Rethinking Education and the Art Institution: YCAM Curator Leonhard Bartolomeus on Collective Art Practice in the Global Context
Benjamin Korman, Cléo Verstrepen, and Sharon Liu
Participants at the "Is Art Useful?" event in September 2022, part of the YCAM Open Lab. Bartolomeus is seated in the center of the image, fourth from the right.
Leonhard Bartolomeus—Barto for short—is a curator at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media (YCAM) and longtime collaborator with ruangrupa, the Indonesian art collective that served as artistic director of documenta 15 in 2022. In his role at YCAM, Barto is exploring the topics of community and public space. This work is inspired by Arte Útil, a concept and methodology proposed by artist Tania Bruguera that, according to the Asociación de Arte Útil website, “draws on artistic thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that change how we act in society.”
Through projects, workshops, and public forums, Barto is leading YCAM in reviewing the media art center’s role as an institution and its connections with the local community. As part of this process, Barto has been actively leading “Alternative Learning” programs since the start of the pandemic, in addition to organizing the “KURIKULAB: Moving Classroom” project and exhibition with the Indonesian art collective Serrum.
In the summer of 2022, YCAM invited Arte Útil movement leaders Alistair Hudson and John Byrne to participate in “Open Lab 2022: Is Art Useful?,” a public symposium. In the days preceding the event, YCAM staff and invited speakers—as well as Tokyo-based writer, editor, and translator Andrew Maerkle and researchers from the Graduate School of Global Arts (GA) at Tokyo University of the Arts—to join in a series of lively discussions that informed the event.
This interview emerged from that context. The conversation was led by three GA researchers in attendance at OpenLab2022, Benjamin Korman, Cléo Verstrepen, and Sharon Liu, with editorial contributions from Hanna Hirakawa.
BENJAMIN KORMAN: Let’s begin with the environment in which you developed your approach to curation, or what you refer to as facilitation. The early 20th-century activist and educator Ki Hajar Dewantara identified the culture of Indonesia as one of spiritualism, compassion, and collectivism, which he opposed to the rigid and hierarchical culture and history of art upheld by the West. How do you think the political atmosphere in Indonesia—particularly the student protests in the 1990s that immediately preceded the formation of ruangrupa—shifted the balance between those two poles?
LEONHARD BARTOLOMEUS: What Ki Hajar Dewantara brought to the Indonesian education system in the early 20th century was to combine all this theory from the West, like Montessori and Waldorf, and Rabindrinath Tagore’s Santiniketan from India, and then mix it with Islamic culture. Despite the fact that his work was groundbreaking and influential, the Indonesian educational infrastructure was not that good. Even though my peers and I were taking the ideas from Ki Hajar Dewantara as our main foundation, they didn't apply directly. Especially during the Suharto regime, the country was clearly heading toward a more nationalistic point of view. And it wasn’t until the 1998 student movement gave way to an alternative educational system that we started developing different practices using different mediums and thinking about different issues.
But this doesn’t connect directly to how the protests unfolded or how ruangrupa developed. It was only after the postreformation era in the early 21st century that people started figuring out what's been happening in the educational system. We didn’t realize it at the beginning, but this new system, in which people learn through equal status and position, actually came from the ideas of Ki Hajar Dewantara.
The scholar Antariksa, who works with the nonprofit educational collective KUNCI Cultural Studies in Yogyakarta, has identified three words that distinguish Indonesian art collectives, which he refers to as the “three Ns”: nongkrong, nyantrik, and nebeng. Nongkrong basically means to “hang out.” There’s no other translation for it. Nyantrik actually comes from a Tamil word meaning “learned man,” which references how Muslim scholars study in a traditional Islamic boarding school: you follow one teacher throughout his activities. Starting from when you wake up, you’re basically imitating that teacher. This also became a method of learning for early 1950s art groups. There’s one master—a senior painter—and all the students follow him around, learning his techniques, what he does when he wakes up, when he takes a bath, when he eats his breakfast. Whatever he does, the students imitate it. I think there’s something similar in theater called method acting, yeah? You try to copy the way certain people live. Nebeng, the third N, basically means living together, like occupying someone’s space or living together with your friends. It can also describe a negative situation, such as when you act like a freeloader or parasite to your friends and colleagues.
These three key points characterize the Indonesian collectives that came to exist after the student protests of the 1990s. I don’t want to say the 3N system is special in terms of originality or authenticity, but at the time it was something that had never been done before. Once the Suharto regime took over in the 1960s, everything became more about individuality—artists were supposed to be working by themselves and competing with each other.
