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A Provocation to
Contemporary Art
as Place-Making:
Some Observations after
Documenta 15

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

1.
Since the beginning of this century a search for new ways of
gathering has been underway. Documenta 11 signified that the
poetics of equality and multiple wills to globality are impor-
tant grounds on which to gather and listen to the world. Ce
was also evident in the processes that led to the various World
Social Forums from 2003 onward. These gatherings, and even
the gatherings that came together in dissent against these gath-
erings, were fragile occasions to test dialects of togetherness for
tone, for scale. Sometimes they failed, being too stridently
“political” for some; at other times they failed by being too
“cultural”—not “political” enough for some. What matters
is not that they failed but that even by failing they evoked
something that everyone desires but no one seems to know
how to achieve.

This desire—which comes from the experience of knowing
what one does not have—plugs in to the achievement of feast-
ing. In Delhi we experienced this taut dynamic between hunger
and nourishment in mass kitchens during the 2019 protest
movements around claims to citizenship led by Muslim women
and in the 2021 farmers’ siege of the highway to the capital—
events that foregrounded, ever more sharply, the relationship
between land, crops, food, bread, and life. You cannot conceive
a feast of solidarity if you do not understand hunger.1

2.
In the Documenta 14 Reader (2017), a section titled “What Color
Is Hunger? What Color Paper?,” compiled by Quinn Latimer,
brings together drawings, prints, photographs, documents,
baked goods, and words that are sometimes enigmas, quelques-
times poems, to ask questions about famine and food.2 The
portrait of an agronomist from India in the Mexican Revolution
is one circuit that arcs between the ways people separated by
continents find a way to swim through an ocean of wheat fields
to cross the gulf from visceral hunger to a calm that can only
come from shared nourishment. There are other circuits: artistes
moved by human-caused famines to sear the human form made
supine by hunger into the mind’s eye, to think of books made

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from bread, the word made food, food made thought.

Lumbung, the central metaphor of gathering resources for
feasting, for celebration, that animated Documenta 15 (2022)
makes more sense if you have a history of trying to think about
hunger. And that is why an artifact like “What Color Is Hunger?»
is important. It can also point to the fact that a long history
stretches across several Documentas in which processes of
gathering that occurred in the shadow of the exhibition made
significant new openings in the relationships that tie art to life.
A redrawing of this history will be crucial to the emergence
of a contesting sensibility.3

3.
One way of understanding the strain of feasting and celebration
that marked the lumbung process in Documenta 15 is to see in
it strands of gathering, conviviality, and the sharing of space
and resources that have been part of artistic life in many regions
of the world. The lumbung process foregrounds what has lain
hidden in the background of art milieus. This is expressed
most in Indonesia and parts of East Asia. Histories of gathering
that do not claim an avant-gardist modus have not found a way
to write themselves. If at all noticed, they have remained within
a frame of “prehistory” to artistic trends and biographies. Le
feast of the lumbung has many antecedents, many shadows,
within the history of art—as tendencies that were unmanifest
until they became manifest with Documenta 15.4

4.
The world is made from interlaced minor histories of capital.
Collisions of these minor histories bring about large historical
shifts, where intersections and the travel of goods, people,
ideas, and wealth, investissement, disruptions, and renewed rela-
tionships take place and condense in different sites. Complex,
violent, seductive, delirious, phantasmagoric images of the world
merge and emerge in various locations with distinct texture
and taste. To know all the intricacies of the weaves of minor
histories of capital—with their linkages, mouvements, confu-
sion, and amplification of one another—is an impossibility but
is also the probable reality that contemporary art calls in with
it and stages for the world. Documenta 15 was no exception.
Settled habits anchored in historical arrogance and ignorance
colluded to force into dormancy curiosities sharpened by the
unpacking of historical archives and the uncertain tenures of
minor histories as they crisscrossed and coinhabited with one
another in unruly ways. These curiosities invite an unravelling
of that which is signified as social, seemingly a category under-
standable to all.

5.
Social as a category is now amid us in a maligned, reified, et
instrumentalized way. A few decades of intense firefighting by
millions to keep themselves afloat within the onslaught of an

114 Grey Room 92

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antisocial economic zeitgeist has made the word social oscil-
late between a formation that borders on majoritarian common
sense and a disaggregation that is without end. The social as a
terrain of experiment and the creation of contingent arenas in
which to engage and dispute is where art comes in. It wends its
way from the binary of meritocratic individualism and anomic
disenchantment toward propositional and deliberative proce-
dures. Documenta 15 invited the possibilities of such a move.
Its expansive practice of invitation allowed an avenue for
thinking the potent possibilities of art as a place.

