lumbung konteks: Listening to The Land, The Land itself by Jatiwangi art Factory, The Question of Funding

documenta fifteen’s public program, titled Meydan, continues after lumbung calling with the new online conversation series lumbung konteks. The seven-part series will take place on the first Sunday of each month starting December 5, 2021. Each session invites two documenta fifteen lumbung members to introduce, expand, and reflect on each other’s practice and their wider ecosystems. 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 first episode, lumbung members Jatiwangi art Factory and The Question of Funding will discuss their work and its relationship to land in conversation with writer Rayya Badran. By sharing songs and sounds where rhythm comes from the very ground up, the two lumbung members will reflect on community work and what gathering together against dispossession feels and sounds like.

In conversation

Established in 2005, Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) is a community that embraces contemporary arts and cultural practices as part of the local life discourse in a rural area. Their manifold activities always involve the local public and include a video festival, a music festival, a residency program, a discussion series, and a TV and radio station. JaF’s work has been shown at various venues in Indonesia and abroad, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2020), the Asian Art Biennial, Taichung (2017), the Gwangju Biennale (2016), Copenhagen Alternative Art Fair (2016), SONSBEEK ’16, Arnhem (2016), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2013), and the Jakarta Contemporary Ceramic Biennale (2012).

The Question of Funding is a growing collective of cultural producers and community organizers from Palestine. It aims to rethink the economy of funding and the culture it produces in Palestine and the world, through producing and practicing a politically and culturally involved economy. The collective extends itself to the community of people who have been attempting to subvert and critique the funding economy in their lives and work. It produces, documents, accumulates, and disseminates knowledge with the wider community.

Rayya Badran is a writer, translator, and educator based in Beirut.

Undine Schäfer is a sign interpreter based in Göttingen.

Lilian Astrid Geese is a conference interpreter based in Berlin.

Directions