A central theme for Documenta 15 was the idea and spirit of the Indonesian lumbung: literally, a communal structure for storing grain and agricultural tools; more broadly, an invisible and hereditary system that prepares a community for crisis. Thus, Nuraini Juliastuti’s talk on “Commons People: Lumbung as a Traveling Concept” (for Documenta 15’s “Let There Be Lumbung” session) considers how the idea of lumbung involves management of resources on many levels, highlighting that lumbung extends beyond form and materiality.Nonetheless, ruangrupa’s rhetoric of healing has been uncritically amplified in art criticism—from the New York Times to Hyperallergic—which repeats the desiderata of many art practices dedicated to environmental restoration without mentioning, let alone proposing ways to address, the causality behind the ever-worsening disasters of climate breakdown, mass extinction, and related sociopolitical crises.

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