ruangrupa was founded in Jakarta in 2000 by a group of artists from the need to have a space where to meet and work, with a particular attention towards public art, performance art, and video art. Through the decades, the collective has explored different contexts and formats, such as exhibitions, festivals, art laboratories, workshops, research, publishing books, magazines and online journals, with multiple changes in its structure and programs. In 2018, together with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, it initiated GUDSKUL: Contemporary Art Collective and Ecosystem Studies, a public learning space located in Jagakarsa, a district in the south of Jakarta, designed as a collective working simulation study space that promotes the importance of critical and experimental dialogue through a sharing process and experience-based learning. In this conversation Reza Afisina, Iswanto Hartono and Bellina Erby go through their notions of space and of intangible infrastructures, the histories and methodologies of both collectives, in the light of their experience as artistic directors of documenta fifteen and their recent workshop held in Milan.
Question: What really inspires us about ruangrupa’s practice is its will/need to conceive art as a process, rather than an object, leading to the participatory construction of spaces of freedom in which to experiment new models of coexistence. We retrace this imaginative space both in the name of ruangrupa (where “ruang” and “rupa” stand for “space” and “form”) and in the practice of the Living Room, that you also activated in a site-specific way at Casa degli Artisti in Milan, as part of the public program of “Sguardi Urbani” [1]. Far from the 19th-century Italian bourgeois living room, yours becomes a place where to exercise radical care and hospitality. Would you like to tell us more?
Bellina Erby: What’s important for ruangrupa is always space, since their name refers to the “visual” and the “space”, this also affects the artistic approach we believe in. In many of the experiences I have seen in ruangrupa’s process since I joined this kind of ecosystem, space and surroundings are always at the core. When we planned documenta fifteen, we broke down the space and Reza and Iswanto went to Kassel to blend into it, without considering it as something far away. The ideal way for us is to put our daily life, and the way we have fun with our artistic things, in our own space, so we have to make it very comfortable, that’s why space is a priority.
Iswanto Hartono: We always avoid creating jargon, even an imaginative jargon, that tends to be about methodological and theoretical issues. This is because the most important thing about the Living Room is that it has been embedded within our practice since the very beginning, when we moved from one house to another. I think it’s because of the nature of Jakarta itself, where we don’t have infrastructures for art, so the artists are looking for their own possible space and houses which, in terms of economic sustainability, are more affordable to rent or run. But also, because we grew up during the New Order regime, where public space was controlled, so houses were the safest space where to care for each other. It’s a practical paradox between domestic and public space and the living room was in the center of the space, we used it as a common space: everything is common there, people could gather. I remember, in our houses even the bathroom was a working space, things were used as much as we could because we only had a very small space. The Artlab was in the bedroom and the living room was for meetings, galleries, activations, workshops… It changed during the days, and the people were sleeping there as well. It’s the opposite of the bourgeois idea of the living room. It is similar to the one we organised in Milan, but in every city it’s different, since it’s related to its rhythm and dynamics. In Jakarta it has very distinct characteristics, being the city a center of politics and the economy.
Reza Afisina: We don’t want to impose the Living Room as a method, because it’s always everywhere anyhow: the most important thing regarding this particular space is that it’s a safe place, that’s how we connect within us, growing up towards these notions of artistic practices, especially in the sense of expressions. As we grew up or studied during the New Order regime, we needed a safe place rather than the things that were happening in our college or inside the campus or inside the institutions. We needed an extended space. Back in the college years, we never thought that we could really have our own space, since everything in Jakarta was not affordable, and that was not a common practice. Later on, we got to know that most of our friends, mostly in Yogyakarta, were starting something from their own houses – like Taring Padi, Cemeti or any group connected to our historical context. So that was the only safe place for us to really stay together, discuss and talk about several things, to make events. Every time every collective organization or artist group rented a house it was because that’s the basic need, so that everyone could live in the same place. Sometimes it’s not necessary to form as a collective, like many painters’ groups that belong to some local cultural societies, and rent the house together to work together, but for us back in Jakarta, we needed a space that was also meant for living. Since it was difficult for each of us to rent a space, it was better to gather collectively, also because at the same time ruangrupa was forming itself as a collective. So that’s why the house is so important for us, and this is not a method: it’s the way we see ourselves, based on necessities; it’s the place for us to live and work at the same time.
