Curated by Trampoline House Artistic Team members Carlota Mir and Sara Alberani, Massaging the Asylum System is a collaboration between two collectives and Lumbung members* at documenta fifteen: Copenhagen-based refugee justice centre Trampoline House and UK-based neurodiverse collective Project Art Works.
Massaging the Asylum System is a joint exploration of the relationship between people’s rights as they seek asylum and try to rebuild their lives in Denmark, and how different systems, from the State to Danish society, may or may not respect those rights. Supported by preliminary work and visits, informal talks, public speaking, collective research within the Lumbung community, and the forging of relationships, the collaboration came to fruition with two public workshop series: one in Copenhagen, where we invited Project Art Works to pick apart the asylum system in Denmark together with the Trampoline House community, and one in Kassel, where we took these learnings from the House and then gathered in our respective exhibition spaces, inviting documenta audiences, to re-imagine asylum together. Intersecting two very different, yet touching realities, our work became a temporary coalition of dissident bodies.
Initiated by Mir and Alberani, the collaboration was funded with money from the Lumbung collective pot* after approval from all Lumbung members. The group made decisions on collective projects to be funded according to shared lumbung values: projects should be experimental, locally anchored, regenerative and be driven by generosity, sufficiency, humour, independence, and transparency. They should also bring additional value to the Lumbung network. Related to the overarching concept of Lumbung*, the collective pot was a collectively governed economic resource that worked as a way to speculate artistically on how to build and maintain such a common structure over time. Lumbung is both a community and an infrastructure of resources that sustains artistic projects 'rooted in life', an approach that subverts the traditional logic of artificially producing works for a biennial.
Massaging the Asylum System was unique in its alliance of two Lumbung members with decades of experience in their fields, bringing together their situated knowledge to make something new. The project emerged from the shared affinities between both organisations that were discovered during the Lumbung process. Both Trampoline House and Project Art Works work at the intersection of art and activism in their field to produce equity within their communities. In this sense, it is not a coincidence that they were two of the few Europe-based organisations that participated in documenta fifteen. Though situated in the Global North, Trampoline House deals with the effects of European institutional racism and colonial violence in the Global South, such as migration and forced displacement, thus making its work to support people in an extremely hostile asylum system an essential contribution to documenta fifteen. As for Project Art Works, they are a collective of neurodiverse artists and activists that works with art and care. Based in Hastings, UK, their focus is on makers and artists who, because of complex support needs, experience the world differently to what neurotypical societies think of as ‘normal’, challenging normative canons of accessibility to public life through advocacy and artistic action. Through their practice, both organisations stand by the belief that using art as activism is particularly necessary in the case of communities who are marginalised within the already marginalised: rejected asylum seekers, people who are neurodivergent and/or have profound learning disabilities and complex support needs; these are collectives for whom invisibility and marginalisation is a daily reality.
We were able to propose, initiate and develop this collaboration thanks to the openness of our teams and communities, the support of the Lumbung inter-lokal* network and its practices of resource sharing. Massaging the Asylum System couldn’t have happened without the support of Trampoline House co-founder and curator Tone Olaf Nielsen and the close collaboration of Project Art Works artists Kate Adams, Tim Corrigan, and Martin Swan. It also couldn’t have happened without the input of people in Trampoline House and the support of the Project Art Works community. In short, this is a collective venture.
Entitled Cosmologies of Asylum as a reference to both Project Art Works’ artistic methodologies and Trampoline House’s community, this harvest* presents the fruits of a two-year-long collective conversation between the artistic teams and the larger communities which make up both organisations and whose voices resonate here.
The harvest focuses on a specific artistic tool from Project Art Works that became key for the collaboration: the Cosmologies of Care. These are circular drawings that originally represented the lives of neurodivergent people and helped visualise social systems of care in the UK, which are typically adversarial and hard to navigate. In the workshops, we translated and adapted this tool into the context of asylum in Denmark, first by understanding the system, and then learning how we could ‘massage’ it together, so that it could become softer and more humane.
Beginning with how the Cosmologies of Care were first created by Project Art Works artist Kate Adams as individual tools for self-awareness, the harvest consists of a circular map that follows the cosmologies as they move through the emotional and physical spaces of Project Art Works, Trampoline House and documenta fifteen at different stages of the process. Through ongoing circulation, translations and shifts, the cosmologies become strong consciousness-raising tools that help not only detect malaise, navigate adversarial systems, express anger, and make visible the invisible: they also become essential to voice desires, aspirations and utopias, bringing resilience alongside possible, more joyful futures into perspective.
Forming concentric layers, translation, circulation, and circularity emerge as ongoing motion. Artistic practices abandon rigid, individual and authorial forms to shift shape, transform and merge: they become vehicles to tell the stories of different communities and the systems they are administered by, make the invisible visible, and build solidarity-based alliances; both between locales and in the exhibition space, which became embodied otherwise.
