TACITA DEAN: I’m Tacita Dean. I’ve been living in Berlin since 2000 and I’ve worked in a lot of these bombed cities, Göttingen, Darmstadt, and Kassel is another one. 

NARRATOR: These postcards are images of Kassel, Germany, a town that was once a Nazi stronghold. By the end of World War II, it was reduced to rubble. Today it’s the site of Documenta—an international art exhibition that happens every five years. Dean made this piece as a commission for the 2012 exhibition. 

DEAN: It was just this idea of imagining a town through its postcards. In order to understand a city, I often look for found postcards, historical postcards in junk shops. And there was this whole box of these historical Kassel postcards, pre-war, and I bought them all, there and then. When I started to look at them, I realized how different they are from the contemporary Kassel. 

A lot of the names no longer exist. Some of them, it’s just a brick wall over what was there. I mean, unbelievable the difference between the two. This terrible post-war architecture, these very sort of generic Kaufhauses and buildings that they have. 

NARRATOR: Dean painted some of those present-day elements over the historic images and then mailed postcards 3,000 miles away to Kabul, Afghanistan.  

DEAN: Kabul which of course was a city being disfigured in the same way that Kassel was, so there was this connection. And they would be shown in Kabul, which is what happened in the end.