Q: In relation to the Living Room practice, could you tell us about the “RSVP” (research, score, value and to perform) [1] model?
IH: It’s a method developed in the 70s by Lawrence Halprin, an American Landscape Architect, along with his wife Anna. It’s meant for designers, and creatives doing artistic research. It’s interesting for us since it involves “scoring”, which is very close to what we practice with “harvesting” and the last component is “performance”, so how to perform, since the process is more important than the object. We made many modifications from that method and it’s not that the whole Living Room is based on that, but it’s a kind of exercise which is very progressive and fruitful, and can adjust to every local context. It’s very “locally anchored”, because it cannot be applied in the same way, or with the same method everywhere… That’s why we mention it in every session.
RA: Before we had the notion of the so-called “laboratory” in the artistic processes, that we called Artlab. Sometimes there are lots of names – artists run initiative, artists’ residence, and others… and we try to blend most of these gestures and practices, so we called it a laboratory. We used mapping strategies, as part of how we research the cities, to find lots of different potentialities within them, as in Lonely Market and Lonely Map. There’s also a mobile cinema. This is how we achieve these outcomes in most of our practices. RSVP is one of our recipes, we use it as part of the adjustments towards different related practices. Sometimes the structures could be changed, but these four-points from RSVP are our basis for finding something else, and the results might be hybrid, found in other ways or through other points, it depends.
Q: Regarding the ruruhaus in Kassel, its story, its process… could you tell us more?
RA: The ruruhaus is not the only one we have created with this approach, to make ourselves more visible and to be introduced into an ecosystem. The first ruruhuis was established in 2009 in Utrecht, when ruangrupa was invited to the “The Grand Domestic Revolution” project, at Casco Art Institute. And then ruruhuis was part of our process during the Sonsbeek International Exhibition in Arnhem; and we also had a ruru connected to the space inside a gallery during the São Paulo Biennial together with other collectives, RURU Gakko as a form of knowledge and creation of our practices before we started. At the time, we called it the ruru institute, and actually it was the first transformation towards the Gudskul collective study. So, the ruruhaus is one of the approaches that we mostly use to have our own space again, a space where everybody could get invited.
But, in the form of objects, we created these “houses” or “living rooms” for the first time in 2002 at the Gwangju Biennale. We tried to play with how people interact with the capacity of a space. We never really impose that our space needs to be oriented towards the artistic. We need space, that’s the most important thing. And we need to know if we could govern, put together the spaces, how interdependent they are, because we need to think about different kinds of structures. Sometimes it could be meant to be like a gallery space, sometimes a housing space, sometimes a market space. This space is changing: sometimes it belongs to students, sometimes to public space, sometimes it’s a theatre or performance space. Perhaps here in Europe you have spaces that have been designated – you have art centres, museums, galleries. But in Indonesia, we don’t have a very solid structure we could gain access to until you exhibit there, it’s not really accommodating nor supporting our practice, especially in the sense of collective or experimental practices.
What could be lacking in these different articulations is the harvest, because we’re mostly changing and moving, sometimes only for presentations, not really staying in a place, so we don’t have the time to harvest: maybe we have a conversation, like now, and some are going to be written, but this is only one of the harvests that we got after we spent our time in Milan, for example.
Q: In your practice, it is people, together with the artworks, who become the ultimate object of curatorial care. In this sense, we are very interested in your approach based on the creation of an interlocal yet “locally anchored” network, which could be understood as a sort of enabling infrastructure for the emergence of collective responsibility and contextual care. How to create, through artistic and curatorial practices, infrastructures of permanent care, shared growth, and support, in other words, a “caring ecosystem”?
RA: This could be a very long process, for sure. It is not easy to “create” because it should be based on necessities. We never really put many points that we need to grow this way, up until we had Gudskul or what we call an “ecosystem”. So, this is like more than twenty years of practice. That’s why it is very different if this will be applied to something that we don’t know how it’s already grown. For example, we could graft the process, but we don’t have any fixed formulations. If you like to deepen these issues, you could see our siasat. a short tactical guide for artist run initiative. We mentioned something there regarding the so-called “curatorial process”, because for us this is not a curatorial process: for us, this is the way we live considering our working conditions.