So when we started reflecting back a couple of years later, about five years after ruangrupa and Serrum were established, it was like a puzzle coming together. “Oh, this kind of thing is also an educational method. It’s not only about the bohemian lifestyle of an artist.” It’s an indirect connection, but all the conversations were already there and were part of the bigger culture of the society itself.
BK: Indonesian art collectives are gaining more exposure through global art festivals. Unfamiliar audiences may see these ideas about the nature of art as radical, at least because it’s not the way art is generally presented in the West. But a lot of it is really more rooted in traditional and historical culture. Are you seeing any other art movements employing similar methods in the global art world?
LB: Yes, there’s a Global South network called Arts Collaboratory, which has some similar characteristics with ruangrupa. We have worked with them before. But I think each country, each collective or group, organizes itself in a different way. These characteristics always develop organically in the Global South, where the lack of infrastructure tends to produce struggle. We are used to working together in this collective format. After the second financial crisis in Southeast Asia in 2007, a new generation of collectives—my generation—arose. As someone who came later, I saw ruangrupa in a different light from how Ade Darmawan and the other cofounders developed it. I was already thinking, “OK, collectives are another form of contemporary art.
Leonhard Bartolomeus. Photo by Panji Purnama Putra
You either become an individual artist or you join or form a group.” That’s how I saw it. But when you’re inside a group, your focus is not necessarily on making the artwork itself. It’s about working on bigger issues, expanding your networks.
These collectives operate in different ways, really, but their works is always related to political movements. And I think it applies across the board: something like 80 or 90 percent of all the artists that participated in documenta 15 employ very similar strategies. In Colombia, there’s a collective called Más Arte, Más Acción (More Art, More Action) that works with the local indigenous people. There’s a group in Thailand called Baan Noorg, located outside Bangkok, also working in the same way. They work in communities and have a certain structure that they use to activate their programs. My take is that it becomes difficult to actually see the relationship with the community once you connect it to the arts. If you go to Senegal, South Africa, Congo, Kenya, there’s a lot of people using these strategies in their communities. As long as there’s a lack of infrastructure, as long as there are struggles, oppression, repression, I think there will always be a need to work together, whatever it takes.
BK: Your mention of Más Arte, Más Acción reminds me of the Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo. I imagine Más Arte, Más Acción’s work approaches the same problems as hers. But while they work closely with their community, she has become a blue-chip artist whose art is collected internationally and presented in museum collections. And it’s an interesting thing to contrast what some would think of as the “regular work” of an artist—producing objects—with the work that’s being done by these collectives.
LB: There’s a thin line between art and social activism. While Doris and Más Arte Más Acción address similar issues, I think the reception of the latter’s work is completely different. Though one member of Más Arte, Más Acción, Fernando Arias, is also quite popular as an artist. But then they get different spotlights. That’s how it goes.
In the art scene, you’re looking at only very fine details. It’s a microscopic view. ruangrupa worries about this, because—let’s say you’re looking at ruangrupa at documenta 15. It was like, “Oh yeah it’s so great, the way they think and the way they’re offering another structure.” But if you actually go to our space in Jakarta, we still have the same structure. Being in documenta didn’t actually change or augment the way that we communicate with the society around us.
The Arte Útil movement experiences this same issue, according to Alistair Hudson and John Byrne, two leading thinkers in the movement. When you see them present their recent projects, it looks great. It sounds like a job well done—working with the community. But then when I speak with them, they say, “Yeah, it’s just one part. We still need to continue the conversation.” It’s about how to keep the relationship with the community going. Más Arte, Más Acción is doing the really difficult work of helping the community in Colombia’s Chocó Department. This problem always exists everywhere.
BK: In what context did you first encounter Arte Útil, and when did you first identify the connections to the ideas of FIXER—a term referring to alternative art spaces and art collectives in Indonesia defined by local artists, activists, and educators?
LB: I encountered Arte Útil when I was with ruangrupa. We were planning to do our exhibition on FIXER around 2015, but it fell through. At the time, we tried identifying global practices that related to us. I think most people were confused trying to identify what ruangrupa is. Mostly they identified our style of collective practice as emerging out of Nicolas Bourriaud and the Relational Aesthetics movement. But we felt like we were not aesthetic enough for that.
