Discussion among members - Recherche en IA spécialisée au MIT

Discussion among members
of Taring Padi and students
of the MA in Transcultural
Studies and Art History,
Heidelberg University, à
Documenta 15, Hallenbad
Ost, Kassel, Juin 28, 2022.
Photograph by Georgy
Radchenko.

https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00380

Learning with
Documenta 15: Principles,
Practices, Problems

MONICA JUNEJA AND JO ZIEBRITZKI

Dans 1982, visitors to Documenta 7 encountered a pile of seven thou-
sand basalt stones on the grounds in front of the Fridericianum.
The artist Joseph Beuys had initiated an action to plant an equal
number of oaks throughout the city of Kassel, each accompa-
nied by a stone. The pile would progressively shrink, as the
cityscape grew greener. The artistic, politico-ecological act of
planting trees in an urban setting, re-performed in various
cities across the globe, continuously gained in symbolic power.
When we remember the seven thousand oaks of 1982 aujourd'hui, le
artist’s persona is as present as the socio-ecological relevance of
the project. The simple fact that we continue to speak of “Beuys’s
oaks” reveals the valorizing habitus of the art world. It fore-
grounds the artist’s initiative to generate urban renewal,
whereas the participation of innumerable collaborators—
commu nity workers, politicians, administrators, staff members
of Documenta—who did the actual work of planting the trees
has not found its way into recollections. In the meanwhile,
postcolonial and feminist critiques have relentlessly challenged
a historiography that privileges the centrality of individual
artists and masterpieces, and yet the power of these categories
persists. Some four decades later, Documenta 15 (d15) set out
to radically reconfigure basic pillars of the institutionalized art
world—the individual star curator, the artist celebrated as a
pinnacle of creativity and producer of the “masterpiece," et,
not least, a canon that is at the same time complicit with the
commodification of art. How did the fifteenth iteration of
Documenta, curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa,
part with entrenched conventions? How did d15 seek to reshape
the roles of curator, artist, and visitor, by which means, and to
what ends? To what extent did ruangrupa’s clarion call to “make
friends not art” generate discomfort or puzzlement among vis-
itors, even those who came prepared to embrace different ways
of experiencing art? The following account, based on our
personal experience of d15, informed by conversations with
members of the Taring Padi collective and the ruangrupa team,
explores some of these questions. As we engage with princi-
ples, pratiques, and not least problems, we are aware that such
an exploratory exercise can proffer only tentative conclusions.
A sprawling affair distributed across thirty-two venues in
the city of Kassel during the summer of 2022, d15 exuded little
of the spirit of a classical exhibition. Plutôt, it offered a festival-
like constellation of events, open networks, réunions, ensemble

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with a handful of conventional exhibition venues, all extend-
ing backward to the months preceding the official opening and
projecting toward the future. The visitor, now encouraged to
become a participant in the composite process of making and
faire, confronted an exuberant heterogeneity of positions and
projects that made a “(re-)distribution of the sensible” palpa-
ble.1 Audiences, often pre-schooled in expectations and view-
ing practices, were challenged to make sense of the different
worldviews and specific histories and to find ways of engaging
with these rather than contemplating finished works. To what
extent the above dimensions, transformative in intent and chal-
lenging through their very proposition, effected a sustainable
paradigm shift within the curatorial dynamics of a recursive
global exhibition is a complicated question for multiple reasons.
A major obstacle is that our assessment depends largely on per-
sonal impressions, experiences, and memories, given the infor-
mal nature of decision-making and many activities undertaken
within the exhibition process, for which no centralized archive
may exist for the future. Individual collectives may or may not
have written records of their positions and activities at d15,
though some did provide insights into their work in the
form of interviews. While we have declarations of intent and
framing principles from ruangrupa, the written record of their
praxis as it unfolded in the course of planning and executing
their programs is hardly available for research.2 On the whole,
the commitment to decentralize the organization and build
interactive solidarities on the spot has left us with, at best, un
fragmented and highly selective record. Till today, the bulk of
the written record has been decisively shaped by the unfortu-
nate turn of events that rocked d15 and dominated media
reports in an inevitably reductive reading of it. What makes
this Documenta somehow illegible to many of its visitors and
scholars is a question we will address at the end of this article,
even as our reading is likely to remain largely speculative.