It is good to have feedback from your side on how this has been understood within your context, because it involves lots of different practices. For example, the way that you see it now, it is because we have mentioned the living room, kitchen, laboratory, one of the approaches that is RSVP, and so it seems like our whole working process is like that, but in reality it’s a longer process. Perhaps if we did it in Milano, it could be a different approach: we could challenge these points and perhaps we would find other formulations, because the thing is that ruangrupa is in Jakarta. We don’t know what would happen if ruangrupa went to Turin or Genoa, perhaps there would be hybrid forms of ruangrupa, maybe also the name would be different, or perhaps we could have a similar approach.
Coming back to space itself, for us to own or have space takes time, just like what we do with the ecosystem. It took us more than 17 years to finally get a grant thanks to which we could provide us space and infrastructure to continue our practices. This is not a project. If we have a space, then we have the collective responsibility that comes from each of our individual practices: getting along together, living together, working together, every day, without any context of “working hours”. ruangrupa is always changing. Sometimes there are six of us, sometimes ten… We don’t have a solid way to approach, it depends on the necessities. For example, until 2003/2005 we didn’t need a finance department, but suddenly we needed it, as well as a research department and a business unit, and other qualities as well. So, it’s always growing.
Q: In documenta fifteen we remember a very interesting video in which members of ruangrupa work and sleep in the same space, showing the deep relationships among you as working members of the collective…
RA: Since our college years we have always slept together in one of our studios. I came from the cinematography faculty, but I lived on campus from 1997 to around 2003 and stayed in different studios. I have known Daniella and Indra Ameng since the very beginning, Ade also visited us sometimes. This kind of particular meeting space, when we started to have our rented house, what we did first was to make sure that we activated most of the space that we got and during the night time it changed into a bedroom, or something else. This was kind of natural to us, because when we were staying in the campus, during the day we were studying, in the afternoon sometimes we hung out or worked in the studios, and during the evening sometimes we washed our clothes, slept, or did our homework together. And then, after work, we had like night time. So, this is natural. If we had space in our art academy, we would have stayed there forever, because as a student you have privilege. We stayed in a studio because you can own it together with your friends. It was like negotiating with the space.
BE: Even in Gudskul, we still sleep together every night.
IH: Coming back to the “caring ecosystem”, there are two points that are important as well, the first one is the process and the second one is the infrastructure.
Regarding “locally anchoring”, when we did the “curation” during the documenta, of course everything would have been part of the lumbung process. We were not interested and we did not want to do the commission-based process for this. We rather encouraged the artists to continue doing and bring what they were already doing in their own localities – like in Africa, America, Indonesia, Europe as well. The “locally anchored” is a process, not created for this edition of documenta, to bring their practices in Kassel. Of course, some artists made new works, but many just continued their practices, in a growing process naturally embedded within the “curation” that we were trying to establish. With regard to the infrastructure, it is an intangible infrastructure, because in Jakarta, we don’t have infrastructures, that’s why the students live on the campuses, but those intangible from daily lives, transform into a process for artistic making as well. There is something new in the space where ruangrupa was initiated, transforming from daily survival needs, into a way to survive as a collective, from a small bubble to what you see in the documenta fifteen. So, as a collective we had no pressure to create a proper infrastructure for it, because it would be naturally created by the artists themselves. And this is very interesting, because of course there were typical difficulties when they first meet, but slowly, they fight to get the spaces to negotiate and when the conversation starts rolling, they create, organize, design and run the space together, collectively, in those venues. Most of the design as well was a collective design. For example, the Rotunda in the Fridericianum, with the library and the common space, was designed by us with the artists and the production team as well. This infrastructure, as a part of the process, started from the intangible one, since we have never been imposing to create such infrastructures. The ecosystem naturally evolved from those processes.
Q: Enabling these networks to work together, and connect people, so that the infrastructure is more about relationships than actual spaces, facilitating meetings, discussions, and to exchanges between people…
BE: I want to reflect on this question into Gudskul practices now, because in the background of Jakarta’s history, many thousand people from different islands moved to Jakarta and now we live in the land that was occupied by people before us. When we built Gudskul, for us it was important to be engaged with the environment, the surroundings, the neighbourhood. All the projects in Gudskul are not only provided for people with the art knowledge, but also for the ones in our neighbourhood. So, like in one recent project, the Neba Di Marih festival, it is in Jagakarsa’s local language. We don’t use art language to approach and engage with them, so they can have a sense of belonging to our space. It was also our concern to be part of them, so they are part of us, because we live in one land, in one district.
