Let there be lumbung: Talks about lumbung practices and lumbung beyond documenta fifteen

The conference Let there be lumbung from Tuesday, September 20 to Friday, September 23, 2022 at ruruHaus in Kassel, in the sense of nongkrong, provides a forum for contextualizing art practices by ways of lumbung.

documenta fifteen invites to join the discussion of lumbung practices and its reception in different contexts. There are panels about the origins of lumbung, its social and historical contexts, repercussions, and its potentialities beyond documenta fifteen. The conference, which takes place in the last week of the 100 days of the exhibition in Kassel, includes a series of talks by scholars and cultural practitioners from various time zones.

Invited speakers

• Charles Esche (CEST), Director of the Van Abbemuseum; Professor of contemporary art and curating
• Hilmar Farid (WIB) (presencial or online), historian and director general of culture, Ministry of the Education, Culture, Research and Technology, Indonesia
• John Roosa (PDT), Associate Professor of History at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver
• Nuraini Juliastuti (WIB/CEST), trans-local practicing researcher and writer, focusing on art organisation, activism, illegality, and alternative cultural production in Indonesia
• Melani Budianta (WIB) (presencial or online), Professor of literary and cultural studies at the Faculty of Humanities, Universitas Indonesia.
• Nikos Papastergiadis (AEDT), Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures and Professor of Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne
• Philippe Pirotte (WITA), Professor Art History and Curatorial Studies and curator

Schedule

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

4–4.30 pm
Philippe Pirotte: Control Prevention

4.30–5 pm
Q&A

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

4–4.30 pm
John Roosa: Dangerous Images and Moral Panics in Indonesia, 1965 to the Present

4.30–5 pm
Q&A

5–5.30 pm
Coffee break

5.30–6 pm
Charles Esche: The 1st Exhibition of the 21st Century

6–6.30 pm
Q&A

Thursday, September 22, 2022

4–4.30 pm
Hilmar Farid (in Kassel or digital): Turning the Tides: Lumbung as a Cultural Movement

4.30–5 pm
Q&A

5–5.30 pm
Coffee break

5.30–6 pm
Nikos Papastergiadis: The Crisis of Europe and the Future of Multiculturalism

6–6.30 pm
Q&A

Friday, September 23, 2022

4–4.30 pm
Nuraini Juliastuti: Commons people, lumbung as a traveling concept

4.30–5 pm
Q&A

5–5.30 pm
Coffee break

5.30–6 pm
Melani Budianta (in Kassel or digital): Negotiating the Transnational lumbung

6–6.30 pm
Q&A

Abstracts of the speakers

Charles Esche: The 1st Exhibition of the 21st Century
Post apocalyptic of the west and how do we live in common and the destruction caused by capitalism.

Hilmar Farid: Turning the Tides: Lumbung as a Cultural Movement

John Roosa: Dangerous Images and Moral Panics in Indonesia, 1965 to the Present
The ongoing, decades-long farce, of innocuous appearances of certain images, interpreted by Indonesian state officials as evidence of a sinister underground conspiracy of powerful
proportions. An environment where images are suspect and carry exaggerated implications for “national security” and “public order.”

Nuraini Juliastuti: Commons people, lumbung as a traveling concept
In the times of uncertainties, the growing currency and relevance of sharing and commoning-based cultural projects represents a recognition of lumbung as a certain mannerism of doing art—but extraction feels lurking behind it.

Melani Budianta: Negotiating the Transnational lumbung
The pandora box that the documenta fifteen lumbung project opens up reveals the problem of transnational translation in addressing burdens of local traumatic histories, and the continuing violence of global structures.

Nikos Papastergiadis: The Crisis of Europe and the Future of Multiculturalism
What are the spaces for cultural differences and what are the rituals for hospitality.

Philippe Pirotte: Control Prevention
The culture of making friends and working together coming out of the refuge: the biggest scandalon of the lumbung proposal for those addicted to hierarchy and control.

