On the shore of Lake Maggiore, in the Swiss canton of Ticino, is the closest thing we might have to a monument to a curator. Next to this sunken monolith by Ulrich Rückriem, a small plaque reads, “In ricordo di Harald Szeemann.” When I went to pay my respects this summer, I found the sculpture almost covered in weeds, wrapped with rusty chain-link. Sometime in the twenty years since Szeemann’s death, it seems to have been deemed a health and safety risk. I remembered a cautionary line you used to hear in curatorial studies departments: “No one visits the grave of a curator.” It’s not a grave, exactly, but where were the other pilgrims?
For three decades Szeemann lived just across the lake, in the Maggia Valley. Burnt and burnt out from curating Documenta 5, he relocated there in 1974, having established the one-man Agentur für Geistige Gastarbeit (usually translated as Agency for Spiritual Guest Work). The move precipitated a shift in his exhibitions, which became increasingly expansive, dedicated to visionaries and outliers, many of whom had also found a home in this Italian-speaking corner of Switzerland. One of these shows, “Monte Verità: The Breasts of Truth” (1978), is today permanently installed at the Museo Casa Anatta, on Monte Verità itself, perched above Lake Maggiore. It’s a superlative example of archival choreography, telling a sprawling history of the area’s magnetic attraction for artists, anarchists, life reformers, and dancers—from Mikhail Bakunin and Rudolf von Laban to any number of Bauhäusler. As Szeemann wrote, in typically magisterial form: “In this museum there aren’t any masterpieces [...] This is a museum of the spirit, each room is a utopia.”
Despite having never held a permanent position in a museum, Szeemann was obsessed with museums and collecting. He dubbed his own vast archive, housed in a former factory he called La Fabbrica Rosa, his Museum of Obsessions. In 2011, this hoard was acquired by the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where it occupies half a mile of shelf space. But some oddities evaded the process of cataloging and acquisition. A selection of three-dozen leftovers is the basis for this publication, which accompanied a curious, tiny exhibition on Monte Verità. It expands upon an exhibition that co-curators Bohdan Stehlik and Una Szeemann (Szeemann’s daughter) organized at La Fabbrica Rosa in 2015.
The objects are uncaptioned and could mostly fit in your pocket. They include a pair of what I first took to be arrowheads but are apparently cuttlebones, worn to reveal what could be the faces of woodland sprites or maybe Bacchus. There is a silver spoon encased in resin, a beaded crucifix, a small whip, a Polaroid of Szeemann’s left eye. Frames and small boxes abound, many empty, and there is a general feeling of icons, relics, reliquaries. For Szeemann fans, it is hard to resist joining the dots to some of his curatorial preoccupations. One metal construction reminded me of his love for contraptions, like when he commissioned a life-sized version of a torture device (from Kafka’s story “In the Penal Colony,” 1919) for his exhibition “The Bachelor Machines” (1975). A ragged black flag could have been a tattered monument to Bakunin.
The presentation was installed in vitrines across two of Szeemann’s beloved “light-and-air huts,” built around 1905 to house sun-worshipping naturists and vegetarians. The title, Pretenzione Intenzione, comes from one of his handwritten notes, which the catalog’s introduction argues could suggest “a desire lies dormant in the objects that makes itself felt intuitively and intimates a purpose that attains only passing concretion in the telling of stories.” Whether this is the case, or indeed makes sense, is an open question. But posing questions and telling stories are certainly at stake here.
Pretenzione Intenzione is the oddest addition to the half-shelf of Szeemann literature that has emerged since his death, in ways that are both welcome and frustrating. It gathers black-and-white photos of the remaining objects, shot specimen-like, by psychoanalyst and artist Stehlik. Six texts take the form of essays, poems, fragments and diaries, from dramaturg Hayat Erdoğan, Una Szeemann, and anthropologist Michael Taussig, among others. Most agree that these items, which Taussig calls “little fetishes,” are junk, trash, remnants. Interpretation and conjecture are largely avoided, in favor of digression and deferral: “To classify is to forget,” writes Erdoğan. “In one drawer I find, well, what is that actually?”
One unexpected refrain is a correlation between Szeemann and the ocean. A poem by Simone Lappert plays several times on “Szeamann” (a pun that works better in German); Raimundas Malašauskas’s essay is titled “For the Ink Sailor”; Taussig insists on naming him “The Seaman”; while Michele Robecchi prefers “the captain.” For me, this does little more than further romanticize the figure of a questing nomad, who has already been pretty thoroughly romanticized.
We are perhaps now a decade removed from—to continue the oceanic metaphors—the high-water mark of our own obsession with Szeemann. For example, in Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s Documenta 13 (2012), curators were figured as agents, while correspondence between Szeemann and Boetti was displayed. A year later in Venice, Massimiliano Gioni’s biennale drew heavily on the themes of Szeemann’s Documenta, and coincided with the Fondazione Prada’s remarkable reconstruction of “When Attitudes Become Form” (1969). All of this culminated in the Getty-organized touring retrospective “Museum of Obsessions” (2018–19). Since then, Szeemann’s legacy has undoubtedly fallen from view somewhat, counterbalanced and, to a degree, eclipsed by the ongoing interest in the “postcolonial constellations” of Okwui Enwezor, who died in 2019 (and whose selected writings have just been published by Duke University Press).
Pretenzione Intenzione is concerned less with legacy-building than with those parts of every life that resist being categorized or comprehended. Its goal is not clarity but occlusion, fabulation and guesswork proffered as generative forms of interpretation. Taussig, for his part, goes so far as to wonder whether Pretenzione Intenzione might come closer to the core of the all-encompassing Szeemann project than what lies in the meticulously ordered Getty vaults—awkward, expansive, even excessive.
Pretenzione Intenzione – Objects of Beauty and Bewilderment from the Archive of Harald Szeemann, edited by Michele Robecchi, Bohdan Stehlik, Una Szeemann, and Elsa Himmer, was published by Edition Patrick Frey in July 2025.
