Foreword

lumbung one entered the apparatus of documenta to fold it in on itself, and unsettled even the expectations of documenta fifteen being a ‘Global South’ exhibition. In this regard, one of the most common and unreflected statements about ruangrupa’s project was expressed through the question where is the art? And yet, among the evident and profusely palpable ecosystemic experiments – ruangrupa defining ecosystem or, in Bahasa Indonesia ekosistem, as the ‘collaborative network structures through which knowledge, resources, ideas, and programs are shared and linked’ – and the unfolding of the project as one foregrounding collectivity, sociality and decentralised organisation, it is also the quality, diversity and amount of artworks that stood out. We feel that the specificity of some of these works has rarely been addressed, the art press, both commercial and academic, focussing mostly on either the overarching concept of lumbung or the stigmatisation of ruangrupa. Even if some of the projects presented in Kassel were able to become independent from the event as a whole, this was only thanks to an acceptance of the loss of control built-in in lumbung. In this regard, the present issue is premised on the intention to examine some of the collectives included in lumbung one and their work with the attention we deem they deserve but have not been given yet. If only three of the nine contributions in this issue directly engage with projects in lumbung one, the escalation of the attacks and destruction of Gaza since October 2023 have magnified, retrospectively and in horrific ways, the West’s resistance to, if not its attempts to suppress subaltern and Global South worldviews that had played out in Kassel. Following lumbung one’s cascading logic, this issue then branches out, on the one hand, towards further engagements with Palestinian art and visual culture as a way to fend off ongoing erasure and, on the other, towards new understandings of geographies of art practices and histories.