RA: Coming back to the notions of “local anchor”, we need that particular approach regarding how societies are practicing together. We realised that if you see ruangrupa growing up, it’s because of the existence of others too. Back in the 2000s, we were always talking about networks, alternative spaces, artists’ run initiatives… Up until today, those names still exist. The network for us is the way to note how some other friends relate in the gestures of our working practices, that perhaps align. Sometimes you may lose your networks or realise that some friends are not very keen to be part of yours, or that we could not work together, because everyone has their own positions. We also lost most of our friends regarding this matter, because everyone has their own expectations, especially regarding financial security. We know that working collectively does not guarantee that you are going to have a wonderful life. It’s not like a secure thing. We set the ecosystem as a part on how we would like to take care together of each other, having collective responsibility, because everyone of us, in regard to our different roles and expertise, has the same aim on how we would like to acknowledge this particular artistic practice the way we read it, observe it, experience it outside of the Academy, and on how we would like to share this responsibility. It’s about how we would like to reflect on it, keep it inspiring or be inspired within each other, how we put admiration for one another. We understand that we live within this capacity, especially in the Jakarta context, which is different from Yogyakarta because they have a sense of competition, regarding creativity and craft, but in Jakarta we could also compete in securing our financial life and living space. So how do we try to embed these notions? How we try to deliver our so-called “method” of artistic practices since we do not come from the curatorial practice, we never really studied art economics, or the creative economy model in the art school system. So, we tried to assemble most of our practices and share the common responsibilities as well the common sense on distributing knowledge, also in the power structure, for example.
Q: Could you tell us something more about the beginning of your practices, as students, and how the cultural contexts in Jakarta have changed until the present time?
RA: Me and Iswanto could be similar because we both grew up in the New Order regime authoritarian system and the cultural context in Jakarta has changed because it’s related to its infrastructure. We mostly came to Jakarta to pursue our dreams, or because most of the schools are there, and it’s more convenient in an economical sense, because it’s a big city, with more possibilities of job and career. I think that this could be part of how we realised that if we would like to form something that could give us a future together, we needed to change the way in which we saw competition. Sometimes there’s no competition at all, since you work together you have the same aim. It was good for us that we had someone that was already from Jakarta, like Ade, Indra, Daniella, Farid, Julia… Because as students, we actually needed someone who could take care of us and our friends did it, and gladly these friends are quite supportive of our lives up until now. To be honest, this is quite difficult to explain because it’s talking about relationships.
Q: Gudskul Ekosistem was born in 2018 from ruangrupa, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, and is situated in Jagakarsa, in the South of Jakarta. Can you tell us more about how this process originated and led to the current site and organization, and also about the practices, workshops and initiatives activated during documenta fifteen?
RA: About Gudskul, beforehand we didn’t know how to form such an ecosystem, close to the notion of collective study, within the contemporary art ecosystem. In 2015 we named it “collective of collectives”, when we started to occupy this huge warehouse together. Serrum could deliver this model on art and education, because they have a lot of practice with a focus on art and pedagogy. We formed Gudskul to deliver and distribute our sense of knowledge together, and these things happened until this moment, nothing changed and we are not trying to change anything. We just try to accompany something that perhaps is missing or does not exist yet, or needs to be challenged, evaluated, criticised regarding the way we act as a collective. The most important thing is to deliver options, in this way you are not trapped in any loop. We need to see many ways of doing things.
BE: As you may know, Gudskul decided to sleep and then cook in the Fridericianum too, as a statement regarding how we decided to make it our house – we drank, partied, and cooked there. That ambiance, that atmosphere, was naturally a space that we could open as wide as we could. You could feel how that space was about exchanging everything, like stories and knowledge. We exchanged knowledge about bahasa Indonesia, for example, we appreciated every small exchange that connected us in that space, to be a safe space.
