We find ourselves like the passengers of a plane that had taken off to the Global, and to whom the pilot announces that he must return because he can no longer land at that airport, and who hear, with horror ("Ladies and gentlemen passengers, the captain is speaking to you again") that the emergency runway, the Local, is also inaccessible. (Where to Land. Bruno Latour, 2018).

In March 2020 the members of ruangrupa explained in an interview that they have not set foot in a documenta, except for their participation —via internet— in Every Time A Ear di Soun, a radio station that was proposed as an artistic medium during the 2017 edition. This Indonesian collective has been in charge of conducting the "Hundred Day Museum" or documenta this 2022. They have inoculated the lumbung concept to everyone who has had an approach to this international exhibition, articulating a great collective narrative where the idea of community and the aspiration to work generating a sustainable ecosystem prevails.

The space has been conquered by the process, by the collective processes that defend the how, the how to do, somehow abolishing the what, the what as a result and enigma. We find ourselves with an intentional explosion of chaos, led by conceptual maps, that places the spectator in a constant mental challenge of wanting to understand the links, the relations and the meanings, we place ourselves in the gear. But I have to admit that I feel like one of those passengers on Latour's plane. I don't know where to land.

The concept of the laboratory as a practice of learning, of sharing synergies, of pooling ideas with the aim of transforming reality, has been in vogue for some time, especially if we are talking about innovation, and ruangrupa is riding the wave with this attempt, as complex as the very structure that underpins the contemporary art sector. It is obvious that as a collective they already have the dynamics of a laboratory, and the result of this documenta fifteen corresponds to their natural practice.

In his famous essay, Bruno Latour again tells us "Give me a Laboratory and I will Raise the World". In the text he describes what he calls a topology of the laboratory situation, fragmented into three sections: the first part, called the dissolution of the inside/outside dichotomy, speaks of displacements, transfers and exchanges; the second, destroying the differences of scale, studies what happens when the micro is projected or becomes independent of the macro; and the third, how the weakest becomes the strongest, locates laboratories as generators of new sources of political force. These three blocks reveal, in their essence, the philosophy that can be found in many of the proposals presented in this fifteenth edition. 

I am going to try, with some boldness, to illustrate this idea: the connection I find with the topology proposed by Latour; through a selection of works that correspond to my particular journey in Kassel and that I consider can be the paradigm of what I have just explained.

[Inside] Outside

A good example of exchanges, minorities and forces is Project Art Works, which is located in various places in the city. In the Fridericianum they recreate a workspace, with all the tools, frames and utensils of a studio, in which visitors mingle with artists, neuro-divergent creators with complex support needs, and show how they work by generating networks through care.

The earliest manifestations of collaborative art and community art, the protagonists of this exhibition, can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s respectively. In Kassel they ride together, showing or emphasising the ingredients that shape experimentation and the process as an end in itself.

Also the installation rasad by Britto Arts Trust (a collective from Bangladesh), uses the practice of re-creation, in this case a bazaar of a small village in the surrounding area, filled with crocheted, ceramic, metal or embroidered food, and produced in various workshops in Dhaka last year with the collaboration of an extensive list of artists. In doing so, they show or draw a landscape that connects food politics, displacement and community culture.

Both projects are situated in this idea of dissolving the inside/outside dichotomy, in which there is a clear transfer of meanings, but this mechanics of recreating spaces, which is repeated on several occasions throughout this documenta, and in which they try to offer an image as faithful as possible to an environment, may generate a certain doubt about the value of the authentic, running the risk of inspiring a certain aroma of an ethnographic museum.

Micro >> Macro

Aware of the amount of information presented in this documenta, and that jolts us at every step, ruangrupa located in the Fridericianum itself a room that doesn't go unnoticed despite the fact that it is not an exhibition space. I'm talking about Quiet space, a place with a certain mystical or scenographic aspect of an empty room, with a window and a classic-style armchair at the back, in front of the door, where you can enter to rest or to meditate reflectively on everything you've seen. A kind of plea for pause. And in contrast to this, but with a certain connection to a "sacred" environment, nearby is the exceptional work of Robert Gabris, a community project called ERROR.

On his website we can find a text by Karina Kottova that explains how the artist used dating apps to meet representatives of the queer and non-binary Romani minority, a "multiple marginalised" community in which its members are outsiders in relation to mainstream society and the Romani ghetto. He uses photographs printed on canvas, where the naked body is the main protagonist, and alters them by partially unpicking them. These images together with text excerpts from their conversations form the core of the installation. The space is physically inaccessible, but transparency predominates, visitors can only look in from the outside, so the barrier or border we encounter reminds us that, from our usually privileged position, we will not be able to understand the work in its entirety, empathy aside. Beyond the careful aesthetic, which stands between the fragile and the sharp, the artist conceives the project with the purpose of generating a long-term platform, with the institution as a democratic entity, to find new ways of understanding diversity through mediation.