Every iteration of Documenta since at least 1997 (Documenta
10 curated by Catherine David) has sought to treat the exhibition
as a discursive space from which to question the foundations
of the institution. Of these, Okwui Enwezor’s “postcolonial
constellation” (Documenta 11, 2002) was the most acclaimed
for its critique of capitalist modernity and the fresh hierarchies
created by globalization and, following from these, of the uni-
versalizing claims of art history. Such critiques, cependant, dans
spite of efforts to go beyond the global art world’s stance of
multicultural inclusion, remained within the epistemic frame-
work of an elite art system that subscribes to a normative
understanding of art as individual intellectual property. Le
model of curation introduced by ruangrupa (the word stands
for “a space form”) at d15 proposed a praxis that is explicitly
dispersed and decentralized. Relational modes of creating art
and knowledge are meant to unfold in a space not segregated
into the domains of production, consommation, and distribution.
The exhibition, activated by the artists, collectives, et autre

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groups present on site, was a space that could be continuously
used, making it more than a place for display alone: engage-
ment in coproducing exhibitions was conceptualized as part of
a process of community building. The Gudskul, to take one
example, is both an educational platform and a pedagogical
model located in Jakarta. Operating from the premises of an
abandoned warehouse, it serves as an infrastructural space for
art groups, as well as for high school and university projects
related to curating and art education. Over the years, it has
offered courses, short residencies, an art camp, studio space,
and a place for collectives. The term is a compound of gudang
(warehouse) and skul (school). The objective of such a setup is
dynamic: that of transforming, rather than simply disseminat-
ing, knowledge into praxis through collective experience. Ce
understanding, once transplanted in Kassel, sought to make

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The Fridskul Common
Library, Documenta 15,
Fridericianum, Kassel,
2022. Photograph
by Nicolas Wefers.
© Documenta Archive.

d15 a knowledge resource fertilized by the creative participation
of artists from across the world cemented through the lumbung
réseau. The Fridericianum, renamed Fridskul for the dura-
tion of d15, was curated as a “storage of all knowledge, stories
and experiences.”3 It was declared a library, archive, living space,
and kitchen, in addition to its function as a museum. Mutual
exchange through practices of sociability—such as cooking
ensemble, playing games, conducting workshops, running classes,
and organizing childcare—was seen as an extension of Gudskul
principles that eschewed the objective of presenting artworks
for the limited duration of one hundred days.

The set of principles that governed the curatorial process of
d15 drew on a premodern system of sharing resources in an
agrarian society, poetically termed lumbung. Ruangrupa recon-
figured lumbung as an artistic practice based on sharing, com-
munal living and caring, and collaborative creativity. In the
twenty-first-century megacity of Jakarta, ruangrupa’s hometown,

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Juneja and Ziebritzki | Learning with Documenta 15: Principles, Practices, Problems

this is clearly an attractive invented tradition with which to
confront the pressures of rapid urbanization, ecological crises,
and rising sea levels.4 It is at the same time an articulation of
solidarity on the part of groups scarred by the experience of
political repression. And yet lumbung—together with related
notions that suggest natural processes, such as “ekosistem”
(where ideas and the making of art are conceived as living com-
ponents of a shared system) and “composting knowledge”
(relationships developed organically over time without formal-
ized arrangements)—is more than a mere metaphor. It is at once
a guiding principle and operative method to give a particular
direction to curating, understood as a form of worlding that
seeks to challenge and transform established modes of exhibi-
tion making.

