'Making friends' as labour: the political economy of the Lumbung in Documenta 15

documenta 15, held between 18 June and 25 September 2022 in Kassel, was hailed as ‘the first exhibition of the Twenty-First Century’ by Charles Esche, due to its bold premise. It was the first edition of documenta that assigned a collective as its artistic direction and brought together over 1500 artists and collectives from the so-called ‘global south’ to form a lumbung—a ‘collective of collectives’—sharing both monetary and non-monetary resources in ‘common pots’. Lumbung as an ideal, which originated in Indonesia, came to clash with the capitalistic and institutional structures in Europe, and its utopian framework was often in conflict with the administrative and managerial expectations of documenta gGmbH. Through an autoethnographic account, field work, and interviews with documenta 15 participants and workers, this article is a critical analysis of documenta 15 and the lumbung framework from a political economy perspective, identifying the unpaid, immaterial, affective, and creative labour performed by artists and documenta staff.