In a review of the second Johannesburg Biennial in 1997, curated by Okwui Enwezor (later artistic director of Documenta11), Armin Medosch reported Catherine David (artistic director of documenta X that same year) as saying in a private conversation: 'I am tired of this grocery-shop idea of identity. It is a very Anglo-Saxon notion: be what you want but stay where you are. I am coming from a very republican regime. I prefer the idea of citizenship to isolated communities.'¹ Eight years later, in 2005, Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack used the quotation 'Be what you want but stay where you are' as the title for a show they curated at the Witte de With in Rotterdam. Thus, knowingly or unknowingly - who knows? - one Documenta director's comment on the curatorial work of another former Documenta director became the title for an exhibition curated by someone who would be the next Documenta artistic director.² The title of the Rotterdam exhibition, therefore, could be read as a group portrait of a kind: De regenten van de Heilige Documenta.³

However, as the text that presented the exhibition made clear, the title 'Be what you want but stay where you are' was intended to refer to a certain concept of 'tolerance', more or less perceived as the specific Dutch modality of governmentality with respect to the other ('be what you want'), and, at the same time, to mechanisms of exclusion that go with that supposedly typical Dutch tolerance ('stay where you are', or 'don't come bother us'). 'Be what you want but stay where you are', if