Around the circular drawings, several clickable islands represent the dichotomies and ongoing tensions that our work and communities move between: care/control, alliance/division, health/illness, solidarity/hostility, access/invisibility. Collecting visual materials and citations from Project Art Works and Trampoline House artists, activists, and community members, alongside other authors and their theoretical approaches to the themes that emerged in the collaboration, these islands work as an open-ended, alternative bibliography of the project.
Embedded within the circular landscape, little clickable icons point to the different sites that conform the ecosystem of this project: Trampoline House, Project Art Works, a twin harvest of the project, curated by Mir and Alberani for our independent Trampoline House publisher visAvis, and the online documenta archive Lumbung dot Space. Finally, the lighthouse at the bottom of the page provides access to the full collaboration timeline between Trampoline House and Project Art Works during the Lumbung process.
A massage is a caring action directed to the body that, through intimate connection and applying pressure, aims to relieve tension and pain. A practice that must involve two or more people, the massage invites openness and the softening of rigid tissues, encouraging gentle healing. With ‘massaging’ as a guiding principle, we merged our practices in spirit and materiality. Together, we looked at the ambiguous social systems of care and control that operate on neurodivergent and migrant communities, we speculated on how to navigate them, and what the role of art in that conversation could be: could we massage the system?
As activist Shakira Kasigwa Mukamusoni from Trampoline House describes it in her film installation The Chain, produced for documenta fifteen, the asylum system in Denmark is like a ‘chain’: this means that people are stuck in a legal grey zone, neither detained nor free, but without prospects of pursuing a future life in Denmark or in Europe. ‘The chain’ is a structurally violent strategy of exhaustion that works by generating an endless succession of physical and emotional restrictions aimed at deterring people from attaining - and seeking - asylum. In other words, the system works, in great measure, by creating sad emotions.1
In coming together and using creative tools, Trampoline House and Project Art Works sought to face the asylum system, connecting our bodies to our ability to imagine and act. To this end, we tapped into the inner knowledge of Trampoline House and Project Art Works: as our practices show, self-determined positions coming from relationships, joy, creative work, or access to social life have to do with the possibility of acting, and they are fundamental for restoring dignity and agency where the system has taken it away. In preparation for the workshops, we asked our communities: which creative processes of self-care and self-empowerment can someone take up to face a violent system? Which ones can we take up together and which ones depend on our different positions and privileges? How can we create solidarity networks and share knowledge among people who may need complex support in different ways? Through shared affect, time and creative action, our aim was to massage a rigid and inhumane asylum system - yes, massage, like a real massage - so that it could become softer and more humane.
In the workshops, we merged the knowledge and methods from both organisations to create spaces for dialogue and friendship. Project Art Works’ methodologies were hosted within the structure and spirit of Trampoline House’s house meetings, which are typically formed by a very diverse group of people - from rejected asylum seekers to people with temporary residence permits, artists, interns, activists, kids, and the elderly. In House meetings, the assembly structure allows for horizontal participation and collective ‘deprogramming’ of all present: this means an unlearning of our habitual positions and stepping down from our privileges to be able to really meet the other.
In this process of sharing conversations and strategies, visualising systems of care and control, and repositioning ourselves and our communities in them, Project Art Works’ Cosmologies of Care became central. These drawings, which can vary in size and scope, from the individual to the collective, from small to large, are tools that help visualise the systems of social care that neurodivergent/disabled people in the UK and their families must go through to get their needs met. Created by artist Kate Adams, who is also the mother of a man with complex support needs (Circle I), the drawings also make care visible as a vital form of labour, and help visualise deeper human aspirations - from choice in who to spend time with to living close to the sea. Aspirations, no matter how big or small, are often overlooked and neglected in the lives of people with disabilities, as a result of the objectification brought about by standardised forms of social care; a striking similarity, we found, to the way refugee lives are handled in fortress Europe.
Inspired by these drawings, our collaboration departed from the realisation that there were evident parallels between the complex systems of care and control that administer both communities: as it first occurred to us during our first in-person encounter at Project Art Works’ Turner Prize exhibition in November 2021 (Circle II), the cosmologies could be useful to make visible the lives of refugee communities and the complexities of the asylum system in Denmark, and to reclaim agency and change within it. Translating the cosmologies into the context of asylum underlined their worth as an endlessly adaptable practice that puts people in the centre, helps raise self awareness, makes visible infrastructures, trauma and desires, and articulates individual thoughts and feelings as part of larger systems and collective constellations.
Parallel to cosmology drawing, live portrait-making became also important. A tool developed by Project Art Works, solar prints are large portraits made with a special blue ink that is sensitive to sunlight and develops instantly with sun exposure. The slow process of making portraits of each other together as we made cosmologies about the asylum system and discussed life and citizenship, allowed us to get to know one another informally and share stories over the course of the different workshops. These moments revealed themselves as vital, as they recognised the need to be seen, which is so neglected in both neurodivergent communities and the asylum system: while some people donated their portraits to the project archive, for others it was important to take them home.
