ADE DARMAWAN AND LEONHARD BARTOLOMEUS:
LEARNING TO LUMBUNG — EXPERIMENTS IN COLLECTIVE ART EDUCATION
By Andrew Maerkle with Hanna Hirakawa and Keisuke Nakaya
The Question of Funding, The Question of Funding (2020). Courtesy documenta fifteen.
What is the role of education in Ruanrupa activities?
ANDREW MAERKLE: There has been a lot of international interest in ruangrupa since the collective’s appointment in 2019 as artistic director of this year’s documenta fifteen. At the same time, I sense there is a lot of confusion about what ruangrupa is. Is it an artist collective? Is it a curatorial platform? Is it an organization? Is it a community? That confusion results in part from the rigid categories that determine how art circulates internationally. But I think that instead of trying to pin ruangrupa down to a fixed definition, approaching ruangrupa through the lens of education can illuminate how the different aspects of your practice inform each other. In fact, as I understand it, one of the first times you implemented a lumbung, which is one of the core concepts for documenta fifteen, was in 2018, when you established the educational initiative Gudskul Ekosistem in collaboration with two other collectives, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara. Ade, could you start by telling us about the role education plays in ruangrupa’s activities?
ADE DARMAWAN: Education is actually a good angle for thinking about the development of ruangrupa, and one that we haven’t really written about before. We founded ruangrupa in 2000, but the original members got to know each other starting from around 1995, when we were students at art school. Being in the art school environment and dealing with the institution of education were important factors for us, on top of which our early activities were also a small part of the big student movement of 1998 with Reformasi. We were highly aware of how education is dominated by ideas of control and power. We wanted to deconstruct that relationship or work with it somehow, because we had been suffering from it for many years—and I more so than the rest, since I come from a family of teachers!
In that sense, networking with students and teachers outside the formal educational apparatus was one of our first priorities. We saw it as a way to bridge the reality inside the school walls with the actual reality outside. In 2004 we launched Jakarta 32°C as a forum for students working in all creative fields. I think we had participants from 10 schools in the first edition and by the last it was more than 20.
After a certain point we started to think that ruangrupa was becoming a school in itself. We had a lot of students working with us, hanging out with us, contributing to projects. It was very informal, experience-based learning—making mistakes, doing stupid stuff and so on. Then gradually those students would initiate something outside the group, not only in Jakarta but in other cities too, so that the network kept growing.
And it’s not just ruangrupa, nor is it happening only in visual art. There are many initiatives from our generation that have become almost like schools now. Collectives provide experiences that formal schools can’t in Indonesia. There is only one film school serving all 200 million people here. Where do the filmmakers come from? They come from the communities, ruangrupa-style. People may say there are not so many art schools across the 17,000 islands of Indonesia, but there are collectives and initiatives and communities sprouting like crazy. We just published a book of research on Indonesian collectives called Articulating Fixer 2021. We included more than 50 collectives in the book, and many of them operate essentially on the basis of learning through practice.
And now ruangrupa combines not only different disciplines, but also different generations. Barto joined us around 2012, which is already something like the fourth generation for us. I remember we were doing evaluations after an event one year—maybe the OK. Video festival—and there was one young friend who told us that he had been afraid to make a mistake. I was shocked, because for us ruangrupa was always about doing what we want, and now here was this younger person introducing the concept of mistakes. We had to step back and think about what had happened. Once you start talking about mistakes, it means you’ve become an institution, you’ve become professional.
We recognized the need to work as an educational or knowledge-regeneration platform, because that’s the only way for our knowledge and experience to be passed on without losing its criticality or being too institutionalized. That’s why we connected with Serrum. Serrum is great because the members are actually trained as teachers, and they bring a different angle to us. The educational platform is a mechanism for us to sustain our ideas and criticality across generations.
AM: What was the curriculum like at the time when you were first starting out? In Indonesia there are major art schools in Bandung, Jakarta, and Yogyakarta, and there’s also a strong local market too, so on some minimum level the needs of the art community are being met. Was it more an issue of philosophy for you?
AD: The modern art school is a recent phenomenon in Indonesia, really only dating back to the postwar period. But now it dominates the whole art scene. Those three schools you mention are the main producers of artists in Indonesia, in conjunction with the market. In that sense they are part of the ecosystem. But art schools adapt very slowly. The curriculum is very classical, let’s say. It’s still divided into rigid categories such as sculpture, painting, printmaking.
