This is the first of three posts on this year’s Documenta art exhibition. -Jeff

Documenta opened its doors to the public on June 6th. Documenta —one of the largest contemporary art exhibitions in the world—takes place in Kassel, Germany every five years. This high point of the international art world calendar was initiated in 1955 to heal the scars of the Second World War, largely as a response to the “Degenerate Art” exhibition by NAZI regime. But it also intended to show the open mindedness of western societies and freedom of expression to the rest of the world, specifically the Eastern Bloc. Obviously the world’s political conjuncture has dramatically changed, since then, as has the exhibition.

One of the most interesting aspects of this year’s exhibition was its multifaceted relationship with the idea of nature and the paranormal. Some of the projects sited in Kassel’s Orangerie, Karlsaue Park and the Ottoneum (the natural history museum) offered a distinct approach to engage with matter and living things as an artistic category.

Eighteenth century parks in the English tradition are spread around Europe as idealized slices of nature in urban settings, with Arcadian forests, bridges, small houses and creeks. The bourgeoisie depicted the countryside in a sentimental way, as a response to rapid urbanization. Nature became something to be looked at and leisurely experienced. Parks are highly crafted artificial sites and reflect this modernist ideology. A small army of maintenance workers maintains the ecosystem and botanists carefully manage the flowers and plants. Even wildness is manufactured.

Pierre Huyghe’s “Untitled (2011-12),” one of the most intriguing projects of the exhibition, negotiates with the park itself. When one arrives to the composting area of the park to see Huyghe’s work, they encounter scattered aggregate, asphalt, sand, soil and construction materials. The location registers as peculiar and haphazard. One inevitably wonders if they arrived to the right site, or just a staging areas for park services. But there is no randomness like this in German parks, known for their preciseness. So this oddity resolves itself as you navigate by jumping over the . . .

Read more: Notes on dOCUMENTA (13): Parks, Nature and Artifact