At d15, the principle of lumbung, by calling into question
a single, central curatorial authority and making it instead a
shared resource among the participant collectives, worked to
undermine the gatekeeping prerogative of institutionalized
curating, enabling the return of marginalized knowledge and
the integration of groups that continue to be dropped by the
wayside or that at best are relegated to distinct and segregated
les espaces. A powerful example of this enabling stance was the
group show One Day We Shall Celebrate Again: RomaMoMA
at documenta fifteen in the central light-filled hall of the
Fridericianum.5 RomaMoMA was curated as a joint enterprise
of the Hungarian grassroots collective Off-Biennale Budapest
and the European Roma Institute for Arts and Culture (ERIAC).
The works assembled queried the (im)possibility of a Roma
Museum of Contemporary Art. By presenting the untold past
and unfolding present of Roma artists, whose works have rarely
found an institutional space, the exhibit challenged the princi-
ple of “inclusion” that characterizes the global art world,
following which artistic practices from beyond Euro-America
are “added on” to the mainstream art world without questioning
its canons and foundational principles. The group show intro-
duced viewers to the work of ten artists emanating from different
régions, all of whom share a kinship with the Roma. Ensemble
they raised the question of how to define “Roma art” and where
to place it, given its nonexistence within the prevailing canon.
Framing the show was Ethel Brooks’s RomaMoMA Manifesto
for documenta fifteen:

We have relied on our own archives, our own transgener-
ational sharing of knowledge, our own pedagogies of prac-
tice. The beauty that we share with the world, the ways that
we teach, learn, and thrive, have been built by us, for each
other—and, yes, for you. We have healed each other, et,
through our fortune-telling, our metalwork, our horses,
our art, our caring for the Earth, we have strived to heal
you as we heal ourselves. This is how we educate. This is
our heritage.6

The creation of such an exhibit was facilitated by the horizon-

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tal forms of decision-making within different units (majelis)
that sought, among other things, to collectivize economic ben-
efits, thereby challenging the commodification of art within a
capitalist system.

Among the most empowering and enriching effects of eschew-
ing a single, overarching goal—namely, to bypass institution-
alized systems of evaluating “projects”—was the opening of
Documenta as a space available for an unprecedented plurality
of lived experiences, knowledge systems, and specific counter-
hegemonic practices. Understanding the situatedness of each,
so the underlying premise claimed, would lead to a permeable
constellation of shared yet nonflattening solidarities. The range
of positions to be experienced—and temporarily lived with—
were full of unexpected turns, constantly challenging the visitor
to engage with the dynamic bond between art and life they spun.
An installation composed of hundreds of bound bales resem-
bling a gigantic garbage site struck visitors with dystopian

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The Nest Collective.
Return to Sender,
2022. Documenta 15,
Karlsaue, Kassel.
Photograph by
Nils Klinger. ©
Documenta Archive.

force as they strolled across the baroque lawns of the Karlsaue
facing the Orangerie. Its powerful and grotesque quality was
meant to upset and distress by drawing attention to the com-
pressed magnitude of waste—unwanted or unusable textiles,
sneakers, industrial and electronic waste—the leftovers of
massive overconsumption in the affluent societies of the Global
North. Return to Sender is an intervention by the Kenyan
Nest Collective that summons to consciousness the routine
microrealities of innumerable African locations, the recipients
of this daily “gift” of leftovers. Its sequel, Return to Sender—
Delivery Details, continued the narrative: within the hollow
interior of the mountain of litter a video recapitulated the dif-
ferent moments and voices that make up this story that con-
nects distant corners of the world, a story of giving/throwing
away, of dissonance, hardship, grief, destroyed existences.
Return to Sender, we learned, is but the uppermost layer of a
deeper relationship embedded in Kassel’s colonial past. Le
installation stood facing the site of a colonial exhibition that

