Undiagnosing documenta is a workshop and reading presented as part of Decolonial Hacker's program Privation in Three Acts at documenta fifteen, in dialogue with the public program by LE18.

In Undiagnosing documenta, the memory test as a standardized tool of medical diagnosis is explored and expanded into a conceptual framework through which the surveillance (and resulting censorship) of the artists, artworks, and archives of documenta fifteen can be better analyzed and resisted. Under this light, the oppressive regulating structure of documenta fifteen is understood as a relentless memory test whereby the post-colonial subject's memories are interrogated and measured against those of the German institution and nation state, as the riddled separation between memory and History becomes weaponized. 

Stepping outside the roles of the patient/object of examination, participants were invited, in the rotunda of the Fridericianum, to undertake a collective re-writing of the memory test, creating documents against which to test the institution and its process of forgetting. What memories – individual, historical or collective – have, during documenta fifteen, been banished to oblivion? Dominant diagnoses become dispelled as lost mnemonic constellations surface to the fore. 

Related writing:
The Injunction to Forget: documenta fifteen and the Test of Memory

*Workshop documentation shot by Milan Soremsk, courtesy of documenta fifteen.