lumbung konteks: Reclaiming rural narratives by INLAND, Wajukuu Art Project

lumbung konteks is a seven-part series of online conversations taking place on the first Sunday of 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, lumbung members discuss the differences and affinities between their specific 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 second exchange of the series, lumbung members INLAND and Wajukuu Art Project, in conversation with Molemo Moiloa, discuss their approach to art practice as intrinsically linked to intergenerational knowledge and ways of living with the land. Thinking against violent legacies of the urban-rural divide, INLAND and Wajukuu Art Project share stories of how this divide produces alienation and precarity among young generations. They ask what kinds of self-determinacy, spirituality, and community a reclamation of the rural might offer across their different contexts, material realities, and everyday lives.

In conversation

INLAND is a collaborative agency started in 2009 by Fernando García Dory. It provides a platform for diverse actors engaged in agricultural, social, and cultural production. INLAND functions as a collective focused on land-based collaborations and economies and communities-of-practice as a substrate for post-contemporary art and cultural forms. INLAND has a radio station and an academy, produces shows, and makes cheese. It is a consultant for the European Union Commission on the use of art for rural development policies while promoting the European Shepherds’ Network, a social movement that questions those same policies.

Wajukuu Art Project is a community-based organization situated in the Lunga-Lunga neighborhood of the Mukuru slum in Nairobi. The project was established in 2004 by a group of artists with a common goal: to make Mukuru a place where children can thrive and to create employment through the production and sale of quality artworks. Art forms the backbone of Wajukuu. It is understood as both a practice and a way of life. Through art classes, a community library, documentary film screenings, and mural painting, Wajukuu creates a platform for the community to fully participate in the issues affecting them.

Molemo Moiloa is based in Johannesburg. She has worked in various capacities at the intersection of creative practice and community organizing. She is currently working on notions of ungovernability, social infrastructures of cultural organizing, and relationships to nature. Moiloa is one-half of the artist collaborative and documenta fifteen lumbung artist MADEYOULOOK and co-organizer of the Open Restitution Africa project.

Lilian Astrid Geese is a conference interpreter based in Berlin.

Undine Schäfer is a sign language interpreter based in Göttingen.

Directions