Open Source PDF of 'Lumbung, Commons and Community Art'
The Open Source PDF of my & Simon Kentgens' book "Lumbung, commons and community art" with HumDrumPress is out:
https://humdrumpress.com/Lumbung
Full quote of the introduction:
_This conversation originally took place on Radio WORM, a community internet radio station run by, and inside of Rotterdam’s alternative cultural venue WORM. Our one and a half hour talk, interrupted only by a few short pieces of music and sound recordings, took place on the evening of Friday, March 24, 2023. We, Simon Kentgens and Florian Cramer, had been witnesses and peripheral participants of documenta fifteen in Kassel in the summer of 2022, and tried to draw our preliminary, personal conclusions after an intense and controversial event.
For us, documenta fifteen was the culmination of a longer debate about radical collectivity and the commons in the arts. The commons is a model of production, and of society, in which resources are freely shared and collectively owned by a community. Examples include Free/Open Source software, public libraries and other shared resources.
As collaborators at Willem de Kooning Academy, Rotterdam’s art school, we had been involved in various projects around collective, self-organized, community- and commons-oriented, and often non-Western arts practices, in order to rethink our school’s curriculum, which, like most art schools, focuses on students’ individual artistic and work portfolio development. For years we had worked with various local and international multidisciplinary artist collectives in workshops we organized at our school. These included Gudskul, an alternative art school founded by three Jakarta-based collectives, including ruangrupa; 展銷場 Display Distribute from Hong Kong; Jatiwangi art Factory from Indonesia; Banana School (BananSkolen), an alternative, non-hierarchical school run by the Goodiepal & Pals (GP&PLS) collective in Copenhagen; the Amsterdam-based We Are Here collective of undocumented refugees, and the Rotterdam-based Take-A-Way collective of artists, refugees and addicts.
We reencountered many of these collectives as documenta fifteen participants in the summer of 2022. Our co-worker reinaart vanhoe had worked closely with ruangrupa for more than twenty years, has published a book on them and other Indonesian artist collectives as part of our school’s research program, and ran a community space at documenta fifteen.
Founded in the 1950s as a five-yearly exhibition, Documenta is widely considered to be the world’s most important contemporary art event, and usually features art by big-name artists, or artists who become big-name by exhibiting at Documenta. Documenta fifteen, however, broke with the conventions of contemporary art by neither being a curated exhibition, nor even an art show in any strict sense, but rather a three-month festival to which collectives invited other collectives. These collectives were physically present for many of the one hundred days of the event, and the emphasis was on activities such as workshops, social gatherings, cooking, and other communal happenings in addition to exhibitions.
This was part of what ruangrupa, the artistic directors of documenta fifteen, called “lumbung”. In their home country of Indonesia, a lumbung is a rice barn that is collectively used by farmers. In a broader sense, the word corresponds to the English word “commons” which originally stood for collectively owned and used agricultural land. In German and Dutch, the words “Allmende” and “meent” have similar origins and meanings. For ruangrupa, lumbung is also a practice that enables an alternative economy of collectivity, shared resource building, and equitable distribution.
The distribution of curatorial control, its multidisciplinarity, collectivity and shared ownership made documenta fifteen a radical, large-scale, real-life commoning experiment: by actually running and living a commons, rather than just imagining it (as art is usually expected to do). It also meant that things went wrong. We aren’t claiming any critical authority here, to have the last word on this experiment, but wish to share our experiences and observations to contribute to a larger body of histories of documenta fifteen, written by its community members._