lumbung konteks: Prototypes for belonging by Britto Arts Trust, ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanistics

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 sixth episode of the series, lumbung members Britto Arts Trust and Z/KU, in conversation with Alessio Antoniolli, Director of Gasworks (London) and Triangle Network, will reflect on the various changes the two organizations have gone through, and discuss how these changes have helped them to rethink and adapt their role in wider society. Some of the questions posed include: how can public engagement be mobilized, what kinds of public spaces exist and can be imagined, and what modes of belonging and pedagogy can be developed when working from within one’s local context as well as transnationally.

In conversation:

Britto Arts Trust is a non-profit artist collective founded in 2002, working from Dhaka in different places in the country. As part of the Triangle Network , an international network of artists and organizations, the collective has a global reach. In search of lost history, cultures and communities, the collective explores and collects diverse sources together with various partners. Britto supports numerous interdisciplinary practitioners, groups and networks. The collective offers professional artists a local and international forum for meetings, discussions, experiments and the self-determined advancement of their skills. As an answer to the lack of adequate educational institutions in Bangladesh, Britto acts as an alternative educational platform that enables artists to work in a more experimental way.

ZK/U – Center for Art and Urbanism is an artist and research residency founded in 2012. Behind the ZK/U is the organization KUNStrePUBLIK, an artist collective that has been active in public space for more than fifteen years. Through concrete projects, the collective explores the possibilities and limitations of art, allowing citizens to freely express themselves or be represented through an action and physical result of KUNStrePUBLIK’s work. The aim is to bring together global discourses and local practices. In doing so, the ZK/U explores the ways in which art can be a catalyst for change in the urban environment and, through its work, attempts to demonstrate the feasibility of these participatory, urban artistic practices.

Alessio Antoniolli is the Director of Gasworks, London, where he leads a programme of exhibitions, international residencies and participatory events. He is also the Director of Triangle Network, a world-wide network of visual art organisations that work together to create artists’ exchanges and to share knowledge with each other. In 2022 he was also appointed curator at Fondazione Memmo, Italy, where he will programme one exhibition each year, starting with a solo presentation by Wai Kin Sin, in 2023. He has lectured widely and has been part of many juries including the UK’s Turner Prize in 2019.

Lilian Astrid Geese is a conference interpreter based in Berlin.

Undine Schäfer is a sign interpreter based in Göttingen.

Directions