I think ruangrupa cofounder Ade Darmawan already had some kind of connection with Charles Esche, director of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, at the time. Charles was also part of the L’Internationale research platform that was working toward Arte Útil. That’s when those first conversations happened. We were actually trying to collaborate with John Byrne and his school, the Liverpool John Moores University, and also the Liverpool Biennial, when I was managing Gudskul in 2018. Unfortunately they didn’t come together. But when I moved to YCAM, I brought those ideas and opportunities with me.
Now the FIXER exhibition is finally happening, seven or eight years later. I don’t think it would have happened if we had not become documenta directors. I think the interesting thing about Arte Útil is how most of its practitioners are scholars and their work is well articulated through text. We don’t really need to address a global audience, but then chances like documenta surface. It’s a lot of effort for Indonesian artists and art groups to do well-prepared research and documentation, so we thought Arte Útil could be a good basis for us to work from.
BK: How does the movement compare to, for example, the collective Kerjasama 59, which used their collective space to grow vegetables for feeding the community during the pandemic?
LB: I think Arte Útil might be applicable to Kerjasama 59, however, I don’t think the groups taking part in FIXER want to be categorized as one thing or another. They’re basically sharing the same ideas. They just go through different ways of speaking: one may lean more toward academic, critical texts, while another may be based on more practical work. I think we need a means to unpack our work in a critical context. And then if we only use Indonesian or Southeast Asian art groups as reference, it’s really difficult to distinguish between the work of one collective and another. What’s the difference? No one ever wants to differentiate themselves. Again—there’s no need to be special. I don’t see much difference between what Kerjasama 59 does and the Office of Arte Útil. Although they work in different contexts, they share the same ideas.
When I moved to YCAM, these questions became much more relevant. How can we make institutional change using Arte Útil practices? It’s also part of my strategy for convincing them that this kind of change is necessary. I also think that in a Japanese institution, it’s much more convincing for the administration to work with someone from an established institution and reference an academic text.
CLÉO VERSTREPEN: I’d like to switch now to the Japanese context. Japan has a rich history of socially engaged art, despite the fact that it is rarely discussed in the mainstream art media and underappreciated abroad. I'd like to ask you about your experience as a foreign curator working in the Japanese context. How is it different from your previous experiences in Indonesia and elsewhere in the world? What is particular to the context of Japan, and especially rural Japan, when it comes to the question of local communities? Are there any challenges or specificities that make it a particularly interesting ground?
LB: Working in Japan is quite tough. I have a bit of a mixed experience working in Japan and I still don't know why I have this relationship with the country. The first time I worked here was at Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima MOCA). I think it's one of the biggest contemporary art museums in western Japan. I did not have much of an idea at that time about how the Japanese art scene had developed. As I studied ceramics at art school, what I knew about Japan was mostly related to the history of the crafts, such as the Mingei folk crafts movement. When I worked in Hiroshima, I was fortunate enough to work with Yukie Kamiya, who was then chief curator. She gave me a lot of insight into the Japanese art scene and introduced me to several artists and curators, which helped me to start working in a similar way to how I had been working with ruangrupa. Once you get out of the major art scene, the practice becomes very experimental. Some groups are doing community-based performances, some people open their space to homeless people, and others work with environmental issues.
But I agree with you. It's quite rare for a major institution to pick up such projects and give them an appropriate presentation. And from the conversations I’ve had with fellow curators across Japan, they seem to have a different mission and vision when working in an institution like a museum. They have a kind of political influence because they represent their city. They need to be internationally known, they need to attract a lot of visitors from abroad, help with tourism, and so on.
Before I came, I didn’t actually have many connections with bigger institutions. So the projects I did in Japan were mostly with local communities. For example, one community, Mojiko Art Platform, is located in Mojiko, a very small town just on the edge of Kita-Kyushu, where they run the Open Gate Project. They have a group of people—citizens—who are not artists yet have the idea that it is interesting to do something with the city using art production, such as doing artistic performances and inviting artists for residencies. This is easier to me than working in an institution.
One of the challenges for me at YCAM is the relationship between the citizen and the institution itself, because it is already very established and rigid. Something I've observed is that a museum is expected to offer a “perfect” service to visitors. And visitors also think that they need to behave in a certain way or be in a certain mindset when entering a museum. Where does this attitude come from? For me, this is very strange. Because once you break away from the institution, it just becomes a normal relationship; you become a neighbor, your neighbor is an artist, and he or she is doing strange things every day. And then you’re just like “OK, I can take it.” So, apart from language problems, one thing I'm still trying to figure out is how I or we can break those structures.
