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Dean Kissick shares his diary of four days in Athens during the preview days of documenta 14. 

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 5

On Wednesday afternoon the PKK (the left-wing organisation known as the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, currently fighting Islamic State in Syria) are flying their flags in Syntagma Square in front of the Greek parliament. They have a small table laid out with books. The Council of the European Union considers the PKK to be a terrorist organisation but nobody seems to mind them being here. 

In the evening I’m invited to a party that runs every night of the opening week until 7am. It’s called “Pizzag8”. But I go to another bar and meet a young man with two black eyes. He was beaten up by local hooligans for wearing the wrong football scarf. He doesn’t know what scarf he was wearing. “Oh,” says his taxi driver when he sees his black eyes, “you’ve been smoking what I’ve been smoking!”

THURSDAY, APRIL 6

Morning begins in the bowels of the Athens Concert Hall waiting for the press conference to start. There is wifi here so I look at Twitter; everyone is mocking Kendall Jenner for her radical-chic Pepsi ad, which will soon be pulled. The curtain rises. All of the curators and artists are sitting onstage and perform Greek composer Jani Christou’s experimental score Epicycle (1968–2017), which, we’re told, inspired the curatorial process of documenta 14: Learning from Athens. The piece is just loads of people howling different things and stamping their feet.

This edition of documenta takes as a mascot the owl of Athena, symbolising wisdom. “We believe,” says artistic director Adam Szymczyk, “that unlearning everything we believe to know is the best beginning.” In other words we should aspire to the Socratic paradox: to know that we know nothing. He also notes that much has happened during the making of this show: the US election, the Brexit referendum, the 2015 Greek bailout referendum and subsequently the government’s acceptance of a bailout package containing larger pension cuts and tax increases than those rejected in the referendum. A lot more will happen over the course of this unusually long exhibition, with huge elections looming in Europe. A lot will happen over the next three days too.

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