Juneja and Ziebritzki | Learning with Documenta 15: Principles, Practices, Problems

took place in 1897, which showcased alongside ethnographic
objects a panoply of raw materials from the African conti-
nent—cocoa, tobacco, sugar, coffee, ivory—all of which were
then processed into commodities to quench consumerist desires.
“Restitution 2.0” deploys aesthetic disturbance to complete the
circuit of this exchange.7 Further exploring the spread of the
exhibition, visitors encountered a rich plurality of positions
and propositions: be it the Atis Rezistans from Port-au-Prince;
or the Britto Arts Trust, whose gesture of retaining agency over
food and locally produced foodstuffs was a gesture to save that
which was disappearing through the dispossession of land and
ressources; or the remarkable Project Art Works, which has over
the years nurtured a practice conjoining art and social care. Ce
latter collective, made up of forty neurodivergent artists, explores
through collaborative work among artists, families, activists,
and carers the meanings of “producing” art for those who depend
on different forms of support and therefore understand the idea
of making and achieving in divergent ways. Their exhibit at the
Fridericianum included an archive that made transparent some
of the processes of art-making, often nonverbal, less about
the product and more focused on experience. This handful of
instances points to the unlimited plurality of stances, resistant
to categorization or compartmentalization into a politics of the
Left and the Right.

The multiplicity of agents involved and the focus on com-
munities challenged not only curatorial conventions of the
institutionalized art world in the Global North but also the vis-
itors. The d15 discarded the notion of the autonomous artwork
and impressive “masterpiece” standing for the highest form
of creativity. Plutôt, through contact with the accumulation of
creative practices and practitioners, visitors were urged to
engage, understand, share, discuss, and eventually reflect on
their own situatedness. The experience depended on their
readiness and ability to engage through informal nonkrong
(hanging out) with the collectives and artists present in Kassel,
through organized workshops (the lumbung program), ou
through “walks and stories” offered by the sobat-sobats (the art
mediators). The visitor’s experience was thus contingent on
factors such as expectations they brought to the site, their han-
dling of language and cultural barriers, or how much time and
energy they were willing to give to the challenge of decipher-
ing “process” rather than contemplating finished works. Le
curatorial focus on practices rather than objects turned d15
into a constantly evolving event, lequel, in addition to the mul-
tiplication of agents and the international crowd of visitors,
makes generalizing the visitors’ experience nearly impossible.
Such a potent intervention in an established global institu-
tion was expected to set into motion a transcultural process.
But to what extent was that process—that is, the dynamic of
encounter and transformation—effectively realized? And what
was lost to it? We have been frequently cautioned against
romanticizing collectivity—lumbung—as per se nonhierarchical

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and nonexploitative.8 And some of d15’s structural dimensions
do raise questions about its smooth relocation from an agrarian
to an exhibition context. Ongoing discussions have posed the
simple question of scale; that is, the logistical difficulties
of applying, on a global scale, to a collectivity of over 1,500
artistes, each embodying different forms of knowledge, princi-
ples of sharing originally intended for a small community.9 The
refusal to take up a position of curatorial authority raises in
turn the concomitant question of responsibility. Dispersing
both authority and authorship ends up obfuscating responsi-
bilities by rendering individual positions difficult to locate
within the large collective body or even clusters thereof. What
fills the void that is created following a withdrawal of authority?
This becomes a particularly tricky issue when raised in rela-
tion to the selection of artists. We are informed that fourteen
collectives were invited by ruangrupa as lumbung members,
each of which in turn invited other collectives and artists to
participate. The responsibility for principles of selection and
exclusion in such a decentralized system becomes elusive
here—and, as we know too well, the noninvitation of Jewish-
Israeli artists became a contentious question that cast its
shadow over the entire process.