Following of with the "sacred", this time in the basement of the Fridericianum, we find Chilltan, a project by Saodat Ismailova that combines performance, film and atmosphere. The work takes place in a labyrinthine space of interconnected rooms, through which the visitor moves freely. The word chilltan derives from Persian and means "40 bodies" or "40 beings" without specific gender. Ismailova, who is also exhibiting at the Venice Biennale in parallel to documenta, studies these changing entities of fluid gender that form a mysterious orbit of beings with supernatural powers and traditional wisdom. Historical narratives, silks, projections, handmade mattresses and other mystical materials create the atmosphere of the entire work.

One of the characteristics of this edition, proposed by ruangrupa, is the "power" that they give to the artist, I'm talking about the power of "multiplying" through the invitation that they themselves can make to other artists. In this case, Ismailova invites Davra (a collective of young Central Asian artists) who also reflect on the term Chilltan and who, throughout the days, with this intention of a "changing scene", which has also been the protagonist in this edition, intervene in something that is equally "sacred" for Kassel, two of the oak trees planted forty years ago by Joseph Beuys.

Here and in the majority of the proposals we can quickly perceive the clear intention of generating nodes and networks, seeking a horizontal "hierarchy" that transmutes from the individual to the collective in which all become essential agents.

The Weak and the Strong

One of the most overwhelming works, due to its immersive nature, is And They Die a Natural Death by Vietnamese artist Nguyễn Trinh Thi. Located inside a defensive tower (Rondell) that formed part of the city's ancient fortifications, and which was built in 1523 over the river, this work welcomes us with the solemnity that characterises such a building. It is a work with a certain intimate, almost spiritual resolution, combining sound, image, technology and literature. The artist was inspired by a scene from Tale Told in the Year 2000, an autobiographical novel by the writer Bùi Ngọc Tấn, which is set outside a prison camp in which the inmates come across a forest of bird's eye chilli, are driven mad by its taste, reminding them of home, but the excitement ends in tragedy as the ethnic minority prisoner is killed.

The installation forms a theatre of shifting shadows that surround the visitor, projecting onto the walls, created with illuminated bird's-eye chilli plants; the acoustic sounds come from adapted bamboo flutes, the same ones used by various ethnic groups in Vietnam, and remind you of that wind in the literary forest. The flutes and lights are controlled by an automated setup that retrieves real-time wind data from sensors installed in Tam Đảo, where the writer's former detention camp was located. 

Once again we cross borders, we have two technologically connected places, a work that changes according to the wind, committed to memory and to minorities, that highlights human miseries in a way that is as poetic as it is painful, and in which tradition is once again a tool. 

I'm going to end the tour with a project that in my opinion represents all the values and strengths of this edition, El libro de las Diez mil Cosas (The Book of Ten Thousand Things). The components of La Intermundial Holobiente are rooted in the processual and participatory, where conversation through the multiple is indispensable, and where the rules of the established are a creative game to question our modus operandi. They also advocate imagining new forms of non-hierarchical coexistence, thinking of the work as a mutant model, beyond the contemplative, as a vehicle of continuous change and transformation, and they do so with a well-prepared script. The careful staging is at the height of all these ingredients that are mixed in a well-orchestrated way. A dreamlike world that invites you to reflect, to dream or to reason.

I have finally landed somewhere, in some seam between the Local and the Global, with mixed feelings. This edition is an exhibition that is thought to be rhizomatic, without a trunk, without beginning or end, with an extensive knot, that is articulated with the powerful concept of lumbung. But it is difficult to assimilate the idea of the whole, of the whole, without a denouement. It is an ode to process. Documenta fifteen is a Comoteca, a eulogy to the "how". The human as an organic collective, the community as a unit of measurement, the social as a biological scheme, being and being, art and nature. With a certain inflation of videos, mental maps and ethnographic display, they wanted to bring the context of the Global South. Precariousness, rurality, difference emerge as the common denominator of an archipelago of artistic collectives invited to the epicentre of the continent to form a conceptual pangaea around the idea of lumbung.

The result shows us a laboratory prototype that questions the essence of the work of art and the ways of showing it, in which the concept or concepts take over the narrative thread.

GEMA RUPÉREZ. Plastic and visual artist. Founder and director of Ababol Festival, she also teaches at the Higher School of Design Hacer Creativo. She holds a degree in Fine Arts from the Faculty of San Carlos (Valencia). Her work is part of the collection of different institutions: among others, Nagasaki Prefectural Museum (Japan), Enaire Foundation, Pilar Citoler Foundation, Ramón J. Sender Foundation or Casa Velázquez.

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