The documenta 14 team decided against producing a regular exhibition catalogue, opting instead for a ‘daybook’ that covers all 163 days of the event: with two locations, the main thing the entries had in common was time. Each artist was allotted a day, with each entry accompanied by a second date in which artists went into a specific event that was personally important to them. The book, designed by Laurenz Brunner and Julia Born, can be seen as a record of ‘the passage of a few persons through a rather brief unity of time’ (the title of Guy Debord’s 1959 film). The book functions as a chronological calendar, while the personal timeline, in contrast, is organised the other way around and presented in a black rectangle. As often the case with inextricable books, the design refers to another medium. The cover is made of plastic and is reminiscent of a personal organiser. The conflicting timeline stimulates one’s awareness of time, and the reader is activated by the disorienting design.
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