The dispersal of responsibility in this instance was, in effect,
a decision that responsibility, by default, would be carried
by all. A transcultural process of communication between the
lumbung members on the one side and the institution of
Documenta (GmbH) on the other—that is, the self-reflexive dia-
logue regarding organizational structures that might have
promised a long-term transformative effect on all participants—
faltered from the start because each side consciously adopted
a different style of communication. The Documenta adminis-
tration, in its adherence to an obsolete understanding of
autonomy, espoused no need to nurture such a relationship
informed by dialogue and learning once the initial act of
“inclusion” was accomplished. The members of ruangrupa in
turn consciously positioned themselves against discursive
exchange, castigating “theory” as a mechanism of an oppres-
sive “Western” episteme. Plutôt, “stories and storytelling”
were privileged as a “distinction-reducing approach” that
extended to most modes of communication.10 Such rejection of
what is potentially a critical mode of reflecting on one’s own
history and positionality became a barrier in many ways. It got
in the way of a critical self-questioning of the essentially mas-
culinist ethos of the ruangrupa team and its use of the rhetoric
of friendship to overlook the pitfalls of precarity among young
mediators.11 Finally, it became a barrier to productive commu-
nication even in those collaborative projects in which ruan-
grupa participated, such as the two-week summer school
“Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Education,” organized by
Dorothee Richter and Ronald Kolb together with Documenta’s
art education program, CAMP. The workshop space of the
summer school was placed inside the exhibition space, avec

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artists present and engaged in discussions, effecting a shift
from the representational mode of art to its performative aspect.
Richter, cependant, underlines the “impossibility of establishing
clear communication,” ostensibly over organizational aspects.
Essentially, according to her, this mode of evasion was “an
indirect means of power.”12 Exacerbated by the antisemitism
scandal, the much awaited and hoped-for transcultural process
of recalibrating the relationship of profoundly different exhi-
bition practices hardened into a polarized struggle for hege-
mony, into a different form of transcultural relationship resting
on refusal to communicate.

Visitors, aussi, had to confront challenges of communication
that sometimes took the form of frustration induced by well-
worn habits of cultural consumption in which they had been
socialized. Because d15 was part of the longer history of
Documenta, which in turn is an integral part of postwar (West)
Germany’s cultural identity, the recasting of the roles of the
curators, artistes, and visitors provided much ground for misun-
derstandings due to the incongruent cultural codes of the
parties involved.13 The unrealized dialogue between ruangrupa
and the Documenta administration was to some extent repro-
duced in the challenging dialogue between artistic collectives
on site and visitors in Kassel. Not only did the incompatibility
of cultural codes make encounters difficult but so, aussi, did the
very languages spoken by the artists and visitors. The call to
“make friends not art” could cut both ways. Many visitors
experienced the conviviality they observed in the social hubs
as a closed group of “friends” to which they could not find a
ready entry point—an experience often recounted by German
visitors. Any form of community that uses friendship as a key
category also operates, by definition (“friends only”), as a selec-
tive mode, enacting its own inclusions and exclusions. As the
polemics of the antisemitism scandal acquired shrill tones, le
lines between “friends” and “others” were inevitably drawn.

And yet, paradoxically, the exceptionally large number of
visitors to d15 testifies to the magnetic pull exercised by what
came across to many as a joyous collectivity of welcoming
spaces that consciously sought to discard the exclusionary
hierarchies of established art and exhibition systems. Le
relaxed atmosphere at the various venues and the focus on
encounters rather than masterpieces offered visitors the poten-
tial to engage creatively and socially, to discover in workshops
and informal talks their artistic, discursive, sociale, or playful
abilities. Visitors were invited to connect as creative agents to
the social-artistic practices of collectives, lequel, even if they
chose different strategies—such as painting and protesting
(Taring Padi), cooking and eating (Britto Arts Trust), or inclu-
sive, queer parties (Party Office b2b Fadescha)—all used art-
making to shape communities. Other collectives sought to
show how they deployed historical material and narratives as
a mode of resistance against colonial and racist structures and
hegemony—these include the Asia Art Archive, The Black