CV: Indeed, YCAM is quite a big structure, with a comfortable budget, impressive architecture, and many other resources. While it does not feel like a conventional museum, the visitor might still be intimidated when entering the building, and not necessarily see it as a place that they can fully make their own. You just told me that this is what you're struggling with, but have you started to identify some strategies for better integrating local communities? What do you think it means for an institution to be alternative in the current context, and how can you achieve this?
LB: I'm really grateful to YCAM. Compared to other institutions, there is so much freedom here working as a curator or as part of the team. But I try to think critically about the reasons I need to be here or why I need to make an exhibition. I feel like people forget to do this after they’ve worked in an institution for several years. Or perhaps they don’t know how to do it. There is this saying in Japan, shou ga nai. Whatever happens, let it be, we can’t do anything about it.
One thing that I'm surprised by is how a city that is quite small in scale—with a population of about 200,000 people—came to have such a big, massive institution with almost unlimited resources in terms of money, time, and equipment. You start questioning: Why does the city look like this? What happened?
I would not be too critical if YCAM was just a museum. But we have such a big budget, with so many resources, and we can be so experimental. Why hasn’t YCAM had that much of an impact throughout the city? I’m still looking for an answer.
The idea of the Alternative Education program is to think about how people can use YCAM as a place for learning or gaining an alternative source of education. I have found that there needs to be more connection happening across bottom-up or horizontal relations.
After the first year, I did a project with the Indonesian art collective Serrum titled KURIKULAB: Moving Class. It allowed me to understand it was actually really difficult for people to play around and make chaos inside the museum. Is it because we didn't give them enough of a platform to do that? That exhibition was a very good way for me to understand how we can play around with rules, the institution, and the community.
Also, working this year with Alistair, John, and your group from the Global Arts program at Tokyo University of Arts, I realized I can’t make any outside changes to the institution if the inside is still the same. It would just be another project by another curator. I was thinking outsiders could bring help from outside—they could give balance, give exposure, show that there are different perspectives and that people have different opinions about institutions and how things work. It works a little bit, at least it builds up the conversation. For me, that's a good thing. Before, it was really difficult to start this conversation because it didn’t feel necessary. I think that's the problem: once you work in the institution, it's like working in a machine, in a car. You miss out on everything because you’re moving so fast. You work on a yearly basis and everything needs to be done on time. Three months, four months—you just forget everything, what happens in the community, the society—and it becomes like an autopilot mode.
CV: How do you deal with that?
LB: My strategy is just to try to disrupt those mechanisms little by little, though without making too much damage either. But then it's always good to exercise the “alien threat.” Like I'm just separating myself as a foreigner or an alien: I make some chaos and the worst thing that can happen to me is that I get fired, right? I spoke with some of the staff to understand how people working in an institution think. And I know that once they make changes, it also puts them at risk. If the changes fail, or if it becomes a complete mess, it could seriously affect their reputation. So I told them that they can use me as a channel to create that mess. Collaborating with the education team was really part of the strategy to understand how things worked.
Next month, YCAM educator Keina Konno and some other friends and I are planning to conduct individual interviews with the whole staff of the institution, asking three specific questions: (1) If you were not part of the staff, what would you think about this institution? (2) What do you not like about this institution? (3) If you could make one or several changes, what would you want to do or improve? It’s necessary to understand how everyone working in the institution thinks about it. Then we will collect answers to the same questions from the community outside: How do they feel? What kind of relationships do they want to have? I am hopeful it will work at some point. What I'm proposing is that there needs to be an institutional change. It cannot just be a project, because then what’s the meaning of it? As Alistair and John said, just try to make a hole in the institution and let the resources leak out. I think that at some point YCAM will need to change and do whatever it takes. Meeting people outside the community is the first priority for me.
CV: The way you are willing to make YCAM meaningful for communities on a local scale while remaining open to the world and its diversity reminds me of the archipelagic thinking of Édouard Glissant, the Martinican poet and critic. As a curator, how do you integrate this balance into your working process? Do you feel you can play the role of a cultural translator?
LB: Wow. Interesting. I think at some point, yes. Especially in Japan, if you're working as a foreigner, you need to always be a cultural translator by default. But the thing that I'm trying to avoid is using internationalism as just another way to translate tourism. On an institutional level, people just think being international means attracting tourists. I had a similar conversation with friends from ZKM Karlsruhe who visited YCAM. Especially if we are considering media technology and media art, being international is almost a default now because everyone is using technology. But then how does the conversation become a hyperlocal conversation? How do the problems happening in Yamaguchi relate to other issues in Karlsruhe, Marseille, or Jakarta?