RA: We knew that many people from Gudskul would like to come, but we had a limited amount of budget, so we could not really cover our own daily expenses. That was the cheapest thing that we could do to stay and live together. So that was a very basic idea when we realised that many friends would have come, and some of them also needed a place to stay since they couldn’t afford the accommodations during documenta. So Gudskul was also an operating kitchen for the friends who stayed inside because they needed it. Then, suddenly, it was gradually becoming a safe space for all of us together. Even the notes like “Please clean your dishes”, “Please clean your trash”, happened gradually. When they activated that space, they didn’t have any regulations yet, and felt like everyone could take their own responsibility, but since the space was becoming quite publicly known, and mostly every night there was some event going on, there was a negotiation on how we would like to secure this place together. Because this belonged not only to Gudskul, but making this responsibility a collective responsibility it’s quite challenging.
Q: There was also a collection of recipes…
RA: And this came later, before there was no collection of recipes until we found out that lots of friends were cooking. And suddenly we asked ourselves: “Why don’t we record all these recipes, with the drawing and such?” So, it was becoming like a book of recipes from the artists and people who came to visit. And we never asked someone to cook, because spontaneously they just said, “Hey, how about if tomorrow I cook? Because I could cook for some friends that we’ll host”.
BE: And we divided into two groups, if you remember, in Jagakarsa and in Kassel, to celebrate documenta fifteen together, simultaneously, during the 100 days, so in one of the corners of Gudskul space we had a camera to monitor each other.
RA: I think we have a question about Casa degli Artisti: how is it known to the neighbourhood, do they come and go just like transiting? Because the space is quite open, the first time that we were there I thought “Oh, this is nice”, because perhaps people know what kind of space it is: it has a good restaurant, a good hangout space and a living room. Because we felt it was similar to the way in which we govern Gudskul, that belongs to its neighbourhood. And its neighbours know about the things that happen in Gudskul, even though the only transiting point is the food seller kiosks, and inside we don’t have a restaurant. People sometimes come to Gudskul as regular customers of some of the local kiosks nearby. With or without exhibitions, sometimes they just hang out there. That’s why I’m asking about Casa degli Artisti, because it is part of its neighbourhood area, so I am wondering about what knowledge of this space the neighbours there have.
Q: Many don’t know this space.
RA: So, we need to invite more for karaoke, cooking, outdoor cinema…! 🙂
Q: Thanks to what you did in Milan, Casa degli Artisti has opened up to people outside the so-called art scene. We invited people from different fields, inviting them to invite other people: the idea was just to meet there, to open up to everyone who accepted the invitation, and see what could happen, if there was someone to talk to, to meet. In Italy there are many collective practices, but they can lead to not being aligned with expectations and standards, so it’s very pressuring, without having solid institutions to rely on, and difficult to collaborate with others because the competition is strong.
RA: About that, some of our attempts to engage, since 2000 up to 2015, we were always moving every two years, so the longest rent for a house that we had, back in 2007 until 2015, it’s like one of the particularly good located, situated houses that really were close to most of the dynamics in the neighbourhoods from the south of Jakarta during that time. So, we created a mobile cinema and Holy Market situations together, because we wanted to engage in this so-called competitiveness in our neighbourhood. We also wanted to learn what competition is, in the sense of how societies deal with that today. The reason is always the economy, but we wanted to know which were the other reasons: perhaps one comes from or belongs to some cultural groups or societies, perhaps it regards senior and junior capacities, or perhaps you compete because of the space… So, we tried to map this as a part of our narration, since we could not really easily see the surface. But when it came more into performative gestures or acts, then suddenly there were always reactions. For example, the first time that we were in the Artlab together, creating the Lonely Market map, we mapped the situation so-called “market” or “transaction”. What is a transaction? It could be anything, it could be monetary, could be not. That’s why we tried to map the kind of transactions of our nearby area, to discover more of Jakarta as a context and what kind of models were put into the articulation of transactions. Then we divided it into different kinds of subjects that could be related to the gestures of the ones who came to this area to live, study, work, or create their own entrepreneurship and such. We tried to make this as a whole part of narration and later we invited them back. In Lonely market map, we invited most of the sellers that we knew, that have their own specific practices, to show them, not only to sell something, but to also tell the stories about the way they work. That could be one of the attempts that you could try.
Q: As you invited back documenta to be part of your ecosystems, when invited to be artistic directors, we would like to ask you if there is something you would like to ask back or share or propose thinking about the Italian context, after the experiences we shared in Milano?