We first used the cosmologies in the first workshop series in Trampoline House in May 2022 to look more closely at the asylum system in Denmark (Circle IV). With facilitation by Carlota Mir and Sara Alberani, Tone Olaf Nielsen and Nabila Saidi (Trampoline House); Kate Adams and Tim Corrigan (Project Art Works), we looked at the support infrastructures that people have during the various phases of asylum - from the government but also from family, friends, community or Trampoline House - and the ones they don’t have, especially as rejected asylum seekers. Starting with large collective warm-up drawings, we made a first round of individual cosmologies where people reflected on their support networks, both in Denmark and abroad. We then made a collective cosmology illustrating the different phases of asylum for people coming from non-EU countries and the Global South, and what can happen when people get stuck in grey areas for years.
Through cosmology drawings guided by people with migration experience, both from Ukraine and other countries, we were then able to compare how the asylum system operates on migrants from the Global South versus how the system was modified to facilitate the arrival of Ukrainian refugees, coming to the conclusion that a better asylum system is not a utopia, but a simple matter of political will.2 We concluded our sessions with a collective cosmology around the topic of freedom, and what it meant for each of us: drawn outside of the circle, aspirations such as bodily autonomy, freedom of speech, mobility, access or being able to be oneself were met with the reality of the asylum system, where basic needs, represented in the core circles - such as residence permits, education or proper healthcare - are routinely neglected. In the empty spaces between aspiration and reality, we used the current support structures to cross through the circles and point to the realm of aspiration: freedom. Reaching outwards, Trampoline House, anger, hope and resilience emerged as parallel lifelines in the cosmology. With its large empty areas representing the obstacles faced to reach safety and fulfil basic needs, let alone attain freedom, the ‘freedom’ cosmology painted a very different picture from the original Cosmology of Care by Project Art Works, in which a maze-like social care system is visualised, appearing as illegible, but with a beginning, a middle, and an end. In other words, an adversarial system which can be navigated through finding - or building - the right support.
Circulating beyond Trampoline House in Copenhagen, traces of the first series of workshops were part of the installations of both organisations in Kassel (Circle V). Exhibited there, the cosmology drawings and blue portraits bore witness to the joint action that had taken place in our Copenhagen locality as we got together. Displaying traces as malleable indicators of both past and future action responds to shared values around the role of art and its place in exhibitions: as Project Art Works artist Tim Corrigan pointed out after the public workshop sessions, ‘the art is the conversation that takes place. It’s just that it’s done in a different way: artistic tools become conversation tools. Working this way, our practice becomes more collaborative, more immersive, more impulsive. The art, in other words, is the conversation. What is understood as ‘art’ - the painting, the film, the picture - becomes a trace, a tool, and a language'.3 As he underlines, it is the activations of the space that are of utmost importance. Exhibition spaces work with, and are indebted to, the communities that activate and sustain them: they act as containers that amplify affective encounters through hosting their traces, forming new proposals for gathering and movement.
The translation of our shared practices and conversations into the exhibition context of documenta in Kassel was both symbolic and literal. For Trampoline House, the feelings, testimonies and stories that were shared during the workshops with Project Art Works in May 2022 were important for rekindling a collective sense of self after a very hard year - the House had to close down in December 2021 due to economic struggles, which intensified under COVID, and had just reopened in a smaller version, the Weekend Trampoline House. Through harvesting these and other workshops in our locality, we were able to bring the voices of House members, who can’t travel outside of Denmark because of their legal status, into our installation in Kassel, both in film and in writing. Some of the testimonies from the workshops became central pieces of our documenta installation ‘Castle in Kassel’ (see, for example, Circle I - Kani’s Cosmology, with a transcript of the original installation video).
As for the cosmologies, which explored a different system to that of disability in the UK for the first time, the collaboration between Trampoline House and Project Art Works guided the public process of cosmology making during the 100 days of documenta, and it worked as a way to meaningfully broaden the topics explored by Project Art Works in Kassel. To mark the significance of our collaboration, symbolise translation into the local context of Kassel and pave the way for a process of public cosmology drawing sessions during the 100 days, a German translation of the Freedom cosmology was made and hung at the entrance of Project Art Works’ space in Fridericianum. As Kate Adams reflects in her letter exchange with Carlota Mir and Sara Alberani, which is published in full in our harvest for visAvis:
We took the learnings of Hastings and those of Copenhagen to Kassel and continued to work with the cosmologies: our public programme concluded with a collective exploration for imagining a better asylum system in a series of public workshops in Kassel involving documenta audiences (Circle VI), which took place in September 2022 during the closing of the 100 days of documenta.
On the first day, in our Trampoline House space in Kassel, members from both teams and communities introduced the collaboration and set out to discuss the EU’s failing migration model while we made fresh portraits of each other. Meanwhile, we started to work on different cosmologies based on key aspects of participants’ experiences of community, belonging, migration and asylum. We also introduced audiences to some of the recommendations for a better asylum system coming from Trampoline House members who, because of their legal status, could not physically travel to Kassel, translating their voices and integrating them into the collective discussion and drawing process. People from the Project Art Works community, who could travel to Kassel, spontaneously engaged in participation, and some ended up vigorously reclaiming a better asylum system, much in the same way they’ve fought for better social care for years in their localities.