We don't actually need to have those numbers of tourists coming here and there. That's also one thing that I'm trying to suggest to YCAM. Because there’s a lot more potential for what we can do, since we don't follow a museum structure. So how can YCAM act as a cultural hub, connecting bigger issues in the global scene to what is happening in Yamaguchi?
So then I just see it from my perspective, using my alienated identity to prompt those conversations. If a Japanese person has tattoos like mine, they tend to be looked upon as a yakuza or criminal, but the locals here have a different way of accepting me because I’m not Japanese. If you are in Tokyo, it's metropolitan, you can see all kinds of people with unique fashion, with attitude. But here I feel like a giant sculpture walking around the city! But this alienated perspective can become a toolkit for developing communication. It's similar to what happens when you bring in artists from outside the local area. It changes the perspectives of locals because they have foreigners coming and talking with them.
This is something that is integral to living in an archipelago like Indonesia. I mean, you need to easily switch identities, you cannot be the same person when you travel to another island, as you will meet a different culture with different rules. So for me, it's not that difficult. But I guess for some people it might be. There are a lot of things that need to be converted, culture-wise. I haven't succeeded enough in terms of translating my spicy culture for my Japanese friends. I'm still trying to do that this year. I mean, if there's a possibility.
We were also thinking that, in Indonesia, we are poor enough as curators, so we always play around with this idea of “scavenger curatorial.” Some curators are probably trying to find original ideas and develop authentic projects. But my friends and I think of ourselves as scavengers picking up different ideas from different countries and mixing them up, reassembling them. Frankly, it's similar to the way the media was developed in Indonesia; because Indonesia is not a technology-producing country, everyone is just a consumer. It means you need to learn how to fix things, how to find different spare parts. So, yes, for me this mindset is about always being in translation, rather than trying to be unique. I just wonder, What can we do? There are a lot of problems, how can we mix it up? How can we make a mess in a way that prompts some changes in society? We should have more freedom as curators, no?
SHARON LIU: Following up on the idea of cultural translation, some scholars are now arguing that the age of world art/international art is over and art festivals will become smaller in scale and more local in the future. Do you think there's still meaning in world art/international art, and if so, what meaning does it carry for Japanese audiences?
LB: I’m actually not opposed to international art festivals or international art fairs. That's one mechanism that survives. There are so many methods that can still work, including going to different international events and international residencies. But what I'm trying to do right now is to understand the responsibility of local institutions, because they use tax money, which belongs to the people of that city. The institution might have a different opinion on this, but my first priority is always asking how we can build a community around us. What is the point of the Y for Yamaguchi in front of CAM? You can replace Y with T or K or whatever letter representing any Japanese city, as long as the city government wants to give your institution money to exist and do art creation or production there. What's the meaning of having a media arts center in a small city in western Japan? That's always the question. Because anyone else can do the same, you know, there's nothing special to how we’re doing it. It’s just somehow that no one else is doing it. That's all there is to it.
The question I pose to myself right now, and also to some of my colleagues, is if we’re really considering international audiences, then to what extent are we satisfied with, say, the number of local or international visitors? Why do you need to organize an international festival? What's the benefit? Necessity is always in the mechanism or the system, instead of the goal. Because when you organize an international art festival, like a biennale or triennale, the first goal is to make it a touristic event and to bring people to the area. I’m not saying that’s bad, but then you don't actually maximize its potential. You could spend that time instead building a conversation with the locals, helping them to actually understand their own problems through your perspective as a foreigner. And so there are a lot of things that are missing there, because all of it is so goal oriented.
In fact, my biggest concern working in an institution right now is that everything is always goal oriented. You don't have time for the process, because that's not how the system works. We should take some time to rethink the process and reflect on how we are building our international networks.
SL: You just mentioned that considering questions about locality and globality is always at the core of an institution’s responsibility. With various online presentation formats for digital art, the purpose of physical museums is being challenged. I wonder how you envision YCAM’s future and what kind of role a media art institute should play?
LB: Well, I've asked this question a couple of times. We can do exhibitions online right now, so why do we need a physical space? Now you can just go to Google Arts & Culture. Everything is available there, all the art histories and all the pictures. Why do we need to make a media art exhibition in person, which is just the end product of the real work? You can’t see what's happening behind the scenes, or experience the technology that we use. With a lot of resources now, we can just work with different engineers, you know, one sound engineer coming from France, one sound engineer coming from Taiwan, one video engineer coming from Africa. That could be done in one way. Once things change, you don't actually need the physical space.