We need more options. There are so many ways to produce and perceive art now. That’s why the more spontaneous educational approach of the art collectives or communities is helping to broaden views of art in Indonesia. The institutional definition of art or an artist is based on a Western model. The idea that art is an individual form of expression has a history of less than a hundred years here. Our tradition of communal or collective art in Indonesia is far older than that. The idea of the career artist is also really new. Even when I was studying at art school in the 1990s, it was not as developed as it is now. It only has a history of 20 or 30 years in the collective consciousness.
So although we are diversifying approaches to art in Indonesia in relation to the Western model, we’re actually going back to the premodern tradition at the same time. Modernization was of course an important step in the process of decolonization. You need to be able to speak back to the colonizers from a shared level of argumentation or criticality. But we have to question what that means now. What is the meaning of studying painting in the current context of Indonesia?
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Above: Festival Jakarta 32˚C. Below: Irwan Ahmett, Happiness, installation view, RURU Gallery, Jakarta, 2008. Both images: Courtesy ruangrupa.
To the real educational platform
AM: Barto, do you have anything to add about the role of education in ruangrupa’s formation, and how you are extending that to your work as a curator at Yamaguchi Center for Art and Media?
LEONHARD BARTOLOMEUS (BARTO): I think people underestimate the role ruangrupa plays in art education in Indonesia. Can you imagine what it was like for me as a student at Jakarta Institute of Art when I went to see RURU Gallery’s exhibition of Irwan Ahmett in 2008? I was amazed. Why didn’t anyone at the university teach us about this? Installation? Conceptual art? That was the encounter that got me interested in contemporary art, because there was not really any other place to go to at the time. Some teachers in the art schools even prohibited their students from visiting ruangrupa. They said it wasn’t art. So the first thing to note is that ruangrupa gave us young artists an alternative to what we could experience in our formal education. And another important role ruangrupa plays is to fill gaps in the formal education. There were essentially no programs for curators or critics when I was at school. Then around the time of ruangrupa’s 15th anniversary in 2016, we began to realize that learning was at the core of ruangrupa’s activities. Many friends were telling us to make a real educational platform that could both challenge the formal institutions and prompt them to evolve. That’s where the idea for Gudskul came from. The three founding collectives are all similar in their commitment to using workshops or project-based activities to introduce educational programs in their communities.
I think that’s the point I’m trying to make with the project for Serrum that I organized at YCAM. I’m not really a media art curator, so when I first arrived in Yamaguchi, I questioned what I could contribute. I realized I could offer my knowledge and networks of peers in Indonesia and other parts of the world, and I knew I wanted to find ways to open the institution to the local community. Since museums and art centers are very strong institutions in Japan, visitors already have this mental image that there is a specific way to behave when they look at artworks in that context. Instead of making exhibitions, I wanted to make a platform that allows visitors to make use of the space. And since YCAM already had a commitment to education, that became my point of entry. The interesting thing about Serrum is that they may be the only art collective in Indonesia where the members are all trained in pedagogical practice and work as art educators. There were really interesting conversations between Serrum and the YCAM educational team. My next project is a collaboration with the City Lab at Liverpool John Moores University, which is trying to bring back the notion of useful arts through Tania Bruguera’s concept of Arte Útil as well as the ideas of John Ruskin and the Arts and Crafts movement. They think of artworks not only as museum pieces, but also as something that can be useful for and actually rooted in the community, rather than a single person or institution that gets to decide what is art or not.
I think it’s still relatively uncommon to produce projects by collectives. For instance, at YCAM we usually invite individual artists to work with us. I wouldn’t say it’s easy, but at least working that way is simpler, as you only have to deal with one person. The problem with collectives is you are never sure who you should be dealing with. It’s always changing. But that can also stimulate the curiosity of the visitors. They have questions about what a collective is or how to define it. For me, it’s not about any formal criteria, but just about utilizing each other’s abilities and sharing resources. That’s a concept I learned from ruangrupa which I have translated to the Serrum project.
AM: In the case of both ruangrupa and Serrum it seems to be important to provide a space where people can come and go while exchanging ideas, as also suggested by the title ruangrupa chose for Sonsbeek ’16, transACTION. But how do you create an open space that can be sustained openly—because institutions start to select, right?
AD: It’s a question of scale and time. I think a collective should always be a small–medium enterprise, to borrow a term from Indonesian government policy. Gudskul is now at a pretty good scale. As you say, Andrew, once it gets bigger, the time concept changes, and a power structure emerges.