On the second day, we moved to Project Art Works’ installation in the Fridericianum and we turned our individual cosmologies and collective discussions from day one into a final large-scale cosmology that sought to imagine asylum otherwise: merging together the recommendations from House members, asylum activists, immigration lawyers and migration researchers in Copenhagen, participants from both Trampoline House and Project Art Works, and the documenta audience, we sat together to collectively conceive a new model that can provide protection for everyone seeking safety in Europe. As Sara Alberani recalls in her letter to Carlota Mir and Kate Adams (see visÀvis harvest):
When both collectives were invited to participate in documenta fifteen as Lumbung members, one of ruangrupa's statements was: 'Art is rooted in life'.6 Instead of commissioning new art works, they asked artists and collectives to keep doing what they do in their localities while harvesting it. One of the ways that we began building a relationship was the realisation that both of us were, literally, doing just that in our proposals to documenta: focusing on our localities, translating our practices into the exhibition space by summoning real lives and stories - bodies, emotions, trauma, and joy - but always in relationship to larger systems and their oppressions, and using art as a tool to create public conversations about hard topics: asylum and disability.
Our artistic research began by a spontaneous process of alliance that was born out of the virtual Lumbung inter-lokal assemblies between the 14 core collectives - or Lumbung members - leading up to documenta fifteen, which were initiated online in late 2020, with Project Art Works joining in early 2021. The questions we asked and practised in the network during the months leading up to the exhibition informed our collaboration: What does it mean to be locally and globally rooted today, and what potential does locality currently hold? How can we share knowledge and resources among locales? How should our artistic practices use space to redefine our relationship with the public? How can we consider regenerative/collective economies? How can we translate our practices into the space of Kassel sustainably, generatively and non-extractively? All of these questions related directly to the overarching concept of the Lumbung, a communal rice barn where the surplus harvest is stored for the benefit of the community.
Out of the different Lumbung groups that were created to get to know each other and develop thinking and practices around common interests, there was a particular space that became the base of the collaboration: the ‘Where is the Art?’* Lumbung group, which both Trampoline House and Project Art Works joined. From the first conversations we exchanged, it became clear we both felt that this sarcastic question resonated with the way our practices were perceived, but also with our stance towards artistic practice - putting people before artworks. To quote artist Tania Bruguera, who has previously participated in Trampoline House’s artistic programme and was also part of Lumbung through INSTAR, we shared the belief that ‘art should not be an event, but a culture of implementation’.7 During bi-weekly meetings, we began to talk to one another around questions such as: What is art without objects? Which artwork can be an example in a way that can be tested in different cultures and localities? How do we make art in a place that doesn’t perceive this practice as art?
The conversations we shared showed that this direct way of working with community, where human rights are put in the centre, is central to both organisations. In this sense, the role of art as a tool to imagine reality otherwise, for reworlding, for rethinking relationships, beyond merely fixing, or maintaining, what the system has destroyed or discarded, is central to both Project Art Works and Trampoline House: there is a common appetite for dismantling established social models through the exercise of individual and collective agency and the intention to practise a set of divergent logics and tools in a sustained way - that is, daily work is far more important than making exhibitions 'about' things, and when exhibitions are in fact made, they are not about, but with, the people concerned.
After a lot of informal dialogue among us, we were able to compare our practices, local contexts and the struggles of our communities in a public speaking session entitled ‘Navigating Systems of Care and Control’, which took place online in April 2022. This conversation between Trampoline House and Project Art Works was part of Lumbung Konteks, an online public programme within documenta fifteen. Conceived as a monthly conversation series between pairs of lumbung members in the period leading up to the exhibition, this initiative from the documenta Artistic Team sought to create dialogues among the different collectives, drawing common threads in our practice that reflected on shared lumbung values. In the case of Trampoline House and Project Art Works, we already had a clear sense of what our common ground was, and we seized the public programme as an opportunity to share our artistic practices, concerns and political agendas, laying the groundwork for the collaboration that was to come.
Moderated by Yasmin Gunaratnam, a British scholar who has been working on issues of race and gender equality in health and social care for the past twenty years, ‘Navigating Systems of Care and Control’ was important for two main reasons. First, it allowed us to recognise the similarities in the struggles that our communities face, such as invisibility in society, infantilisation and lack of agency, marginalisation, institutionalisation, punitive attitudes towards challenging behaviour, and societal neglect, to name a few. In recognising these similarities, we could also identify a similar use of artistic practices in both organisations: as creative tools for activism. Using different strategies, we both work to make visible the shared knowledge that there is no such thing as a ‘homogenous’ group of ‘refugees’ or ‘disabled people’. For this reason, placing individual needs and people’s lived experience and knowledge of their situation at the centre of activism, advocacy and social inclusion work is key. In the conversation, it became clear that our work entails a similar understanding of vulnerability as system-produced, as well as an awareness that interdependency and reliance upon social systems of care is a reality that surrounds us all, and a condition which should be reclaimed in a caring, emancipatory way, rather than aspiring to the Western ideal of total ‘autonomy’ and individual success, which is fuelled by an exploitative capitalist system.