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Archives, Centre d’art Waza, and Komina Film a Rojava. Et
many collectives attempted both to create a community and
to engage as activists; Par exemple, by developing alternative
models of cultural and artistic education (par exemple., Arts Collaboratory,
Centre d’art Waza, *foundationClass*collective, Project Art Works).
In contrast to Beuys’s one-man show as shaman/artist/
ecologist at Documenta 7 (1982), ruangrupa’s reconfigurations chal-
lenged the flow of attention and money not only during the one
hundred days of the exhibition in 2022 but also before and after.
The multiplication of actors, together with the blurring of roles
and responsibilities, made it difficult to idealize and canonize
any of the actors or practices involved. Their model of curating
proposed another way of being with the world, through sharing—

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Top: The Black
Archives. Black Pasts
& Presents: Interwoven
Histories of Solidarity,
Asia Art Archive, 2022.
Documenta 15,
Fridericianum, Kassel.
Photograph by
Frank Sperling. ©
Documenta Archive.

Bottom: Britto Arts
Trust. PAKGHOR—
the social kitchen,
2022. Documenta 15,
Documenta Halle,
Kassel. Photograph by
Victoria Tomaschko.
© Documenta Archive.

of resources, espace, connaissance, authorship. This proposition of
solidarity responded to the needs of many experiencing the deep
alienation induced by the global COVID-19 pandemic. While the
motto of Documenta 14 was “learning from Athens,” d15 invited
its participants to learn with one another. And yet, l'un des
many questions that remains is whether art critics and historians
are willing to embark on the journey to learn with d15: Comment
do we write about it? What modes of writing could capture or
even further develop the radical redistribution of creative,
organizational, and financial agency and the strong dedication
to shared practices initiated by d15? Why does this latest
Documenta, in spite of the novelty and excitement that it
brought, continue to elude us by its illegibility? We can only

Juneja and Ziebritzki | Learning with Documenta 15: Principles, Practices, Problems

103

speculate on the reasons—one of the factors being the frag-
mented nature of the record. While “process” in theory was
elaborately represented through complex diagrams and flip
charts, the actual process, as it unfolded in all its minuteness,
unpredictability, and oral interaction, has remained opaque—
as could be read in the lost expressions of many visitors as they
stood before the graphic representations that filled the first hall
of the Fridericianum on the ground floor to the right.

This opacity further manifested itself in habits of communi-
cation that were more often than not premised on an avoidance
of committed response or directness, making dialogue on con-
crete issues an uphill and initially frustrating trial. This is an
experience we had several times and has since been confirmed
by others. Our interactions with members of ruangrupa were
friendly and sympathetic. And yet, at the end we were left in
the dark about the operationalizing of their curatorial principles,
about how metaphors such as “ekosistem” and “composting
knowledge” could be translated into material strategies. Declaring
their approach as “nonsystematic, not crystalline, dynamic,»
as one that “changes according to conversations between peo-
ple and their needs” makes that approach unavailable to most
analytical ventures.14 Socialized within an authoritarian polit-
ical system, this would seem to be a form of carefully cultivated
resistance to institutionalized power, as the collective strove to
rearrange the terms of its own peripheral existence. This is in
marked difference both to practices that have grown within
democratic, multivocal civil societies elsewhere and to the
discursive modes of communication that many of us take for
granted. While this practice of collectivity resembles avant-
garde movements such as dada and surrealism, or the form of
institutional critique that came with Fluxus, it escapes these
available models, given the emphasis on dispersal. On the flip
side, the proclamation of core values such as solidarity, friend-
ship, sustainability, trust, responsibility, and sharing remained
abstract to many within the exhibition setting. David Teh
describes ruangrupa as “more a spirit of curatorship—not
limited to a single body, yet somehow tied to a place.”15 Perhaps
we should read the “show” not as a unified whole translating
an orchestrated politics of site and display but as a form of
redistribution, of celebrating plurality by making it resist exist-
ing categories. Curating as a transcultural process of world
making can only unfold through long-term interactions that
cannot be viewed as seamless or linear. We can extract many
nuggets of creative experimentation from what we saw and
experienced through the work of individual collectives, lequel
would no doubt travel further to fresh exhibition sites. Attending
to the empowering dimensions of Documenta 15 et analyser
their fault lines are important steps toward making sense of
transformations over time.

