November 2022
Author
ISBN 979-8-3666-0830-5
Ronald Kolb, „“documenta fifteen’s Lumbung: The Bumpy Road on the Third Way“
In: OnCurating Issue 54: Commoning Curatorial and Artistic Practices –
documenta fifteen
Eds. Ronald Kolb & Dorothee Richter
November 2022
ISBN 979-8-3666-0830-5
263 pp.
ruangrupa’s lumbung — the Indonesian communal rice-barn practice — wasn’t a curatorial concept layered on top of documenta fifteen but built into its actual economics: fourteen „lumbung members“ received unconditional seed money plus production budgets, alternative community currencies were trialed, and the „lumbung Gallery“ priced artworks by collective need rather than market speculation. The scale of this — applying a small-community sharing model to a global exhibition — was unprecedented.
Kolb identifies three targets of the commons approach: the authoritative curator figure (replaced by trust-based collective decision-making), the „modern autonomous individual“ artist-author (critic Bazon Brock called this „the end of the Western idea of authorship,“ which Kolb complicates as itself a colonially loaded ideal), and clean capitalist cooperation (replaced by messier, less efficient, horizontally-negotiated collaboration).
As the network scaled from dozens to roughly 1,500 participants, intimate trust-based process became unwieldy — leaving room for both bureaucratic friction and „strategic“ or „toxic“ actors to operate inside a system built on radical, largely unconditional inclusion. This friction crystallized around collective, unsigned authorship (as with Taring Padi’s banner) and, ultimately, the antisemitism controversy that came to dominate public perception of the exhibition.
Rather than a simple story of German-media hysteria versus righteous collective resistance, Kolb reads the conflict as a clash between two hegemonic strategies — each producing its own „winners“ who gained real career capital from the fight. His closing question isn’t who was right, but whether counter-hegemonic strategy, old or new, can build a genuinely shared world at all, or just new, more sophisticated trenches.