In our exchange, very clear parallels emerged, especially regarding the way that our communities - neurodivergent people and refugees - are treated as improductive bodies or ‘surplus’ in society - to borrow a term from the book Health Communism, which mentions both the asylum system and disabled communities as specific government-managed carceral-socio-medical systems of ‘care’ that produce profitable marginalisation through discipline and systemic/legal processes of categorisation that make people vulnerable.8 Concepts such as ‘social murder’ (Engels), ‘slow death’ (Lauren Berlant) ‘social death’ (Orlando Patterson/Nicholas Mirzoeff), ‘bare life’ (Giorgio Agamben), or ‘the chain’ (Shakira Kasigwa Mukamusoni-Trampoline House) illustrate the ways in which care is exercised as control upon certain collectives deemed ‘undesirable’ inside Western capitalist societies. It is the ‘slow violence of the everyday’,9 as Lauren Berlant puts it, through which our governments’ necropolitics allow for the dire subsistence of marginalised bodies.
Navigating both the asylum system in Denmark and social care systems in the UK, it is easy to get stuck in places where the body might be fed and cared for, but the spirit is left to waste. For instance, in Sjaelsmark, a remote Danish camp for rejected asylum seekers which we visited upon invitation by fellow Trampoline House Artistic Team member Christine Mbabazi, people live in bare rooms that resemble prison cells with random roommates, they can’t decorate their rooms or cook their own food, they describe the food that they have to eat as ‘inedible’, and every night, they are locked in every day at 10 pm. This situation bears a clear resemblance to practices of institutionalisation in the modern history of disability in the West, where current plans for the modernisation of care often fall short of people’s needs and expectations. For example, according to scholar Jill Bradshaw, despite the changes from institutionalised to communal living for learning disabled people in the UK, which are part of a larger strategy for the individualisation of care based on catering for a person’s specific needs, ‘it is of course possible to transfer many of the negative features of institutional living to life in a community house: rigid routines, lack of choice, little opportunity to participate in activities both in and out of the home, no control over where you live or with whom, limited contact with the wider community… 10 In other words, despite some progress, invisibility and dehumanisation are still recurrent realities in social care. This might also be partly due to the fact that, like in the rest of Europe, social care services in the UK have suffered a comprehensive process of devaluation, de-funding and privatisation in the last decades.11
Second, Navigating Systems of Care and Control allowed us to recognise the differences in our communities, but also in our organisations. For example, we saw clear differences in the type and levels of support that people may need throughout their lives and thus, the kinds of vulnerabilisation via disabling tactics that are enacted by the system. People with complex support needs are system and care-dependent, which typically allows institutions to dictate the standardised pathways that they must follow, often with an emphasis on what they cannot do; refugees are made deliberately system-dependent by being surveilled, locked away and banned from education and working, preventing them from doing things as a control strategy. While in Denmark this responds to a deliberate government strategy to make people’s mental health waste away in camps over the years, thus deterring them from seeking asylum - a tactic that visual culture theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff termed ‘social death’ during his collaboration with Trampoline House,12 in the UK we find that dehumanisation can still be a consequence of de-funded, still partly inadequate social care. We also looked at the different levels of social antagonism to either community, and consequently, the different levels of government support that are offered to either cause and organisation. Here, the criminalisation of refugees in Europe stood out against disability, the latter being an easier topic to navigate at present, within both public and private funding structures. In this landscape, we reflected on the recent financial struggles of Trampoline House, whose activist work is centred upon rejected asylum seekers and frontally opposes the dismal government policies in place, vis a vis the advocacy work of Project Art Works, which is more transversal. The analysis of our differences as arts organisations also threw light on the ways in which the social and political issues of our time are increasingly dealt with through progressive artistic infrastructures, and the consequences that this shift might have on societal views on certain social groups (potentially positive), but also on the level of solidity, stability, funding, and coverage of pressing social and political issues if they increasingly depend on project-based or arts funding (potentially negative).
Chiefly, ‘Navigating Systems of Care and Control’ exposed a shared perspective on the ways in which our communities are embedded within infrastructures of care and control, which allowed us to reflect on how the capitalist organisation of care produces and reproduces our societies’ necropolitical assumptions. As Pascale Molinier writes, ‘care is the neuralgic conflict zone’.13 What is saved and what is not, on whom the burden of care work falls and on whom it does not,14 who is allowed to provide care for others and who remains a victim, who lives and who can only afford to survive, who can be an artist and who cannot, are decisions at the heart of every society, historically formalised by different models of care labour organisation. As a consequence of that, social systems of care, which are often adversarial, hard to navigate, and have deteriorated enormously in the last decades, often fail to detect, let alone tend to an individual’s human needs and aspirations. Because the vulnerability of our communities appears to be, to a large extent, system fabricated, it becomes a field of intervention: care and control emerge as a shifting dichotomy, causing our work to move between two poles: from lack (of proper care) and experience (of being controlled) to freedom to (care)/freedom from (control). This duality is represented in the cosmologies, where freedom emerges first as speculative futurity, and eventually as a potentially tangible outcome: a better asylum system.