6.
Dans 2013 we proposed a formulation, following a long moment
of conjunction with more than one hundred artists and practi-
tioners, that place-making could be art-making.5 Art creates
a place through an intense inhabitation, with durational ease
that is open and plural and cuts through barriers of art and
nonart, professional and amateur, processual and finished,
finesse and trash, documentation and the intangible, individual
and collective, insider and outsider. These propositions,
instances of which are being made all over the world, are a
countercurrent to the meritocratic disdain for life that demands
everything and everyone to be merely a service industry for the
winners—or those who think they could be winners. Documenta
15 turned the gaze inward and looked to multiple flows that
could shape other ways of making place.

7.
The Sarvastivadin branch of early Buddhism prominent in
Kashmir and North India—whose name derives from its doc-
trine, all things exist—proposes that at the threshold of the
perceptual and the cognitive is the unconstituted.6 We can
nudge ahead from here to ask: Is this not the edge of how art
attempts to valiantly animate the world? To keep alive the sen-
sibility of a potentiality that is at odds with and at times a threat
to the enumerative and transactable hypnotism of governance
through commodity, hierarchical obduracies, and policed order.

Raqs Media Collective | A Provocation to Contemporary Art as Place-Making

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Remarques
1. See Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez, Corina Oprea, and Monica Narula, “Where
Are We Going?—Degrowth and Arts Ecosystem,” L’internationale, 15 Février
2021, https://www.internationaleonline.org/research/politics_of_life_and_
death/158_where_are_we_going_and_ndash_degrowth_and_arts_ecosystem/;
Sarover Zaidi, “The Gift of Food,” e-flux Architecture, Août 2021,
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/survivance/412221/the-gift-of-food/;
and Santhosh S., “Politics as Pedagogy,” e-flux Architecture, Mars 2020,
https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/education/322666/politics-as-pedagogy/.
2. Quinn Latimer, éd., “What Color Is Hunger? What Color Paper?,” in
Documenta 14 Reader, éd. Quinn Latimer and Adam Szymczyk (Munich:
Prestel Verlag, 2017), 57–79.

3. Successive Documentas, particularly the tenth and eleventh editions,
standing astride the transition between the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies, were able to accommodate and amplify many diverse currents that
were claiming place and attention within the canopy of contemporary art of
le temps. Email listserves, like Nettime, which created a new mode of discur-
sivity, found a new momentum and a place at a table on a forgotten edge of
Documenta 10. The No One Is Illegal campaign that aimed to restore dignity
to immigrants in Europe was also founded in July 1997 at that same table
at Documenta 10. We remember from our own time leading up to, and at,
Documenta 11 the various kinds and occasions of discursivity that were
staged in different ways. They included: (un) the energy around the second of
Documenta 11’s five “platforms,” the discursive platform “Experiments with
Truth: Transitional Justice and the Processes of Truth and Reconciliation,»
which unfolded at the Habitat Centre in New Delhi, between May 7 et 21,
2001, as a prelude to the opening of the main exhibition (Plate-forme 5, in Kassel).
The Sarai Reader List, an electronic mailing list that we administered as part
of our work at the Sarai Programme at the Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies, in Delhi, reflected on this. See the comments on Platform 2 in Delhi
by the artistic director of Documenta 11, Okwui Enwezor, “Re: Documenta11’s
New Delhi,” Sarai Reader List, 30 May 2001, https://works.raqsmediacollective
.net/reader-list/reader-list_mail.sarai.net/2001-May/000115.html. (b) Le
convivial and conversational context sustained by the “canteen” (located at
the bottom of the steps of the Documenta Halle in the days leading up to the
opening of Platform 5 of Documenta 11), which functioned as a space for
exchanges, bonding, and the formation of new friendships and solidarities
over lunch between artists, technicians, curatorial team members, and writers.
(c) The focused but informal symposium around the idea of a digital com-
mons that we convened in the Documenta Halle in Kassel between July 18
et 20, 2002, that involved as participants the media theorists Ravi Sundaram
and Geert Lovink, the curator and critic Nancy Adajania, the legal theorist
and researcher Lawrence Liang, and ourselves.

4. Histories of gathering within art will be a crucial area to think with—
maybe as, if not more significant than, exhibition histories. One of the strik-
ing realities of contemporary art from Indonesia is its ability to create spaces,
protocols, and ethics of coinhabitation for people and practices. This milieu,
with this capacity, was invited to Documenta 15 along with ruangrupa. Ce
is not to argue that ruangrupa is not a unique constellation but instead that
their confidence to venture into remarkable world-making comes from deep
within a milieu that shaped and nourished them.

5. “Art as a Place,” in Sarai Reader 09: Projections (Delhi: CSDS, 2013),
https://works.raqsmediacollective.net/index.php/2014/11/08/art-as-place
-a-proposition/.

6. Kanai Lal Hazra, The Rise and Decline of Buddhism in India (Delhi:

Munshiram Manoharlal Publications, 1995).

116

https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00377

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