RA: Perhaps I could just give one heads up, because, first, we have never had such a short engagement in Italy. And second, our closest approach to Italy was related to “fashion” festivals and the Venice Biennale. So, we didn’t know about the academic institutions and such until we had this very good opportunity, since we were here and in Kassel during the documenta, and we met Paola, and certainly she is connected to you and to others from Italy, so that’s why we were in Bologna and in Milano. This could be the first encounter for us to think together or propose something about the Italian context, but until this moment could be very speculative. On the other hand, at least we could grab something more into the sense of how we already put this into part of our relationships so far. I think that could be like a good start, because for sure we would like to know many things. We have never been in the art schools, but we could see that everyone came from different directions, some from Naba, some from Brera, but we have never been there, so we don’t know about how these two, for example, are becoming two important campuses in a similar way as we see it in Jakarta, where we have many institutes and universities.
It could be very open towards our way of working together, if possible, to map the history of the collectives in Milan or in Italy, because this is part of our subjects back in Gudskul, the history of collective art or art collectives in Jakarta and Indonesia. So that’s why we have a “lumbung fixer”, for example, and we try to map the collective strategies connected to the “local anchor”. And this is open for us, this is still our ongoing research. Because I think we have similarities upon the political context. You mentioned very clearly, regarding the regions in Italy, how friends from the South are making their direction to the North just like the same within us – how many of our friends only come to Jakarta or Java… I guess if we have to propose to think together, we would need to find a way to map the history of collectives and see what kind of practices have been there, in Milan, in Bologna, and the way that they connect. Also, the culture of publishing in Indonesia is very difficult: in Italy it’s very common that an individual artist makes his own publication, while in Indonesia it is more a practice embedded in oral history, narration, storytelling, and such, and then it lacks documentation… It could be a nice approach.
IH: I think it’s very interesting to be in contact because it’s very different from here in Germany, even geographically, because Germany is in the centre of Europe and in Italy you have a part which is closer to the centre, and the other part closer to the Mediterranean. So culturally, this is also reflected on the food: you have so many diversities, while here is more homogeneous. What’s also interesting is the radical thought and movement, which in Italy is historically very strong, embedded with your culture and politics. Last time in Bologna we discussed quite a lot about cooperative activities, very strong in the 60s and 70s. It is very powerful there, and it falls differently in Indonesia. But I would say that it’s an interesting ground for this kind of radical practices as well.
Q: In the introduction to the documenta fifteen Handbook you write that documenta began since the ecosystem of documenta fifteen began to develop, spiralling to include other ecosystems from different parts of the world that have joined you in the lumbung processes with the invitation “make friends not art.” In addition, you specify that you intend these three years of preparation and the processes that took place at that time as an important part of documenta, as well as what will happen after the exhibition. This is the first time that documenta continues after the 100-day exhibition. Which projects are you developing with the local ecosystem in Kassel?
RA: For Kassel, documenta is kind of a landmark, every five years, so that’s why there’s lots of projects. Many of them also interacted with most of the artists that were coming, some of them already worked together within this context even without documenta, for example. So, these are the ones that I and Iswanto, in the beginning of ruruhaus, encouraged to really open up initiatives within themselves, not really depending on documenta. At the moment some of them are really trying to strengthen this network after documenta. They’re still calling some of the projects “lumbung”, but no specific project that has been conceived because they “need to continue” documenta. Many of them were already working in this field anyway, and some of them have invited us to be involved in their projects. So there’s a lot going on: maybe we still need to find out which part of this Kassel ecosystem can just not only give examples, but think about how they could “harvest” together and really connect with each other. Some of them have experienced documenta, but they were not really working together at that time, so now they have their chance to share this experience. So, what will happen next? We don’t know yet, but most of the attempts are here already.
BE: I was amazed at how, a month ago, some collectives here in Kassel invited me to see their plan about how they wanted to continue the lumbung system in Kassel. For me it was a really nice gesture, because I thought of how they, after documenta fifteen, are starting to believe that the lumbung system is fit for the Kassel ecosystem in the end. And how they want to formulate the lumbung system with their gesture, they plan to make a music festival again, to make exhibitions next summer, and then they want to adapt some of the projects that happened in documenta. And it’s really nice because it’s not triggered by us now, but it’s triggered by themselves because they experienced this system and how we work, and they want to try again, after documenta, to see how it will be going. They’re also very aware this is a kind of trial or error process to experiment with lumbung; they plan to harvest this process and then exhibit next summer.
ruruHaus in September 2020. Courtesy of ruruHaus in Kassel.