For instance, we run Gudskul as a lumbung, with a collective pot for all the resources and money, but it’s not a centralized pot. It’s more transparent and decentralized. I don’t even know how many bank accounts are flying around now. There’s seemingly one for everything—the radio, the shop, art handling, the school, the gallery. There’s a group of people who oversee it, and we review everything and decide which money should go where. We also hold a monthly majelis or assembly where we sit together for the whole day and discuss, share feelings, problems, and so on, and then we decide together. It’s self-organized. And in order to do that it needs to remain within a certain scale, because if it gets too big, then it becomes a state, which doesn’t work—as we know from most states! Time is another big issue, because we need time to build trust and relationships. I don’t know how to accelerate that process. Everything just needs time, in our experience.
So a sustainable model is probably not focused on growth as such. It’s small–medium but connected. And looking back through the years, only the collectives that have managed to maintain that relation have survived.
AM: Education is the engine for many of ruangrupa’s artistic and curatorial activities. For instance, when you hold a workshop for artists, there’s an educational exchange taking place, but new works also result from that. And the workshop itself can then be taken to an international exhibition in a different format, such as an installation. I think the structure for documenta fifteen also draws on your experience with education.
AD: That direction comes from our criticality toward art practice itself, which in fact goes back to the issues we had with how art schools define what we call art. And of course it’s not just schools; there are also museums, biennales, the market—all these big monsters that hold the whole thing up. I think people are gradually coming to realize that there are many problems in the system, like how it’s so extractive or exploitative, and how it makes many people suffer as well.
In organizing documenta, we don’t see lumbung as a theme so much as a practice. We’re not looking at particular artworks, we’re looking at practices. The connection with educational platforms has taught us so much. We’ve encountered many diverse models of educational platforms in many different contexts with completely different perceptions of contemporary art. What is contemporary art in a place like Iraq? What does it mean? People are taking the idea and flipping it on its head. So we’re trying to envision this documenta as more of a journey than an exhibition. What can it do after the 100 days are over? We’re thinking with our collaborators about how we can extend beyond the limits of documenta fifteen itself.
One of the main goals for this documenta is experimenting with economic models. I don't think we can find a new approach to institutional practice without inventing new economic models, because it’s all so connected: state money, corporate money, the market. It’s something that we never really speak about transparently, but it plays a huge role in how art institutions are structured.
Above: Serrum, Kurikulab: Moving Class, installation view, Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, 2021. Below: Serrum’s Ideal School workshop with local facilitators and students in Yamaguchi. Both images: Photo Kazuma Yoshiga, courtesy Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM).
Assembling knowledge from other's activities
AM: Barto, the members of Serrum actually go into schools in Jakarta and create programs on topics ranging from mathematics to media literacy, right?
LB: Yes, and now they are developing a national project called PRESISI (Precision) in collaboration with two other alternative schools, Sanggar Anak Akar and Erudio Indonesia, with support from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Research and Technology. It’s already being trialed at 100 schools, if I’m not mistaken. It is an art-based learning project. The students choose the subject they want to learn, and then they have six months to research on their own and make a presentation using visual material like video, photography, or drawings. It’s quite an achievement for a collective. I joke with them that they are becoming too serious now. But they have a purpose and a vision. And that’s happening with other collectives all across Indonesia right now. A lot of the collectives have a mission to contribute to their communities.
AM: One of the books we’ve been reading this semester is Doris Sommer’s The Work of Art in the World. She writes powerfully about how art-based education is not only an important technique for teaching children to read, but also essential to building the kind of civic literacy that one needs to participate in a democracy. Are you familiar with the book?
LB: Yes, I have a copy. I guess that’s the struggle Ade mentions about working in an institution. It’s like a machine. It always needs to renew itself. There’s less time for building relationships. You bring in the artist, do the project, and then it’s over. But as with ruangrupa’s approach to documenta, the question we have to ask ourselves is what happens after that? What’s the benefit of doing these projects if there’s no sustainable relationship emerging out of them? That’s why at YCAM I proposed doing three-year projects, rather than the typical one-year cycle. Institutions tend to see visitors as a performance metric, just a byte or a digit, rather than as constituents or friends or neighbors. We shouldn’t need a special project to talk with those people. We should always be interested in keeping the space open.
AM: Ade, did you work on the Ruru Gakko project for Aichi Triennale 2016?
AD: Yes, I was there for the first two weeks—one week before the opening and one week after.
LB: The topic of his first class was “How to Be Disorganized,” which surprised many visitors, who were mainly Japanese people. They were asking, Oh, is it really possible?!
AD: And another time I asked them to think about what they should delete from the city—not add, but delete. It was fun.
AM: How was the overall experience?
AD: It was actually a really inspiring experience. Back in Jakarta we often work with our neighbors, and it goes really naturally, but when we’re invited for international projects it tends to be an exhibition at some kind of museum. Museums don’t have neighbors. Maybe they should figure out a way to get some! The architecture is so unfriendly and detached. As Barto said, there are only visitors. But the setting in Aichi was really nice. We were in the middle of everything else, and we worked with the local people, so it wasn’t about us teaching them something, but all of us learning together.
