The Anatta Experiment, dOCUMENTA(13): Kassel, DE

In the late summer of 2011, seven friends were invited to Casa Anatta, Monte Verità’s principal building, in its final moments before undergoing major restoration. Casa Anatta became the scene of a weeklong “vertical drop” into tantric laws and processes normally obscured by the noise of productivity, ultimately finding its crux within Harald Szeemann’s archive and his puzzling Strukturmutter. In 1978, Szeemann used the image of the multi-breasted Goddess Artemis of Ephesus to structure the catalog for his exhibition Monte Verita à – Le Mammelle della Verita: One breast for Lebensreform, one breast for Dance and Art, one for Sexual Revolution, and so on. The “nippled woman” became the gateway to the mountain, Anatta and to the lived aspect of the experiment.

Anatta in Buddhism refers to the notion of “not self, not I, not mine”. In early Buddhist texts, the Buddha commonly uses the word when teaching that all things perceived by the senses are not really “I” or “mine” and should therefore not be clung to. Casa Anatta became Strukturmutter’s body. Not Szeemann’s Strukturmutter, but a structure with Urmutter issues, enabling the 7 anattaists to revolutionize their individual mythologies (to use Szeemann’s term) and become electric impulses flickering along Mutter’s neural pathways. 7 currents with the mobility of the Nervous System and the plasticity of the cerebral cortex – fluid and flame-like, elastic and magnetic.