At the same time, the duality of the term ‘surplus’ as a traditional Marxist term that defines additional socioeconomic value - and thus gain - emerges clearly in our collaboration: on the one hand, as appropriated by Adler-Bolton and Vierkant to define so-called ‘improductive populations’ as an artificially created class of 'unfit' people regarded as a fiscal and social burden in Western capitalist societies;15 on the other, as per ruangrupa’s proposal based on the idea of the communal rice barn or Lumbung, where 'surplus' resources are redistributed creatively and generatively among the the community, according to each member's capacity to give at each moment.16 In Massaging the Asylum System, departing from an acute awareness of the former, the latter is practised intently: it is the undermining of solidarity under capitalism that calls for an intentional practice of solidarity intersecting the struggles of disability and migration.
In the collaboration process, frictions and antagonisms also emerged, from Trampoline House members feeling a lack of connection with what was perceived as a white, ‘foreign body’, to antagonising positions adopted by some people - especially young, educated men with refugee backgrounds - for whom joint action seemed to imply an equation of both communities. In other words, the fear of being equated with what they perceived as a weaker Other - and thus re-marginalised - emerged in parts of the process, attesting to the reality that self-perceived hierarchies also exist within different marginalised groups, particularly in regards to gender, class or ability. In these moments, it was always important to keep language accessible, to be very transparent, and to speak from our situated positions, privileges and differences, so as to invite non-judgemental openness and mutual understanding.
These intersections had other limitations: it is not coincidental that, to our knowledge, there are practically no openly disabled or neurodivergent people who are members of Trampoline House. From the start, Project Art Works were curious about the presence of these communities in the House. As we concluded, people with disabilities, old age and complex support needs in the asylum system are kept in camps in Jutland (another island three hours north-west of Copenhagen) in conditions of severe isolation - and that is if they make it to Denmark at all, as disabled people are much less likely to migrate in the first place.17 Sadly, through the years, Trampoline House has not had the means to bring people from Jutland into the House, as a result of added economic difficulty to engage people who need specific care and support. In the individual cases of House members where disability is a result of the trauma suffered during the migration journey - sadly, a common reality for many people - we didn’t find an appropriate means to discuss the topic in a way that the story could move from the personal to the systemic without exposing the person. In other words, we didn't want to force the intersection of these two realities by concentrating on individual stories. Instead, we chose to focus on establishing parallels between our communities, coming together, and translating aspects of Project Art Works’ methodology into the House dynamics to read the asylum system together and focus on creating solidarity through the joint act of ‘massaging’.
Caring, in this context, means struggling, devoting time and energy to transform unequal power relations. It also means appropriating toxic terrain, a field of domination; making it capable of nurturing again.17 In this sense, I think it’s important to understand shortcomings not as a tragedy, but as opportunities for reflection. Accepting the partial transformative power of caring practices is reading these experimentations as material struggles that ask us to 'stay in touch with the problem', as Donna Haraway states. In other words: when rehearsing critical caring tools, we shouldn’t place ourselves in a scenario of wrong vs right. Rather, we can ask ourselves: What can we do differently next time? How can we engage people better? How can we be more consistent? How can we create alliances without making people feel that their identities are alienated or without making them feel like their differences are threatened? But also - how can we question hierarchies of oppression carefully and not be blind to the ways in which oppressions do intersect and operate, in an attempt to remain faithful to our communities?
While documenta fifteen is over, our practice and friendship is not. As we continue to harvest the fruits of our work in various ways, our encounters have already given birth to new alliances and relationships, in the form of translocally informed, locally rooted projects that use art to raise awareness and create alliances between different marginalised groups. At a time of deep political unrest in our various locales, we also simply seek to preserve the community bonds we created through writing, talking, and sharing work, time and physical space when possible.
Reflecting on our collaboration and ‘temporary coalition’, as I have called it before, researcher Anne Ring Petersen recently wrote that we had ’[taken] art’s visual and political agency seriously, casting imagination and its visual materializations as a potential ‘strong card’ in transformative politics’.19 Perhaps that is true. One thing is for sure, and that is the feeling of a jointly lived experience. Throughout the 100 days, we were in one another’s spaces, events, and things, drew new cosmologies, took portraits and developed solar prints, rushed through production lists, presented our collaboration in public events in Kassel with a collective sense of unease and vulnerability as we stepped out of our respective comfort zones, shared dinners and printers that got lost in mystery Kassel production departments, went dancing after hours to raves and sat by beautiful lakes in Kassel to see the sunrise. Together, we experienced documenta fifteen as a bittersweet experience of censorship, of joy and tears, of togetherness and separation, sharing a sense of direction and survival in the face of hardship and the constant threat of closure over the summer of 2022, while proposing radically different forms of embodying artistic practice and being in an exhibition space - and most importantly, beyond it. Ultimately, our process allowed us to learn to question, from a new angle, who art is for and what it is for.
