What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art?<\/p>\n
I recently learned a lot about this topic from a workshop of international artists convened in Amsterdam. Most of the artists are associated with the so-called\u00a0Lumbung Practice collective<\/a>, an interdisciplinary group experimenting with how to cultivate a commons-based art economy.<\/p>\n The artists come from Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, transqueer-migrant disaporas, and other geographies and circumstances, so they have some very different experiences and talents. And yet they have a deeply shared interest in commoning. What has brought them together is\u00a0the\u00a0Lumbung Practice master\u2019s program at\u00a0the Sandberg Instituut\u00a0<\/a>in Amsterdam, directed by Gertrude Flentge. It’s an arts program dedicated to commoning in the arts!<\/p>\n Lumbung<\/em>\u00a0is an Indonesian term for a communal rice barn, which is a space in which farmers contribute their harvests, collaboratively manage its storage and distribution, and share a social space of interdependence. It\u2019s a culturally resonant practice for describing a community based on trust, generosity, sufficiency, endurance, place-based work, ethical dealings, and humor.<\/p>\n The term\u00a0Lumbung<\/em>\u00a0got a huge burst of visibility a few years ago when an Indonesian artist collective, ruangrupa, was selected to curate\u00a0documenta 15<\/a>, a prestigious international art exhibition in Kassel, Germany. The group boldly decided to run the high-profile exhibition as an experiment in commoning, inviting dozens of artists from around the world to collectively curate the art. Suddenly there was a more recognized term for the contextually based, relational practices of artists.\u00a0\u00a0Flentge joined the ruangrupa team<\/a>\u00a0to help develop the documenta 15 exhibition in 2022, so she learned a great deal about the ethic and practices of\u00a0Lumbung\u00a0<\/em>during that time.<\/p>\n Because there were so many fascinating stories of artistic collaboration being shared at the Amsterdam workshop, I thought it would be great to hear more from artists on how they engage in commoning in their own ways, in difficult circumstances.<\/p>\n In my\u00a0latest episode of\u00a0Frontiers of Commoning\u00a0<\/em>(Episode #61)<\/a>,\u00a0I speak with three arts collectives — from Iran, Indonesia, and The Netherlands — who work in the same tradition as\u00a0Lumbung<\/em>, but of course with their own native variations, inflections, and vocabularies.<\/p>\n The first arts collective is known as “-”\u00a0(dash)<\/a>, an Iranian group of artists based in the city of Isfahan. I spoke with an artist who goes by the pseudonym “M” because she fears politically repercussions for speaking too candidly. (dash) helps convene over a hundred artists from diverse backgrounds every Tuesday at Emrooz Gallery to discuss how they can create a better environment for life and creating art in Isfahan. The group is semi-nomadic in the sense that it doesn\u2019t have a fixed, safe physical space, but is constantly improvising and moving, seizing opportunities as they arise, while helping each other create art.<\/p>\n The second arts group in the podcast is\u00a0Papaya Kuir<\/a>, a lesbo-transfeminist collective for Latin American migrants in the Netherlands. I spoke with Mexican-born Alejandra Maria Ortiz, a transwoman, author and community-builder\u00a0who has experienced marginalization, violence, and sex work.\u00a0 She\u00a0helped create, Papaya Kuir, or PK for short \u2013 a collective that helps artists in the queer community who are undocumented and often in dire situations and\/or homeless.<\/p>\n Finally, I spoke with two Indonesia artists, Angga Cipta (“ACip”), who belongs to several arts collectives including ruangrupa and Artlab, and MG Pringgotono, founder of\u00a0Serrum<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Gudskul,<\/a>\u00a0a public learning space formed by three art collectives in Jakarta. Both ACip and MG are heavy practitioners of a form of commoning known as\u00a0nongkrong,\u00a0<\/em>a super-informal and yet creatively productive form of\u2026well, going out to meet friends and hanging out indefinitely.<\/p>\n And yet it\u2019s much more than hanging out. It’s a gift economy of shared time. Artists who participate in\u00a0nongkrong\u00a0<\/em><\/a>avoid the stiff formality of meetings and yet are able to share a lot of wisdom, suggestions, ideas, and personal affection for each other. It bypasses the presumption that knowledge must be explicit to be communicated effectively. Spending a lot of informal time with friends, colleagues, and newcomers opens up new channels of communication and insight.\u00a0Nongkrong\u00a0<\/em>practitioners create a community rich with tacit, embodied knowledge, shared inner feelings, mutual trust and generosity, and creative insights.<\/p>\n You can listen to my interviews with these fascinating artists\u00a0here.<\/a>\u00a0To listen to my previous interview with Farid Rakun of the Indonesia group ruangrupa (Episode #20), click\u00a0here.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What are some of the distinctive ways that precarious arts collectives share resources, support each other, and make art?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3512021,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79717,213528,79720],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3512005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economy","category-economy-featured","category-society"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3512005"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3512023,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3512005\/revisions\/3512023"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3512021"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3512005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3512005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3512005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}