Short biographies of the speakers

Charles Esche is the Director of the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven; professor of contemporary art and curating at Central Saint Martins, UAL, London, and co-director of Afterall Journal and Books. He teaches on the Exhibition Studies MRes course at CSM, and at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. He (co)curated Power and Other Things, Europalia, BOZAR, Brussels 1017; Art Turns, Word Turns; Museum MACAN, Jakarta 2017; Le Musée Égaré, Kunsthall Oslo 2017 and Printemps de Septembre, Toulouse 2016; Jakarta Biennale 2015; 31st Sao Paulo Biennale, 2014, U3 Triennale, Ljubljana, 2011; RIWAQ Biennale, Palestine, 2007 and 2009; Istanbul Biennale, 2005; Gwangju Biennale, 2002 amongst other international exhibitions. He is chair of CASCO, Utrecht. He received the 2012 Princess Margriet Award and the 2014 CCS Bard College Prize for Curatorial Excellence.

Hilmar Farid is a historian and cultural activist. In the 1990s he was active in the pro-democracy movement. He is a founding member of Jaringan Kerja Budaya, a collective of artists and cultural workers in the early 1990s, and also the Institute of Indonesian Social History in 2000. He taught history and cultural studies at the Jakarta Arts Institute and University of Indonesia for several years. Farid received his PhD from the National University of Singapore and wrote his thesis on Pramoedya Ananta Toer and the politics of decolonization in Indonesia. He has been an active member of the Asian Regional Exchange for New Alternatives (ARENA) and the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. On 31 December 2015, after a long selection process, he was appointed as the Director General for Culture at the Ministry of Education and Culture of the Republic of Indonesia.

John Roosa is an Associate Professor in the History Department at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. He has lived for many years in Indonesia and is the author of the books Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup d’Etat in Indonesia (2006) and Buried Histories: The Anti-Communist Massacres of 1965–1966 in Indonesia (2020).

Nuraini Juliastuti is a trans-local practicing researcher and writer focusing on art organization, activism, illegality, and alternative cultural production. Juliastuti co-founded Kunci Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 1999. She obtained a PhD from Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology, Leiden University. In 2020, she joined University of Amsterdam with a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Worlding Public Cultures at The Arts and Social Innovation at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Juliastuti also develops Domestic Notes, a publication-based project that uses domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, organization of makeshift support systems, and alternative cultural production. With her family, she runs a small press, Reading Sideways Press, to publish works and translations on arts, sports, and literature.

Melani Budianta is a Professor of Literature and Cultural Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Indonesia and a member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society. Since the late 1980s, Budianta has undertaken research and writing focused on gender and cultural activism. Her articles have been published in academic journals, newspapers, and magazines. During the Asian financial crisis of 1997/1998, she participated in Indonesia’s women’s movement. In 2020, Melani Budianta presented her talk Lumbung Budaya Sepanjang Gang or Cultural Granaries Along the Alleys, organized by the Jakarta Art Council.

Nikos Papastergiadis is the Director of the Research Unit in Public Cultures, based at The University of Melbourne. He is a Professor in the School of Culture and Communication at The University of Melbourne and founder—with Scott McQuire—of the Spatial Aesthetics research cluster. His publications include Modernity as Exile (1993), Dialogues in the Diaspora (1998), The Turbulence of Migration (2000), Metaphor and Tension (2004), Spatial Aesthetics: Art Place and the Everyday (2006), Cosmopolitanism and Culture (2012), Museums of the Commons (2020) and On Art and Friendship (2020). He is also the author of numerous essays, which have been translated into over a dozen languages and appeared in major catalogues such as the Biennales of Sydney, Liverpool, Istanbul, Gwangju, Taipei, Lyon, Thessaloniki, and dOCUMENTA (13).

Philippe Pirotte is Professor for Art History and Curatorial Studies (on leave of absence) at Staedelschule Frankfurt, Adjunct Senior Curator at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and Associate Curator at Gropius Bau in Berlin. In October 2021 he organized The Color Curtain and The Promise of Bandung, a series of roundtables reappraising Asian-African political imagination. Now, in collaboration with the group of artists and curators featuring at the roundtables, he prepares the exhibition Bandung Spirits to be held in Berlin in the fall of 2023.

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