I would like to close this essay with a citation from the letter that I recently wrote to Sara and Kate - my two colleagues and friends - on the subject of our collaboration:
Though very different in aesthetic, character and scope, our proposals for documenta fifteen also had something in common: our installations and their public activations were thoughtful propositions where art was a vehicle for having difficult conversations about the lives of our communities. These were told in the collective first person, placed within the larger framework of human rights, and situating agency and direct action as a focus point.
Located in the Hübner building, Trampoline House’s Castle in Kassel consisted of a cosy, Scandinavian-style living room set up inside a chalk circle - a weak, imaginary construction that demarcated the house as a protected space, decidedly yet precariously shielding people from the hostility facing migrants in Denmark.
On the outside: a wall, reading - THIS IS WHAT YOU FACE WHEN SEEKING ASYLUM IN DENMARK - listed an endless trail of dehumanising protocols by the Danish government, while the combination of space and artworks - film and sound pieces, animation, a visit book where visitors could write and share their thoughts and feelings, zines, a fashion collection, masks, protest signs - invited the viewer to walk around, sit down, read and watch TV and come into contact and direct empathy with the reality of Danish - and by extension European - migration policies and their impact on people’s dignity. Making visible the fact that our wider community could not be physically present in Kassel because of their legal status, our Artistic Team, made up of 14 people with mixed refugee and non-refugee backgrounds, put together a programme for the 100 days. We chose to focus on very different site activations: a fashion show, public talks, poetry readings, public drawing sessions and performances on the migrant question and its political and ethical underpinnings, always placing migrant and refugee knowledge, embodiment and experience at the centre, referring back to the House for feedback and inviting what we call ‘deprogramming’ - a collective questioning of one’s own assumptions, privileges and positions through shared vulnerability and affect in the space of the House, whose spirit we had aimed to translate into our living room at Hübner.
For its part, Project Art Works’ supported studio practice for neurodivergent and disabled artists, which spans 20 years, radiated out of the Fridericianum into multiple sites across the city, along with collaborations with audiences, carers, neurodivergent people, and artists. Their main installation space in the Fridericianum was a direct proposition to have a conversation around disability, neurodivergence and complex needs through the coming together of three main elements: the open archive - artworks and film - of artists from the Project Art Works collective in Hastings; the Cosmologies of Care, with public drawing sessions and circles progressively filling up the space with stories of people, carers and communities, and an immersive workshop set-up that worked as a reminder of Project Art Works’ core engagement with neurodivergent people through building relationships and sustained supported studio practice. In the space, translations of the cosmologies from our joint workshops in Copenhagen emerged over the weeks, speaking about freedom to German-speaking audiences in their mother tongue.
*Collective Pot. The Collective Pot is an infrastructure that was proposed by ruangrupa to all fourteen Lumbung members and artists. It is vessel for sharing money and non-monetary resources such as skills, space, time, and energy, and a shared budget to be governed collectively. It is like a totem pole, something highly symbolic that holds the community together. Thanks to the Collective Pot, projects benefiting the lumbung community were collectively approved and funded. Its aims were:
1. To develop economic models that liberate us from funding cycles and allow us to become more sustainable and independent.
2. To use the documenta period and platform to start building our relations and collaborations in the lumbung, to start connecting our ecosystems beyond the core of the organisations - collectives.
3. To experiment with our interdependency and values: if an individual lumbung member is in need, how can we support them through non-monetary and monetary resources in the collective rice barn?
*Cosmologies of Care. Cosmologies of Care are circular drawings that help visualise the social systems of care that people with complex support needs in the UK must go through to get their needs met and live fulfilling lives. They were created by Project Art Works artist Kate Adams and became central pieces in PAW’s documenta fifteen methodologies.
*Harvest. As a Lumbung practice, harvest refers to artistic recordings of discussions and meetings. Harvesters listen, reflect, and depict this process from their own perspectives, forms, and artistic practices. Harvests can be humorous, poetic, or candid. They can take the shape of a sticky note, a written story, drawing, film, sound piece, or meme. Harvesting can be seen as a way of collective writing that enables continuous collective learning, from different sensory experiences. Harvests are made to share what is being discussed with absent members and the general public and they are present throughout the entire process of documenta fifteen, and beyond.
