Press Release
American Academy Fellow Avery F. Gordon at dOCUMENTA(13)
Berlin (June 6, 2012) The American Academy in Berlin is pleased to announce that Avery F.
Gordon, Professor of Sociology at University of California Santa Barbara and the
Academy’s Spring 2012 Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow, together with Berlin-based artist Ines
Schaber, will participate in dOCUMENTA(13). Their installation The Workhouse: Room 2 will
be on show June 9 through September 12, 2012, in Kassel.
The Workhouse is the name for a series of projects concerned with the cultivation of alternative /
autonomous / utopian ways of living and working. Room 2 of The Workhouse engages with the long
history of the former monastery, workhouse, and correctional facility, Breitenau. Installed in the
Handwerkskammer’s modernist building in central Kassel, Room 2 creates a space in which the
ideas and thoughts that were subject to correction might find a temporary but more hospitable
place to dwell uncorrected. Moving between various historical episodes - and guided by the voices
of several daydreamers - the past, present, future, and not-yet of the workhouse is reimagined.
The Workhouse: Room 2 on show at dOCUMENTA(13)
Location: Handwerkskammer Scheidemannplatz 2, Kassel
Date: June 9 - September 16, 2012
Opening hours: 10h00 -- 20h00 daily
Produced by Berlin artist Ines Schaber with American Academy Fellow and Professor Avery F.
Gordon. Supported by the Berlin Senate Chancellery of Cultural Affairs.
Upcoming events:
Saturday, 21 July 2012: ”A Walk to Breitenau”
Ines Schaber, Dr. Gunnar Richter (director of the Gedenkstätte Breitenau) and Avery Gordon will
host a talking walk from Kassel to Breitenau.
Sunday, 22 July 2012: Roundtable Discussion
Avery Gordon and Ines Schaber will participate in a roundtable at Ständehaus before the premier
broadcast of curator Lívía Páldi’s radio program about Breitenau on hr2-kultur.
Organized by Maybe Education and Public Programs Department of dOCUMENTA(13). For
more information: http://d13.documenta.de/or email: maybeeducation@documenta.de
To contact the artists: Avery Gordon Phone: +33 6 07 87 91 12; Email: averygordon@soc.ucsb.edu
Am Sandwerder 17-19 • 14109 Berlin • Tel. +49-30-804 83-0 • www.americanacademy.de
Avery F. Gordon is a writer, educator, and radio producer who teaches in the Department of
Sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara. She is the author of Notes for the Breitenau
Room of The Workhouse (Hatje Cantz Verlag (2011), and Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological
Imagination (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
Ines Schaber is an artist based in Berlin. Since 2005 she has been engaged in the working archive, a
project that consists in a series of case studies, texts, and artistic works through which she
investigates and tests notions of the archive.
The American Academy in Berlin was established in 1994 by Richard C. Holbrooke and other
distinguished Germans and Americans to foster greater understanding and dialogue between the
people of the United States and the people of Germany. A private, nonprofit, non-partisan center
for advanced research in a range of academic and cultural fields, the Academy awards fellowships
to about two-dozen emerging or established scholars, writers, and professionals each year and
brings leading Americans to Berlin for briefer visits for a robust exchange of views between the
people of Germany and the United States.
Photo Credit: Ines Schaber, Untitled (2012). Part of The Workhouse, a project by Ines Schaber with
Avery Gordon. For high-resolution photos please contact Malte Mau, American Academy in
Berlin, Phone: +49 30 – 80483 404; Email: mm@americanacademy.de
Am Sandwerder 17-19 • 14109 Berlin • Tel. +49-30-804 83-0 • www.americanacademy.de