Abstract
In an extended follow-up to their first interview with Sophie Goltz, “Collective Crafting in Post-Suharto Indonesia” (Cultural Politics 18, no. 3), key members of ruangrupa, the Indonesian art collaborative, reflect on their tenure as directors of the fifteenth edition of the international art exhibition documenta (2022), held every five years in Kassel, Germany. Afisina, Dramawan, and Hartono discuss ruangrupa's long-standing attempt to forge a mode of artistic cohabitation through which a perpetually emergent, networked space constitutes, in itself an articulation of autonomy. Emphasizing economic democracy, or pragmatically generated pools of shared resources—emblematically and practically associated with the Indonesian rice house, the lumbung—Darmawan, Afisina, and Hartono respond obliquely to charges of anti-Semitism and racism that overshadowed documenta fifteen, which stands as the most international and racially diverse edition of the exhibition in its history. Darmawan articulates the necessity of an “alternative currency,” based on ruangrupa's adherence to the fundamental value of friendship, as a counter to the recursive claims of identity and representation in large-scale international exhibitions. Hartono and Afisina comment on documenta's partial narration of its own history of postwar internationalism, which fails to account for the historic Asian-African Conference at Bandung from the same year of its founding (1955) and, more broadly, the cultural memory of decolonization.