We were working in a former textile shop, which is why we had all these textiles that we could use. I was really impressed by the lecture the owner gave us. He was like a neighborhood historian, going all the way back to the Edo period. It was amazing. We like to draw that kind of knowledge out from the surroundings. This reminds me of one of the groups we have invited to documenta from South Africa, Keleketla! Library. They call themselves a library, but their library is not a collection of books. Instead, they invite musicians, storytellers, and others to perform and to speak. For them, knowledge is ultimately in the body. That’s similar to what we did at Ruru Gakko. We were compiling knowledge. And three of the participants are still in touch with us.
Barto, you had a longer stay at Ruru Gakko, right?
LB: I stayed for two-and-a-half months. Since everyone else involved in Ruru Gakko was flying in and out, someone had to oversee the project from beginning to end. I was stranded in Nagoya the whole time!
The project really inspired us. The year prior, we had come up with the idea for our first educational platform, Institut ruangrupa, but it was coming together slowly. Ruru Gakko convinced us that we could make this style of collecting knowledge from others work. We already had so many friends and networks in Jakarta, and it showed us how to expand those connections into a longer-term program, which developed into Gudskul.
One important thing about Gudskul is that when we choose a one-year period for doing a project, it’s not about completing a curriculum or calculating how long it will take someone to master the material. It’s the time that we think is necessary to build relationships with the participants. The real connection happens after the study program is over. That’s when we start to do projects together. For example, one year the class organized a big project for a museum in Jakarta with 10 collectives from all across Indonesia.
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Above: ruru huis at Sonsbeek ’16, 2016. Below: Ruru Gakko at Aichi Triennale 2016. Both images: courtesy ruangrupa.
Run counter to the presumed flow of art discourse
AM: Do you remember where the idea for Ruru Gakko came from?
LB: The curator Hiroyuki Hattori invited us to participate in the Aichi Triennale. He had been to Sonsbeek ’16 earlier that year and saw the ruru huis we did there. He wanted us to recreate it in Nagoya. When we discussed it as a group, someone threw out the idea of making a school—“Hey, let’s make a dojo!” Then everyone started adding to it. It happened organically. We also got advice from our local collaborators in Nagoya, who obviously knew much more about the city than we did. As Ade said, we wanted to learn what kind of knowledge exists in Nagoya through the experience of living there.
AM: When we talk about international contemporary art, the assumption is that concepts and terms disperse from the so-called center to the margins. One of the fascinating things with documenta fifteen is that ruangrupa is recentering Indonesian terms in an international context. There’s lumbung of course, and majelis, as well as inter-lokal, which is readily understandable to English speakers, but defamiliarized through the use of Indonesian orthography. Is reversing the presumed flow of art discourse a motivation for you with documenta?
AD: Yes. Art language is heavily colonized, so bringing all these Indonesian terms to documenta is one way to swarm them with confusion! And in fact, it’s not only terms from Indonesia. There are all kinds of languages floating around in the big majelis that we organize for all the artists—words from Africa, from Latin America, from Eastern Europe. We’ve already done two remote majelis and hope to do another physical one during the 100 days. Imagine 150 people all on the same Zoom together—or even more, because of all the groups! Jatiwangi Art Factory always has 20 people sharing one camera.
In any case, we’re going to make a glossary as a way to acknowledge all these non-Western terms that are floating around in the process, and bring those different cosmologies into the documenta context. There’s a group of students from the Disarming Design program at Sandberg Instituut in Amsterdam who are harvesting the terms for us and will compile them into a glossary.
AM: I also detect an echo of the historical event that precipitated the Renaissance, when the Greek and Latin classics were brought back to Europe from the Islamic cultural sphere.
AD: Well, there are similar concepts to lumbung in places like Mali and Hungary too. That’s something we’re going to address as well. It’s not about making lumbung a universal term. This is really going to be a celebration of learning from each other’s different models. We don’t want to say this is the only working model. We don’t even know for ourselves. We’re still processing it.
KEISUKE NAKAYA: I’d like to know more about how you are planning on hacking the institution of documenta. Have you encountered any resistance from conservative elements in Kassel?
AD: Traditionally, the artistic director of documenta is chosen by a finding committee of art professionals from different backgrounds, such as museum directors and curators. One of the committee members invited us to submit a proposal. When we thought about what we could do, we felt that rather than thinking about documenta, it was more important to question ourselves and imagine where we would be headed in the coming years. This was just after we had set up Gudskul, so that was already on our minds. That gave us the idea of inviting documenta back to Jakarta. We saw documenta as being part of our journey, not the other way around. That’s why we want to bring the lumbung concept to Kassel. We want to share it and expand that invitation to others.
