This project is a collaboration with ruangrupa, roel roscam abbing, varia.zone & the lumbung inter-lokal
“We want to create a globally oriented, collaborative and interdisciplinary art and culture platform that will remain effective beyond the 100 days of documenta fifteen. Our curatorial approach strives for a different kind of collaborative model of resource use — in economic terms but also with regard to ideas, knowledge, programs and innovations.“
ruangrupa
lumbung.space is one of the most complex and interdisciplinary projects we’ve had the pleasure of taking on as a co-op. In 2021, our friends varia.zone connected us to ruangrupa. It was the height of the global pandemic, and ruangrupa and their international network of artists needed a way to collaborate remotely to curate the documenta fifteen festival without depending on the exploitative and colonial infrastructures of big tech.
They required a platform that:
- encompassed many mediums
- could support publishing as well as collaboration and comms
- was sovereign and collectively governed
- embodied the values of lumbung
terminology
- lumbung: Indonesian term for “rice barn”. In Indonesian rural communities, the surplus harvest is stored in communal rice barns and distributed for the benefit of the community according to jointly defined criteria. This practice informs all of ruangrupa’s artistic and collaborative work.
- harvest: Harvest means the documentation of meetings, which is prepared by harvesters as overviews, texts, sketches or drawings and enables the traceability of meetings and other collective events.
- lumbung inter-lokal: The international network of lumbung artists & members. The term inter-lokal describes the interweaving of their local practices as well as their international distribution through the network.
Lumbung ⇆ open source
The artistic practice of lumbung has much in common with our approach to building technology – inspired by free software – which prioritizes decentralization, collective decision-making, internationalism, and transparency.
It follows then, that the technological foundation of lumbung.space should also be built on those same values.
Weaving a digital ecosystem w/ open software and open protocols
The Lumbung inter-lokal is composed of several working groups specializing in different mediums of artistic work, each of whom required applications that enabled them to publish and collaborate on their work.
Relying on our Co-op cloud library of packages, we curated a set of software to fit each working group’s needs. For the lumbung press working group, we set up books.lumbung.space running calibre-web; for the lumbung radio working group, we set up a funkwhale instance at sounds.lumbung.space; for the film working group, we set up a jellyfin instance at films.lumbung.space, and so on.
Alongside these, we set up general purpose tools such as cloud.lumbung.space (a nextcloud office suite), and nongkrong.lumbung.space (matrix chat) and social.lumbung.space (mastodon/hometown) for private and public comms.
These were in turn connected by a single login portal, login.lumbung.space, and interoperable protocols such as RSS and ActivityPub, allowing them to communicate with each other. Finally, all the public-facing apps sent updates to front-page of lumbung.space, creating a real-time “harvest” of everyone’s work on the platform.
An experience in decentralized community maintenance
Beyond its conceptual richness and technical complexity, lumbung.space stands out as a project for us because of the unique social experience of working on the project. Lumbung.space subverted the conventional roles of “client” and “service provider” that we were used to in our other projects. There was no singular “client”, there was an international community of members/stakeholders; and we were not just a service provider, we were ourselves members of the network and stakeholders by virtue of being (technical) maintainers of the platform.
As time passes, our role in the project is shifting from software development and maintenance to stewardship and community organising alongside other members of the project.
Our current priority is decentring ourselves as sole technical maintainers of the platform, as well as scaling down the technical complexity and costs of the infrastructure.