Presentation of Lumbung Press

On Sunday 12 March at 12 noon, the presentation of Lumbung Press will take place at Hangar. The collaborative offset press that was part of the last edition of documenta arrives in Barcelona as a project in residence at Hangar, thanks to a collaboration agreement between Hangar, Macba and the Institut de Cultura de Barcelona-Fàbriques de Creació. The meeting will feature Tim Rudolph, Fred Hansen and Erick Beltrán as members of Lumbung Press, who will be printing posters in real-time. There will also be a talk with ruangrupa and Madeyoulook, screenings by Subversive Film and Sebastián Díaz Morales, and various video documentaries from documenta 15.

Lumbung Press is a collective printing practice based on the Indonesian tradition of lumbung — the deposit of common resources to be redistributed for the long-term benefit of the members of a community — the guiding concept of documenta 15, perhaps the most important contemporary art event held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The project, developed and managed collectively by lumbung artists, operated in the documenta Halle space for the 100 days of the last edition of the exhibition, which took place from June to September 2022.

Halfway between a printing press and a publishing house, Lumbung Press was born with the aim of printing in real time the diverse materials generated by the processes of the artists and groups collaborating in documenta, creating a flow of autonomous communication. The press functioned as a mechanism for the direct transmission of energy from artists and collectives, avoiding editing or translation outside the logic of each artistic intention. A space for research into publishing, where it was possible to study and experiment with the design, layout, reproduction, printing, distribution and construction of the value of a publication, and where the only limitations were the technical possibilities of the duotone machine they had and the amount of material (time and paper) equally distributed among all the participants.

The community that emerges from the shared effort – everyone contributes to some part of the process – becomes the backbone of the project. And it is precisely from this commonality that Lumbung Press makes it possible to dismantle the client-service relationship and replace it with an adaptation to the needs of artists and collectives: this means avoiding a focus on specific results at the expense of materials or production systems. Production can be opened up, adapted or modified to find the unexpected, but coherent and precise in each circumstance. In fact, for Lumbung Press there is no such thing as a bad copy, but all are different versions of an idea that forms a record of a collective body.

Its uniqueness, its sustainability and its contribution to the artistic context have made Lumbung Press think beyond documenta. As a result, the artists’ collective that runs the press decided to buy the machinery and begin to weave alliances with Hangar, MACBA and ICUB to make Barcelona the first stop for the project, which will continue to travel to other institutions with a nomadic will.

As a result, Lumbung Press will enjoy a residency at Hangar, which will allow the collective and its workshop to be housed in one of the centre’s spaces for one year. During this period, the press will continue to develop the working method initiated in Kassel, while at the same time fostering the network of artists in the local context by offering support and technical knowledge, but above all by proposing other collaborative forms of printing; moving away from the client-producer relationship to focus on the goal of growing a mutually supportive network of collectives, workers/researchers, collaborators and artists. For this reason, Lumbung Press will be integrated into the Hangar as a resident project, joining the projects of the resident collectives that make up the ecosystem of the centre, whose common denominator is the generation and self-management of tools and resources for the artistic community. Lumbung Press will also be linked to the MACBA through educational projects, public programmes and other transversal projects that the museum has or will work on specifically.

Practical information
Date: March 12th
Time: noon
Location: Hangar, Sala Polivalent
Free admission

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