*Lumbung. Word for a communal rice barn in rural Indonesia. A place where farmers share harvest surplus. Only the surpius! If they have nothing, they don't need to put anything there. A way of relating to each other. Sharing and building together. As an artistic and economic model, Lumbung is practised alongside its values of collectivity, generosity, humour, trust, independence, curiosity, endurance, regeneration, transparency, sufficiency, and connectivity between a multiplicity of locales, rendering them planetary as a result.
*Lumbung Inter-lokal. Lumbung inter-lokal refers to the international network of lumbung members. The term inter-local describes the intertwining of their local practices as well as their international dissemination via the network.
*Lumbung Members. Lumbung members are community-oriented collectives, organisations and institutions invited by ruangrupa and the artistic team to work together to further develop the idea and practice of lumbung . Together they form an interdisciplinary platform for contemporary art that aims to have an impact beyond the 2022 exhibition. The international network of 14 lumbung members is called lumbung inter-lokal. Besides Lumbung inter-lokal, the Lumbung artist network is comprised of another 50 individual artists plus the documenta Artistic Team, making up a community of about 200 people. In addition to working together on the fundamental ideas and questions of documenta fifteen, the lumbung members and artists presented their own projects in the exhibition. They also invited other participants with whom to create their artistic works.
*Lumbung Press. Lumbung Press is a project by lumbung members, lumbung artists and the documenta fifteen artistic team. At its core, it consisted of a collectively operated offset printing shop in the documenta hall, its printed products and the accompanying events. Lumbung members and artists were encouraged to print their own publications, and distribute them within their locales and the Lumbung network. Outliving the exhibition event, Lumbung Press has now moved to Barcelona, where it currently operates. As a way to harvest these publications and keep them accessible, the digital platforms Lumbung Books and Lumbung dot Space have been launched, creating a collectively governed digital archive of documenta fifteen. This publication is included in both platforms.
*Where is the Art? was an internal research and discussion group for Lumbung members initiated by the Artistic Team of documenta fifteen during the preliminary research stage in 2021. Different collectives and group members could sign up according to their interests. Periodic sessions and discussions were held and harvested for a number of months, bringing Lumbung members together and allowing them to initiate discussions. The title of the group is somewhat parodical: it refers to an experience which is shared by most Lumbung members, where, because of the collective, and often immaterial nature of our practices, their artistic value is routinely questioned. The conversations generated a fertile ground for contextualising the different artistic practices and began to generate exchanges where we could think about these questions together.
1S. Alberani, ‘Navigating Systems of Care and control: A Conversation Between Trampoline House and Project Art Works’, Lumbung Konteks, April 2022 [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sHlvXgKASg&ab_channel=documentafifteen][accessed 01/09/2023]
2For a choral account of this session, and the frictions it also generated, see Chapter 4. Loosening the knots, in S. Alberani and C. Mir (eds) Massaging the Asylum System (Copenhagen: visÀvis, 2023)
5S. Alberani, ‘Our Future Has The Shape Of A Cosmology', in Alberani and Mir (eds) Massaging the Asylum System, p. 23
7T. Bruguera in Conversation with T. Olaf Nielsen. Cited in C. Mir, 'Trampoline House', Advocate's speech for the Visible Award 2019 at the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, 16 November 2019
9L. Berlant, “Slow Death (Sovereignty, Obesity, Lateral Agency).” Critical Inquiry, vol. 33, no. 4, 2007, pp. 754–80.
10J. Bradshaw, 'Social Care: shifts, changes and impact on people with complex needs', in Adams and Shaw (eds) Project Art Works: Anthology, 1997-2012 (Hastings: Project Art Works, 2012) pp. 12-13
11S. Dunne from the Support Collective at Project Art Works, in conversation with C. Mir, 17 May 2023
12 N. Mirzoeff, 'Social Death in Denmark', The Nation, 20 January 2019 [https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/denmark-refugees-asylum-europe/][accessed 13/09/2023]
13Pascale Molinier (2013) in Maddalena Fragnito, 'Questioning within Care Ecologies and Conflict', Lecture at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, 26 May 2023.
15'Written by longtime disability justice and healthcare activists Beatrice Adler-Bolton and Artie Vierkant, Health Communism first examines how capital has instrumentalized health, disability, madness, and illness to create a class seen as “surplus,” regarded as a fiscal and social burden. Demarcating the healthy from the surplus, the worker from the “unfit” to work, the authors argue, serves not only to undermine solidarity but to mark whole populations for extraction by the industries that have emerged to manage and contain this “surplus” population. Health Communism then looks to the grave threat capital poses to global public health, and at the rare movements around the world that have successfully challenged the extractive economy of health. Ultimately, Adler-Bolton and Vierkant argue, we will not succeed in defeating capitalism until we sever health from capital. To do this will require a radical new politics of solidarity that centers the surplus, built on an understanding that we must not base the value of human life on one’s willingness or ability to be productive within the current political economy. Verso Books, Health Communism: A Surplus Manifesto [https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2801-health-communism][accessed 15/09/2023]
17See, for example, 'Disability and Human Mobility', Migration Data Portal [accessed 08/08/2023]
18 M. Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017) p. 11