The Art of Prefiguration: Building a Future Collectivity at documenta fifteen

In the twenty-first century, multiculturalism has been declared a failure by Western leaders. Often captured under the banner of post-multiculturalism, this diagnosis prompts the question: if the scope for multicultural policies is diminishing, are these ideals now being expressed by different social and cultural agents, such as artists and activists engaging issues of cultural difference? This chapter seeks answers to this question by exploring the globally influential quinquennial documenta fifteen (2022), curated by the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, and in particular, how their curatorial concept of ‘lumbung’ was harnessed by participants as a generative method gesturing towards future collective practices. The chapter looks closer at one of the contributing collectives, the Trampoline House – a welcoming community centre for asylum seekers and local citizens in Denmark. The chapter proposes that documenta fifteen's ‘lumbung community’ practised a kind of transnational multiculturalism for the age of an accelerating climate crisis that transgresses national borders.