Thinking Collectives/Collective ThinkingIntroductionEva Bentcheva, Annie Jael Kwan, and Ming Tiampo

Thinking Collectives/Collective Thinking explores the critical yields of collective practices in the arts, as well as their longer ‘worlded’ histories. By asking the question, ‘What kind of “we” can we be?’, this chapbook thinks through artistic practice in order to address what it means to work collectively. What kinds of histories can we write across different positionalities? How can we build more just societies, not only on the micro scale of a collective, but also on the macro scales of a city, nation, and planet?

As demonstrated by the example of documenta fifteen in 2022, discussions on collective production have recently (re)surfaced via conversations around the ethico-political responsibility of art, particularly in matters of innovation,Beginning of page[p. 3] equality, and joint responsibility. It is tempting to resort to collectivism as a panacea that resolves modernist assumptions about authorship and subjectivity.22In his 2004 essay, ‘The Production of Social Space as Art Work: Protocols of Community in the Work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes’, Okwui Enwezor stressed the privilege given to collective and collaborative production in new critical discourses on contemporary art. See Okwui Enwezor, ‘The Production of Social Space as Artwork: Protocols of Community in the Work of Le Groupe Amos and Huit Facettes’, in Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945, ed. by Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), pp. 223–51. The rise of collectivism as a ‘buzzword’ in recent years was the subject of a special issue of the magazine Texte zur Kunst, see ‘Collectivity’, ed. by Catharina Hausladen and Geneviev Lipinsky de Orlov, Texte zur Kunst, 124 (December 2021). However, it is equally critical to be aware of its difficulties and risks. For example, although collective practice was a creatively productive proposition for the Japanese avant-garde artist group the Gutai Art Association (1954–72), collectivism itself was a fraught concept. Indeed, in post-war Japan, collectivism did not have immediately liberatory valences due to its associations with mass psychology and Fascism during the war. As a result, the group carefully nurtured a shared spirit of individualism that redefined ‘community’ as a horizontal and creative collective necessary to the development of the individual.33Ming Tiampo, ‘Gutai Chain: The Collective Spirit of Individualism’, Positions: Asia Critique, 21.2 (2013), pp. 383–415.

The complexities of nurturing a spirit of collectivity are also addressed in specific texts about Black and queer activism. adrienne maree brown’s oft-cited text on decentralized, non-hierarchical, and agile modes of activism, ‘Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds’, informs and supports alternative ways of working. It calls for activating grass-roots knowledge and collaborative processes of enabling ideas, implementation, and sustainability through interdependence, reciprocity, and mutuality. In a similar vein, the Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective argues in its 2018 manifesto, research that seeks to ‘discover the different types of mobility and horizontal connection that characterized South-South relations’ necessitates a collaborative approach to history-writing that Beginning of page[p. 4]‘subverts the boundaries of Area Studies, and abandons the “lone-scholar” model’.44Afro-Asian Networks Research Collective, ‘Manifesto: Networks of Decolonization in Asia and Africa’, Radical History Review, 131 (2018), pp. 176–82.

The notion of collectivity in the arts being multilayered emerges from these different positions. This publication takes up the task of discussing the dynamics between ‘thinking collectives’ from a historical and structural position, and ‘collective thinking’ through theory and lived experience, in the contexts of both artistic production and dissemination. It derives primarily from the workshop ‘What Kind of Collective Could We Be? Collective Thinking by Collectives’, which was held on 11 September 2022 and was collaboratively organized between Asia Forum (AF) and Worlding Public Cultures (WPC) at documenta fifteen.55This workshop was situated as part of a programme co-organised by IMAGINART in collaboration with The Question of Funding and OFF-Biennale Budapest, both lumbung artist collectives invited to participate in documenta fifteen by its Artistic Directors, ruangrupa. Bringing together scholars, artists, curators, and activists, this aimed to think through collaboration historically, both in theory and in practice. It focused on strategies, practices, histories, and theories of collaboration through the lens of global Asias, attempting to effectively ‘world’ the concept of collaboration from — and through — Asia.

In order to understand why Asia is the focus of this book, it is important to note the centrality of collaboration in the work of the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, which curated documenta fifteen and thus served as a catalyst for this workshop. Since its inception in 2000 by artist Ade Darmawan, artist and filmmaker Hafiz, and writer Ronny Agustinus, together with a group of twenty others from Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta, ruangrupa has established its own network and processes of institutionalizing in Indonesia and beyond. Not only was this Beginning of page[p. 5] the first time a collective had been asked to undertake the prestigious role of curating one of the most important global exhibitions (aside from the 1968 iteration, which was organised by a twenty-four person documenta council), their appointment as the first collective was notable as a milestone for Asian representation on the global art stage. Moreover, its curatorial methodology of lumbung, based on an Indigenous agrarian architectural structure and communal model of surplus-grain management intended for shared future use and survival, aimed to upturn conventional hierarchies of power and aesthetic priorities. Collectivity was ruangrupa’s central strategy of ‘harnessing’ documenta fifteen’s budget and network, as a contributing resource to the lumbung of shared resources, with the longer-term goal of building sustainable global networks for the redistribution of power.

