lumbung konteks: Navigating systems of care and control by Trampoline House, Project Art Works

lumbung konteks is a seven-part series of online conversations, taking place once every month until June 2022. Each session invites two documenta fifteen lumbung members to introduce their practices and wider ecosystems and to expand and reflect on each other’s work.  Through sharing stories, songs, and tools for living and working in community, the lumbung members discuss the differences and affinities between their contexts. lumbung konteks addresses the importance of the localities within which we all work, the conditions that inform and ground our practices, and the ways we can learn from each other’s models of education, ecology, and economy.

In the fifth episode of the series, lumbung members Trampoline House and Project Art Works, in conversation with sociologist Yasmin Gunaratnam, will discuss conditions of dependency imposed by state institutions, and how we are all affected by them in unequal ways. Drawing from the communities they work with, the two lumbung members discuss the differences and intersections between their practices, and how art can be a way of creating collective agency and access to public life.

In conversation

Project Art Works is a UK-based collective of artists and makers. They produce and disseminate art underpinned by radical approaches to neurodiversity, rights, and representation. Project Art Works’ program evolves through supported studio practice and radiates out into multiple collaborations, exhibitions, co-commissions, movies, publications, and digital outputs. Personalized and holistic studio environments are recreated wherever a project takes place. Artists and makers work together in purposeful collaboration through total communication that utilizes language or gesture, sound, signing, and empathy.  The collective interrogates and promotes creative and sustainable models of artist development and care through practice-based research, productions, and partnerships. The work of neurodiverse artists is disseminated via social media, digital platforms, and cultural and care collaborations nationally and internationally. Through aspirational planning, free training, and advocacy, families and caregivers are given opportunities to utilize their knowledge and skills to better navigate and harness health and social care systems and explore bespoke models of care that improve their lives. Project Art Works was shortlisted for the Turner Prize 2021.

Trampoline House was formed in 2010 by a group of artists, curators, refugee rights advocates, and asylum seekers as an antidote to Denmark’s asylum, refugee, and immigration policies. The House offered legal counseling, language classes, cooking and cleaning internships, job counseling, programs for women and children, workshops, debate events, art exhibitions, and weekly House meetings, where members and staff shared news and discussed urgent issues related to the House and refugee conditions. Due to lack of funding, the House had to close permanently at the end of 2020 and in January 2022, the refugee justice community center Trampoline House re-opened in a smaller version under the name Weekend Trampoline House in Copenhagen. The re-opening as Weekend Trampoline House creates the possibility to continue with their work for a more humane refugee policy, to resume their most popular activities and to create a model for a new, self-sustainable Trampoline House.

Yasmin Gunaratnam is a sociologist and Professor of Social Justice in the School for Education, Communication and Society at King’s (University of London). Yasmin’s work includes research on diasporic dying, debility and end of life care; hospitality to migrants and refugees; and the use of creative methods in anticolonial feminist research. Yasmin is also a yoga and meditation teacher, exploring contemplative social justice and embodied pedagogies.

Lilian Astrid Geese is a conference interpreter based in Berlin.

Undine Schäfer is a sign interpreter based in Göttingen.

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