Cover Story
“One University One Village” at documenta fifteen
Kassel documenta, one of the most influential and significant art and cultural exhibitions in the world, has been held every five years in Kassel, Hesse, central Germany, since its founding in 1955. Alongside the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Bienal, it stands as one of the world’s three major art exhibitions. documenta fifteen was curated by the Jakarta-based art collective ruangrupa, which extended a broad worldwide invitation to community-based collectives, organisations, and institutions to participate in shaping new models of sustainable development and shared collective art practice.
Following their participation in the 13th Shanghai Biennale in 2021, the “One University One Village” team was again invited to join artists Cao Minghao and Chen Jianjun in their “Water School” project at documenta fifteen. The team also contributed a keynote talk to the “Water School” workshop series.
Rammed earth is a construction form that was once widespread across China and many other parts of the world. It has successfully addressed the challenge of balancing sustainable human activity with ecological diversity in environmentally complex regions. The “One University One Village” team was invited to share the new rammed-earth techniques developed through their post-disaster reconstruction practice — their knowledge of improving and innovating traditional earth building, and of raising both the seismic performance and the architectural expression of rammed-earth construction. They also spoke about how these techniques respond, with quiet intelligence, to the interconnected forces of global climate change, industrial and technological development, disaster, and political economy.
The “Water School” exhibition also featured the team’s particle-size distribution analysis of soil samples taken from the Wenchuan Dazhaizi earthquake site, along with earth building technical documents and documentary footage of the Earth Building Workshop. These materials responded to the artists' reflection: “Any place, any micro-detail within the work of the water system can become a site for exploring and practicing deeper environmental questions — a potential school capable of forging alliances across the Earth’s ecologies.”
(Images courtesy of the artists. Photographs: Cao Minghao, Yao Huizi)