Theaster Gates: 12 Ballads for Hugenot House (dOCUMENTA)

12 Ballads for Huguenot House chronicles a project by American installation artist Theaster Gates (born 1973), in which he united two disused buildings--one in Chicago and the other in Kassel, Germany--by dismantling parts of each to reuse in the rebuilding of the other. Huguenot House, in Kassel, was built in the early nineteenth century by migrant workers, as were so many of the houses in Gates’ own neighborhood in Chicago, and today is in a state of disrepair. Gates therefore proposed an architectural exchange, transporting materials from a dilapidated building in Chicago to renovate Huguenot House, while reusing materials from Huguenot House to reconstruct the Chicago building.