Lumbung Press

Lumbung Press is a collective printing practice developed by the artists of documenta 15. It is based on the Indonesian tradition of lumbung, which is the deposit of common resources for redistribution for the long-term benefit of the members of a community. Lumbung Press is born as a mechanism for direct and raw energy transmission from the invited artists and groups during the 100 days of exhibition in Kassel in 2022 and beyond. This “beyond” arrives, and Hangar is the first organization to host the collective and its workshop.

Lumbung Press believes in publishing as a means to build a collective body and is founded on transmission without intermediaries, translation or proofreading outside the logic of each project.
 Lumbung Press revolves around the community that emerges with shared effort (everyone helps in some part of the process) and working towards dismantling clients and services, replacing it with compression and adaptation to the local needs of artists and lumbung collectives. This means avoiding focusing on specific results at the expense of materials or production systems. Production can be opened, adapted or modified to find the unexpected, but coherent and precise in each circumstance. It is not about arriving at a product, as much as it is about what you can do with what you have.

Lumbung Press works to dislocate offset printing from commercial objectives and contexts into creative and more social methods and approaches without losing production and the possibility of a mass audience. It studies and experiments around the conception, layout, multiplication, printing, distribution, and value construction of a publication.

Principles
– Lumbung Press occupies the gap between the function of a printing press and a publishing house, without being one entirely.
– Lumbung Press believes that publishing is the means to build a collective corpus.
– The lumbung group of artists is organic and continuously growing.
– Lumbung Press works under the motto “not big, but a lot.”
– Lumbung Press prints when necessary.
– At Lumbung Press there are no bad copies. They are all different versions of an idea forming a record of a collective corpus.
– Lumbung Press is independent in curatorial and content terms from the institution that receives it on a temporary basis.
– Structural and printing decisions are made by the lumbung working group initiated in D15.
– Lumbung Press is a classroom.

The Lumbung Press residency in Barcelona is an initiative of Lumbung Press, Hangar, MACBA and ICUB with the support of the Sorigué Foundation, Danish Arts Council and Culture Moves Europe.