SYSTEMIC DESIGN | ECOSYSTEM | COMMUNITY | ART

Lumbung, a collective and collaborative community space

(the kampung community rice barn, extrapolated)

ruangrupa collective, 2022. standing: Farid Rakun, Ade Darmawan, Reza Afisina. sitting (front): Ajeng Nurul Aini, Mirwan Andan. sitting (middle row): Iswanto Hartono, Indra Ameng, Daniella Fitria Praptono, Julia Sarisetiati.

For more than just a few reasons, ruangrupa’s artistic directorship of the 15th edition of documenta has been the talk of the town all through the 2022 summer art season.

Documenta has been one of the major art happenings in the world since its inception in 1955. The festival, a one-hundred-day art fest, recurrently happens in Kassel (Germany). The idea was conceived by painter and educator Arnold Bode (1900–1977), who was eager to make up for the lost war years and thought of using art and artful conversations as a way to bring Germany back into dialogue with the rest of the world. With this aim, Bode founded the Society of Western Art of the 20th Century — an organization with the mission of presenting the kind of art that had been branded by Germany’s nationalist narrative as degenerate.

The first documenta was a retrospective of works from art movements that had been denied to the German public (Fauvism, Expressionism, Cubism, the Blaue Reiter, Futurism). It featured works by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, Hans Arp, Henri Matisse, Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, and Max Beckmann.