Again, the potentiality of a physical space is always as a meeting hub. It doesn't need to be a building. You can have a meeting hub for events. But it's important to have that physicality, so then people know how to connect with the ground and with others. I always had this very cheap image about art institutions. It might be annoying or offensive to some people, but I always say, “Yeah, we can be just like a community center.” You know, we are just using art and media technology as a way of working with people. This idea of turning an institutional space into a community center changes the way you think, the way you're presenting the information that you produce.
SL: So the idea of YCAM as a community center changed the way you think of media art itself?
LB: Yeah, with the potentiality of technological developments, being a media artist, media curator, or operating a media institution is one of the toughest things that you can do in the art scene right now because you need to keep up with all of the technological advancements. I’m not saying making conventional artworks is not difficult, but painting has been there for a long time. It's the same medium. Artists might cycle through subjects and techniques, but the technology is still fundamentally the same. Five years ago, if you said something like, “Oh, I'm a media art curator,” no one expected you to read up on the metaverse or virtual reality. But technology changes and society changes. You need to catch up with that situation. That’s also the case with media art institutions.
Currently we have an exhibition talking about the relationship between AI and humans. And another topic is big data security. If you were to break down all of those things into smaller workshops, not even two years would be enough for the citizens to understand the whole situation. But then if you just change your approach to building a relationship with the community and communicate the situation with them, it transforms into something else. So the way I'm seeing an institution is always as a meeting hub and a community center. We’re just using different communication tools.
There’s also another thing that bothers me. When we work with media and new technologies in our everyday lives, they are very close to us, like our laptop, our smartphone, our speakers, our smart home, you name it. But then when we include them in an art project, sometimes we introduce more complexity. Some visitors understand it, but some of them don’t, because then you extract the context and only exhibit one major idea. When you exhibit at an institution, you need to know how to deconstruct the whole idea so it becomes relatable to visitors. So for me, YCAM needs to keep producing information and knowledge for society. That's maybe the only thing that is still relevant.
SL: To wrap up, I’d like to revisit your earlier exchange with Ben about the Global South. You mentioned that being invited to documenta didn’t really help ruangrupa, because there's still work to be done and ongoing conversations in Indonesia. I feel the intention of philosophical, artistic decolonization has become such a complex undertaking for the Global South. On the one hand, some people ask for equal acceptance of all art practices. Conversely, we also put emphasis on pursuing an alternative path. So as an Indonesian curator taking on projects in Japan, what is your take when your art ideals are presented as an alternative or other path? Can we really embrace a decolonized perspective in the end? Or is the postcolonial boundary-blurring utopia actually no longer possible?
LB: Yeah, it's very interesting. I would say I'm pessimistic. For me, decolonization can never work globally. I'm not trying to be cynical, but I think it’s like a dream of trying to erase all the mistakes of the past. It could never actually work, because of the scale of the problem. When you bring the conversation about decolonization onto the table, it creates such a mess. But it can be effective (and probably more impactful) when micropolitics and other cultural backgrounds contextualize the topic. For example, we can talk about specific issues related to Islam or gender in Africa and Asia, as well as how their histories are entangled, and perhaps we can eventually conceive decolonization.
It's really difficult just going here and there and giving lectures about alternative ideas. It happens with ruangrupa as well, where they’re giving talks about lumbung and alternative structures to all kinds of audiences. But then the real homework is always based on your locality, where you belong, and it’s never done. Some people might say, “OK, documenta invited ruangrupa to be the artistic director and that's another step toward decolonization.” But by next year people will have forgotten completely about what happened at documenta.
For the people that are really interested in the idea, it's about how you bring this conversation into your practice, into your localities, into your community. Because however much a contemporary art museum or institution tries to represent that conversation, it never really goes quite well. I mean, you could bring as much talk about decolonization as you want to the Aichi Triennale, for example, and then see what happens in Japan two or three months later. Nothing will happen unless we start working on the ground, because that's where we belong.
I’ll repeat this one last time: everything that ruangrupa did at documenta actually already exists in each community. But no one looked at their own community before. Now institutions have to consider a policy of degrowth and scaling down to incorporate the community into their artistic production. That's what I'm trying to discuss with YCAM: How can we exist in a smaller and more ecologically friendly system?