engleză
Avery F. Gordon was invited by the artist Ines Schaber to, collaborate on her project for dOCUMENTA (13), titled The Workhouse. In this notebook, Gordon is engaged in a portrait of Breitenau, the twelfth-century Benedictine monastery, located twenty kilometers south of Kassel, that has been used throughout its history for various purposes, and since the nineteenth century has been a site of confinement and correction. Turned into a workhouse in 1874, it subsequently became a concentration camp in Nazi years, then a girls reformatory until the 1970s, and is now an open psychiatric residential treatment facility and a rehabilitation center, as well as a Gedenkstätte memorial and research center. During a site visit with Schaber, Gordon, with the help of the memorial s cofounder and director Gunnar Richter, immerses herself in Breitenau s history and recalls its function as a place for the enclosure of disobedient social subjects and their ideas, developing a kind of encyclopedia of the prisoner.
