Water System Refuge #3

Cao Minghao
& Chen Jianjun

Tent fabric Installation, Black Tent Meetings

Their contribution brings together many people—herders and pastoralists, Kassel’s diverse communities, scientists, geologists, anthropologists, lumbung members, lumbung artists, and visitors. The site for interactions is a black tent—woven in yak hair and mixed fabric—installed in the park outside the Orangerie. The tent takes the form of nomadic housing used by herder groups in a region stretching from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern Tibetan Plateau. These groups use the tent not only for refuge, but as sites for governance and ritual.

Within this tent, viewers can see other components to the project: research from workshops, presentations, a new publication titled The Ecology of Sands and “Black Beach” , and the video Grass, Sand and Global Environmental Apparatus. While the tent will be partly biodegradable by the end of the exhibition, its yak hair does not“live and die” at documenta fifteen. Minghao and Jianjun have worked with the Grassland Ecological Planting Farmers’ Cooperative to facilitate production of yak hair slippers.

(From the documenta website)