documenta fifteen
18.06 - 25.09.2022
The title of this article is courtesy of my dear friend Jaime Ruiz Martinez, via Kendrick Lamar.
Lumbung—the Indonesian word for a rice barn, in which the collective governance of communal resources is implied—is the practice producing the structures, social negotiations and economies of documenta fifteen (and beyond). Lumbung can mean “friendship, working well together, sharing things, and looking after everyone in a group.” By closing the bureaucratically-imposed distance usually present between artists, curators, institutions, audience and organisers of such big art events, lumbung makes it possible to engage in processes of mutual trust and truth-telling, forming the bases of the many social and exchange groups of the broader collective.
But the truths of colonised or occupied places – and exploited, or otherwise oppressed people – rarely thrive in historic institutions of the West. In Germany, organised and improvised mechanisms of repression – from the press and policing, to informal fascist organising – are quick to attack unwanted people and information, especially those from ‘the global south.’ Ruangrupa, and many lumbung artists and members have faced racism, harassment from citizens and/or police, transphobia, threats, and a barrage of paternalistic criticism of their work. What appears to trigger Germany about lumbung is the way in which its practices have enabled people from colonised spaces to occupy the art world’s centre stage in ways that neither perform a desired ‘globalsouthness,’ nor assimilate into the regular rules and processes of professionalised biennalisms.
The Nest Collective, Return to Sender, 2022. Courtesy of the Nest Collective.
My friend Denisse and I visited Return to Sender, which lives (temporarily) in a lush park in Kassel, backgrounded by a grand palace-like Orangerie from the early 1700s. The park, Karlswiese, feels royal – in the imperialist sense – whereas Return to Sender seems decidedly non-royal, an installation dumped in the flat grassy stretch, its path littered with giant packages of tightly bundled e-waste. Jagged edges, brittle plastics, and unattached keyboards lead the way to a hollow, corrugated iron-roofed building structure, whose walls are made from giant bales of second hand clothing and textile. Karlswiese’s manicured lawns and grandiose energy seem to yell that this installation is foreign, out of place—but its title suggests otherwise, that it has simply returned home, landed back where it belongs.
Return to Sender–Delivery Details, the film that loops inside, consists of a series of interviews reflecting on the problem of the masses of second hand clothing waste shipped from the West to ports of East Africa, like Mombasa, Kenya. The clothing bales—‘mitumba’ in Swahili—like those stacked to build the structure’s walls, are then distributed to various cities, most notably Nairobi, where the Nest Collective, makers of this intervention, live and work. The market for mitumba has grown a lot since the late 1990s and now accounts for a huge part of Kenya’s clothing industry. But it has introduced some big problems.
Thulile Gamedze, mind map, 2022.
Western mitumba politics are baked into the logic of fast-fashion, in which quick turnaround and increasingly exploitative labour conditions are largely mobilised towards the production of what becomes waste. Waste has to be thrown away, and thus, clothes – often donated – are (dodgily) sorted into bales according to quality, thereafter shipped and sold to African countries cheaply. But about a third of the garments and textiles imported to East Africa are neither re-sellable nor recyclable, and so end up dumped, conveniently far from their Western dumpers, in overflowing landfills and waterways. Many Kenyans must regularly encounter and walk through these littered landscapes, locked into a neoliberal mitumba trade trap, which continues to under-develop the local textile industry, and has hazardous and undignified environmental impact.1Over time, these environmental and economic costs have become increasingly glaring, but Rwanda, for example, who has held fast to an increased taxation policy on the import of used clothes, has, since 2018, been excluded from the AGOA agreement, meaning that its own manufactured products are highly taxed at US borders. These hostile trading policies prove that self-deterministic, development-driven economic moves by African nations are in fact the opposite of what organising bodies like AGOA stand for (not that we needed more proof). But beyond economic and environmental destruction, Return to Sender–Delivery Details emphasises the psychological effects of being made to wear the West’s discarded purchases. Wearers are literally dressed by cast-offs of the still-imperial-world, where their low-income statuses are ongoingly put to use in taking care of one of the West’s many sins.
The Nest, however, is not interested in participating in this trade, returning mitumba to one of their many senders, Germany. Karlswiese Park is the subject of a realist-makeover, reflecting what it may look like for Western nations to commit to owning, rather than exporting their problems to the formerly-colonised world. While the mitumba industry today employs about two million Kenyans, its hyper-presence has made alternatives near-impossible, removing the possibility for more autonomous, self-fashioned clothing and textile industries.
Ruangrupa’s language of ‘harvesting’ talks about processes of mapping, illustrating, diagramming, imaging, building, staging and writing approximations of collectively-brewed knowledges, and important questions raised in meetings and events.2ruangrupa, “lumbung: what is harvest?” in documenta fifteen handbook (Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 2022), 42. Consistent notation and mapping throughout documenta are reminders of the constant seasonal movement that political, historical and creative work is subject to. In order to ‘harvest,’ time must keep rolling, work must remain sustained and sustainable, and we must always take care of the present and protect the coming seasons’ harvests as best as we can. Instead of presenting typically ‘resolved’ art objects or installations, lumbung emphasises practices of planning and working towards as creative and transformative work. The Nest’s harvest – its film engaging the politics of the mitumba-effect, and a collective position against their problematic import – directly implicates the place in which it is shown, Germany, insisting that Western dumping practices are not a habit for which Kenya should have to pay the price.
Indra Ameng, lumbung Kassel, lumbung inter-lokal, lumbung Indonesia, 2022.
In lumbung, ‘sharing’ is not always easy, because it means sharing the burdens of each other’s problems, not only each other’s resources. As we were made to learn through our time in Kassel, Germany does not care much to review perspectives from its underbelly, or to be present with and share in the pain it is culpable of or responsible for. It remains convenient for German consumerist tendencies to use Black spaces as national dustbins, just as it is convenient to gloss over its historical responsibility in bolstering Israel’s colonisation of Palestine, and to forget that its genocidal experiments began on African soil. It is not difficult to see why German institutions would prefer to stay repressed, to sustain the distances imposed by their bureaucratic art relations.
But lumbung practice is just so much nicer. In the “lumbung” chapter of the handbook, ruangrupa describes their resistance to “the domestication or taming of…different [art] practices,” explaining that their attempts to “do things differently” are predicated on a future beyond the 100 days of documenta. Instead of seeing this time as a discrete container for collective working and networking, the impossible-seeming social-rupture of this mega-art structure serves as an experiment in organising towards more autonomous, justice-oriented models and methods for working together.
