Sites of IMPACT

In this keynote address, members of ruangrupa and their collaborators will explore 'lumbung', a concept of the collective's curation of the 2022 Documenta.

 

Lumbung is a traditional agrarian practice in Indonesia. It refers to the process of sharing resources. Lumbung literally means a rice barn, and was commonly used by villagers to deposit and store their surplus. It has an architecture with space for farmers to store the surplus crops and it also functions as a space to meet, collective celebration and share appreciation for the previous harvest. 

 

Lumbung as a mechanism—something we have been and continuously experimenting with in our own ecosystem. Not only as an organisational model, but above all also as an artistic practice that does not separate art and life: in which art, community life, education, ecology, and activism go together. Art in lumbung is rooted in the local and in tradition, and is multidisciplinary and contemporary, because always in conversation with its communities, the various histories, and current realities of cultural practice and the actual socio-political surroundings. 

 

It is a commoning model for sharing resources—economical to start with, but could continuously expanding to non-monetary resources, such as ideas, knowledge, programs, innovations, time and space. Through interdisciplinary artistic interventions mainly based on our constant interest in making, meeting and spending time with people, we are always interested in continuous mutual conversations. Practicing lumbung with certain values and collaborative dialectic sensibilities that are rooted in the local in order to create and expand time, space and understanding of the public. Thinking sustainably, we intend to build something that lasts longer than an exhibition. We are transforming the resources to build these networks of artists, organizations and collectives from within: developing sustainability local strategy plan, capacity building and putting speculative, experimental and institutional projects into new practiced realities.

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ruangrupa is a Jakarta-based collective established in 2000. It is a non-profit organization that strives to support the idea of art within an urban and cultural context by involving artists and other disciplines, such as the social sciences, politics, technology, media, etc., to offer critical observations and views on Indonesian contemporary issues. ruangrupa also produce collaborative works in the form of art projects such as exhibitions, festivals, art labs, workshops, research projects, as well as books, magazines, and online-journal publications. ruangrupa’s work is an all-encompassing social, spatial, and personal practice, strongly linked to Indonesian culture in which friendship, solidarity, and community are central values. ruangrupa runs an art space in South Jakarta. The collective has participated in many cooperative projects and exhibitions, including the Gwangju Biennale (2002 and 2018), the Istanbul Biennial (2005), the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (Brisbane, 2012), the Singapore Biennale (2011), the São Paulo Biennial (2014), the Aichi Triennale (Nagoya, 2016), and Cosmopolis at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2017). In 2016, ruangrupa curated transACTION: Sonsbeek 2016 in Arnhem, the Netherlands. In 2018, the collective (together with two other Jakarta-based collectives, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara) founded GUDSKUL ( www.gudskul.art ) , an educational and networking project for creatives based on cooperative work. At documenta 14, ruangrupa participated with its internet radio station 'ruru radio' as a partner of the decentralized radio project Every Time a Ear di Soun, which brought together eight radio stations from around the world. Since 2019 ruangrupa has been appointed as the artistic director of the 15th edition of Documenta 2022.

 

 

(Photo: Gudskul/Jin Panji)