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Remarques
1. Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible: Esthétique et politique (Paris: La
Fabrique Éditions, 2000).

2. These are put forward in the Documenta Fifteen Handbook (Ostfildern:

Hatje Cantz, 2022), 8–43.

3. Documenta Fifteen Handbook, 34.
4. Jan von Brevern explores the historical meanings of lumbung together
with its contemporary transcultural attraction in European urban settings in
Jan von Brevern, “Ästhetikkolumne: ‘Lumbung’—die Rückkehr der Scheune,»
Merkur 75, Non. 869 (2021): 59–65.

5. See Burcu Dogramaci, “Das imaginierte Museum,” Texte zur Kunst, 17
Octobre 2022, https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/burcu-dogramaci
-documenta-das-imaginierte-museum/.

6. “One Day We Shall Celebrate Again: RomaMoMA at Documenta Fifteen,»
ERIAC Newsletter, Juin 2022, https://eriac.org/one-day-we-shall-celebrate
-again-romamoma-at-documenta-fifteen-2/.

7. The phrase “Restitution 2.0” was coined by the curator and cultural
theorist Mahret Ifeoma Kupka. See “Restitution 2.0,” Texte zur Kunst, 17
Octobre 2022, https://www.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/mahret-ifeoma
-kupka-documenta-restitution-20/.

8. For a discussion of power structures embedded in the idea of lumbung,
its communitarian values notwithstanding, see the position of the anthropol-
ogist Judith Schlehe, cited in von Brevern, “Ästhetikkolumne,» 62. Its recent
appropriation by the Indonesian government to designate a controversial
food program points to its contested nature. Discussions of community and
collectivity in the Global North—as, Par exemple, in the writings of Claire
Bishop and Grant Kester—have focused on an opposition between neoliberal
economics and artistic collectivity. In other contexts, such as in Indonesia,
such a duality is often transcended in an attempt to strategically connect
social engagement and peer support to working relationships within produc-
tion systems. See Elly Kent, “The History of Conscious Collectivity Behind
Ruangrupa,” On Curating, Non. 54 (Novembre 2022): 25–28.

9. Ronald Kolb, “The Bumpy Road on the Third Way: Fragmentary Thoughts
on the Threats and Troubles of Commons and Commoning in Contemporary
Art and Knowledge Production,” On Curating, Non. 54 (Novembre 2022): 57–
94, ici 76.

10. As articulated by Farid Rakun of the ruangrupa collective, cited by Kolb, 73.
11. Of the ten members of ruangrupa, three are women. During our inter-
actions with the group, we observed a demarcation of domains along gender
lines—male members were the ones who addressed the public and responded
on discursive issues, while women invariably (and by their own admission)
took a backseat. Tasks conventionally considered “feminine,” such as child-
care, were assigned to a female member of the group. These observations
have also been confirmed by the more extensive research of Claudia König,
a doctoral candidate at the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies work-
ing on the collective ruangrupa. Personal communication, Kassel, Juin 2022.
In her discussion of “Freundschaftsökonomien,” Nanne Buurmann critically
examines the nature of “affective work” at Documenta 15. She refers to a
publication by the sobats calling for greater solidarity in the face of precarity.
See Nanne Buurman, “Im Hirtenstall geboren? Governementalität bei der
‘Documenta Fifteen,’” Texte zur Kunst, 17 Octobre 2022, https://www
.textezurkunst.de/de/articles/nanne-buurman-im-hirtenstall-geboren/.

12. Dorothee Richter, “Curatorial Commons? A Paradigm Shift,” On

Curating, Non. 54 (Novembre 2022): 29–50, ici 35.

13. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and

Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

14. Documenta Fifteen Handbook, 31.
15. David Teh, “Who Cares a Lot? Ruangrupa as Curatorship,” Afterall:
A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, Non. 30 (Juin 2012), https://www
.afterall.org/article/who-cares-a-lot-ruangrupa-as-curatorship.

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