, or contemporariness “is a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.”[1]

Renata Lucas invites us to travel out of the chronology of the now through the immediacy of the now. The parallel and negative process of urbanization of the city that the artist reveals does not conform to the carefully organized one that happens above ground, as it undermines the narrative that holds Kassel as a site of negotiations with a trauma buttressed by historical facts. One is reminded of the underground as a burial site for anonymous bodies that succumbed during World War II due to the massive bombing that the city underwent for being the centre of the weapon industry of the III Reich. But one is also reminded of the fact that Kassel remains the centre of the weapon industry in Germany today, which feeds the international market such as the conflicts in the Middle East. The age-old fear of the other, of the foreign, is present in both political facts, but with a slight change of the main characters. Anachronies are either flashbacks or flashforwards.

The pyramid, states the artist, “is a popular element that reaches the low and high cultures; it is a common figure that, despite its mystical aspect, points towards the idea of a monument, towards the fantasy of a superior ‘ancient’ civilization. The monumentality of the pyramid refers to the monumentality of dOCUMENTA, which attracts a massive crowd every five years in search of something, a sign, to an otherwise inexpressive city. Moreover, the pyramid also alludes to the delicate nature of the curatorial approach of extending the exhibition to Afghanistan and Egypt”. This archaeology of the present, which makes us slip all the way through different verb tenses, adheres to these sites and digs for the anachronisms that constitute our current time. The disjunction is metaphorized in the physical act of having to travel between floor levels, in a play of entering and exiting the official narrative so as to bring to the fore the in-between-lines that architects it. In Renata Lucas’ piece, fiction is the disjunctive force that ejects the anachronic from its misplaced chronology so as to elucidate the under nettings of the now.

The title Yesterday, quicksands was borrowed from the writings of Surrealist artist Alberto Giacometti, in which he depicts a childhood memory of having encountered a monolith that could be part of a pyramid in his neighbourhood playground. Renata Lucas makes use of a surrealist game to evoke the crossings that weave together our ability to firmly hold our gaze into our time. Proper to the artist’s working methodology, her pieces start with an approach to the commissioned site, detecting the social, political and historical information that are embedded in the building, public space and intellectual framework proposed by the exhibition she is participating in. Architecture, urban space and language are seen as common grounds for the artist to intervene on, in and under; or, more precisely, they equally provide the artist with the space of a blank page for her to write her fictions.

For the Casa de Juntas de Guernica, a simple gesture temporarily destabilizes the oak tree as a symbol of the traditional freedom for the Biscayan people, and by extension, the Basque people as a whole. A foreign tree, a Brazilian sibipiruna, is planted just outside the fenced garden that houses the almost sacred oaks. A site of remembrance of the bloody war that constitutes an episode of the history of Guernica as well as a geographic point of confluence of separatist conflicts in the Basque region, the singled out foreign tree is planted in the sidewalk that circles the building as another visitor to the site, another other. Just as with the ‘real time’ images of the security camera monitors displaying what Kassel could have been, or will have been, or will be, the sibipiruna-visitor, perhaps artificially, attests to what that region still is, or still has been maintained to be, or yet, what could have been released from being. Who knows? The historical traumas that we have to face and undergo may be just the fact that history represented – the visual or written representation of history – comes with a fictional charge too heavy to bear. Again, Renata Lucas performs a symbolic slippage of sings and of time; a physical disjunction, a crossing of the now and its anachronism.

[1] Giorgio Agamben, “What is the Contemporary?”, in “What is an Apparatus?” and other essays. Translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009) p. 41