Despite the proposed postponement of documenta fifteen due to the Covid-19 pandemic and the accompanying worldwide travel restrictions, political upheaval, and loss of jobs and small businesses, ruangrupa still issued a decentralized ripple of invitations in advance of focusing on the exhibition production in Kassel. The outcome was that it distributed its budget to support its collaborators worldwide during a period of global anxiety, and prioritized mutual support and solidarity. Alongside a palpable atmosphere of optimism and expectant conviviality, when documenta fifteen unfolded in Kassel in 2022, this curatorial methodology also sparked a critical — and also contested — interest in the notion of ‘thinking collectively’.66For critical reflections on documenta fifteen, see Monica Juneja and Jo Ziebritzki, ‘Learning with documenta fifteen: Principles, Practices, Problems’, Grey Room, 92 (Summer 2023), pp. 94–105 <https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00380>; Karen van den Berg, ‘Fragile Infrastructures for an Art of Conviviality: Learning from documenta fifteen’, Field: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, 25 (October 2023) <https://field-journal.com/issue-25/fragile-infrastructures-for-an-art-of-conviviality-learning-from-documenta-fifteen> [accessed 13 May 2024].Beginning of page[p. 6] What did it mean to work collectively in the present day? How did this differ from the definition of an artistic ‘collective’? Moreover, how do both of these differ across historical, national, cultural, and inter-personal divides? These questions are at the heart of both AF and WPC, both of which adopt collectivity as a form of structure and working philosophy. For AF and WPC, collectivism is an ethico-political intellectual practice that enables the decolonization of knowledge structures and the assumed universalism of Euro-American epistemologies by placing multiple ontological, temporal, and cosmological positions into relation with one another.

As the title of this book, Thinking Collectives/Collective Thinking, suggests, the aim here is not to provide an art historical survey of collective practices and present-day discourses around collectivity. Likewise, although the collective practices behind documenta fifteen are an important originating impulse for this book, it does not explore the larger complexities regarding documenta fifteen. In particular, to do justice to the highly-charged debates around perceived anti-Semitic content, as well as communication issues and conceptual misalignments between ruangrupa as the curatorial directive and the administrative body of documenta, would require a much longer, focused study of documenta fifteen within specific national and political contexts.77These debates have yielded a plurality of positions which remain contested and highly sensitive to this day. Here, we aim to offer glimpses into the complex and often heterogenous workings of collectives, in the hope that it may demonstrate how they operate in the context of institutions and international events such as documenta, but not exclusive to it. For more details on the debates surrounding documenta fifteen within the German context, see Lisa Deml, ‘Lumbung Will Continue (Somewhere Else): Documenta Fifteen and the Fault Lines of Context and Translation’, Third Text Online, 27 January 2023 <http://thirdtext.org/deml-documenta15> [accessed 21 May 2025]. Instead, this book looks at what is at stake on a practical, discursive, and historical level when comparing the experiences of artists and curators within the regional parameters of East and Southeast Asia, inevitably Beginning of page[p. 7] entangled with Europe. It forms part of the WPC chapbook series, which moves away from top-down discourses around ‘global art’ and explores situated, pluriversal practices of making and researching art. Within this series, the format of the present book is as a ‘Companion’; it aims to bridge historical and theoretical knowledge with first-hand experiences, in order to serve as a self-reflective ‘guide’ on how to navigate the practical aspects of a ‘worlded’ art history. As such, it emphasizes recollections, aims, challenges, and expectations conveyed first-hand by artists and curators working collectively.

As with the workshop in Kassel, it both provides practical ideas drawn from the lived experiences of collectives and addresses the history and theory of collectives in Asia through a series of short scholarly papers. Interspersed with images created by participants during the workshop in Kassel and two ‘harvests’ (collectively-created digital lists of terminology and questions) from related events at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 and the 14th Gwangju Biennale in 2023, the hope is also that this book goes some way towards capturing the beautiful sociality that was experienced at those gatherings: magic moments of friendship, collaboration, and connection that create what Leela Gandhi calls ‘affective communities’, which can enable caring practices of alignment beyond the brittle politics of solidarity.88Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship (Duke University Press, 2020) <https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822387657>.Beginning of page[p. 8]