The committee members were really interested in how the concept could develop beyond documenta. I remember in one of the interviews, one of them asked, “So, there’s not going to be an exhibition?” We were a bit surprised. We thought we might have missed something, so we explained our ideas again, and then he said, “Maybe you don’t need an exhibition.”
But you’re right that there are some conservative parts too. There’s a big fear that there won’t be any exhibition to see, or that there won’t be any artworks as they understand them. There’s a fear of what they believe will be taken away. We have a lot of back and forth about how to see art practices in diverse ways. As I said, there are many different cosmologies. The Western European way of thinking tends to be very self-centered. They only know about themselves and they think that the rest of the world thinks the same or should be the same, which is of course a classic colonialist trope. That informs how they see art, so it takes time and effort to communicate.
For Sonsbeek ’16 we brought ruru huis to Arnhem as a parasite project, and we are doing a follow-up to it in Kassel, ruruHaus, which operates on an even longer span. We set it up two years ago already. It’s a way to build understanding through experience, because so many things are hard to explain. We want to bring back a level of corporeal experience, whereas in Europe they always want to see things in writing. Our practice is very physical, spatial, experiential, and we are constantly thinking about how to blur art and life.
Running ruruHaus for the past two years in Kassel has been important for us. We sent two of our members over and they’ve been there the whole time. It’s become like our sensor in the Kassel ecosystem. It used to be that the artistic director was in the clouds—untouchable. But now the local people can speak with us. They can go to ruruHaus and make something there. We explain by doing, by practicing. It takes time. That’s what we mean by inter-lokal. It’s not something that operates outside Kassel. It’s about recognizing the local, because it’s never really been seen as part of documenta before, despite the efforts of past directors. Kassel is not just an exhibition space. There are people who live there. There are many local cultures and initiatives. ruruHaus can help give voice to that because it works across both time and space.
KN: I myself am a member of a small collective. How do you deal with the dynamics of being a collective?
AD: It’s better not to romanticize collectives. It’s a struggle. It’s chaotic, disorganized, inefficient—and beautiful, of course. So much of what we do is based on our individual passions or interests, and then we come together like a collage. Strong collectivity comes from strong individuality.
Gudskul, exterior view, Jakarta, 2020. Photo Gudskul, courtesy documenta fifteen.
Go beyond Documenta
HANNA HIRAKAWA: I’d like to ask about the future of ruangrupa. How do you see the younger members contributing to what happens next, beyond documenta?
AD: We kind of dissolve slowly—as when we formed a collective of collectives with Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara. The other day a friend asked whether I’m still doing hands-on work with Gudskul. I said it’s on and off. Many times I don’t even know what the other members are up to, so it comes as a surprise to me as well. And it’s been like that for a long time. We know almost by instinct who will lead a project, who will stay in the back, who will do the talking, who will be listening.
Experimenting with economic models is one of the important tasks for us now. I think we haven’t really found the right one yet. It’s great that we can learn so many different models from different contexts through documenta. It’s not like a typical exhibition where we ask artists to show a work. We’re looking at their practices, their ethical values, their models, and what we can learn from them.
LB: Returning to the question about collectives, I’ve been going through a transition at YCAM. I was part of a collective for the first 10 years of my career, and then suddenly I entered an institution where everyone is assessed as an individual. I was like, no, I want to work with everyone else. It’s not only about a curator or artistic director making decisions as the head of the organization. It’s about talking together and sharing ideas. And I think that’s what I learned from ruangrupa dissolving into Gudskul.
I often get asked how to define a collective. I say maybe we shouldn’t think too much about formal criteria, like having a certain number of members or having a physical space. Any lecture about ruangrupa will of course mention the space and the festivals, which produces an idealized image of the collective when it’s not that way at all. A collective is about how you share your resources, how you connect with your environment, your ecosystem, and how you develop something out of that.
Back in 2015 or so the Belgian artist-researcher Reinaart Vanhoe was working on his book Also-Space, From Hot to Something Else: How Indonesian Art Collectives Have Reinvented Networking. He gathered all the members of ruangrupa together and asked us what we wanted to do. It was before Gudskul, and we jokingly said that maybe we should disband. He was taken aback. But that’s the idea. It’s not about being a big institution that occupies everything. It’s always been more sporadic. ruangrupa will have a huge profile after documenta and it’s never going to be the same, so we need to find new options for keeping ourselves small–medium and providing others more opportunities to use our resources.