Note
This conversation took place following the activation of the Living Room practice at Casa degli Artisti, Milan, on May 13th and 14th, 2023, as part of the public program of "Sguardi Urbani" artistic research residency, curated by Cecilia Guida, Deborah Maggiolo and Paola Pietronave. More info on LINK
[1] A/N RSVP cycles is a system of creative methodology for collaboration developed by Lawrence and Anna Halprin and presented in the 1969 book The RSVP Cycles: Creative Processes in the Human Environment. RSVP is an initialism referring to its four components: Resources, Score, Valuaction, Performance. Within the system there is no set order in which the stages should be completed, and each of them implies a micro-cycle including all the other elements of the system (e.g. scoring the resources, resourcing the performance, performing the score etc.).
Reza Afisina and Iswanto Hartono, from ruangrupa and ruruHaus in Kassel. Both as individual artists and collectively together with ruangrupa, they have been involved in various national and international exhibitions and workshops; with ruangrupa as an artists’ collective platform, they also have participated in Gwangju Biennale 2002 and 2018 South Korea, Istanbul Biennale 2005, Singapore Biennale 2011, Asia Pacific Triennial in Brisbane – Australia 2012, Sao Paulo Biennale 2014, Cosmopolis #1, Centre Pompidou in Paris – France 2017, and including co-curating TRANSaction: Sonsbeek International 2016 in Arnhem, the Netherlands as well as the artistic director from collective ruangrupa for documenta fifteen 2022 in Kassel – Germany. They are also part of ruangrupa Arts Laboratory divisions and subjects for collective study of art laboratories with Gudskul as an ecosystem of collectives. ruangrupa Arts Laboratory (ArtLab) is one of divisions that focus on giving a space for research and creative / artistic collaboration for individual artists or groups and people from other disciplines and backgrounds to work together through specific research and collaboration that involve artists from Indonesia and abroad.
Bellina Erby is part of Gudskul Ekosistem and an art producer and program manager from Jakarta, with a focus on food issues, technological interactions, and localities. In 2017, she was part of the curatorial team for OK.Video, where she later worked as a program manager. In 2018 she produced a collaborative research project on local food preservation for the Dayak Iban tribe in Sungai Utik, West Kalimantan. Since 2019 she has been engaged in a solidarity project with independent food initiatives in the global south through Arts Collaboratory network. Between 2019 and 2022 Erby served as assistant artistic director at documenta fifteen and is based in Kassel ever since.
Cecilia Guida, PhD, is curator, art critic, professor at the Academy of Fine Arts-Brera, Milan. Her academic and curatorial interests are public and participatory art practices, radical pedagogy and contemporary public space. She is editor of the Italian edition of Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship by Claire Bishop (2015). Among her publications: Spatial Practices. Funzione pubblica e politica dell’arte nella società delle reti (2012; Spanish ed. 2021; Chinese ed. in progress), Muntadas. Interconnections, interconnessiones, interconexiones (2019) and Le relazioni oltre le immagini. Approcci teorici e pratiche dell’arte pubblica (2022).
Deborah Maggiolo is an independent curator and researcher based in Milan, co-founder of the cultural associations Genealogie del Futuro and Sympoietic Society. Her interests intertwine posthuman ecologies, feminist politics of care and practices of community activation in a critical and speculative reading of the present. She has proposed and coordinated curatorial and editorial projects, in independent and institutional spaces; she collaborates with cultural foundations and national and international associations.
Paola Pietronave is a cultural practitioner involved in curatorial and artistic practices, as well as in mediation and research. Currently her focuses of interest run around collaborative, collective and mutuality-based projects and initiatives with a transdisciplinary approach. She is the co-founder of the projects an office and Critical Studies Department. She has worked as art mediator at documenta fifteen and has published La condizione italiana contemporanea. I Lavoratori dell’Arte 2009-2011 (?) in 2019.