chapter

Lumbung Press

documenta-fifteen.de/en/lumbung-press/

Lumbung Press is a common project developed by lumbung members, lumbung artists, and the Artistic Team of documenta fifteen. It emerged as a response to the question of how the lumbung can make publications and share them in an independent and sustainable manner. The collectively run lumbung Press (installed at documenta Halle during documenta fifteen) shows how to print books and other materials and offers self-publishing resources during and beyond the 100 days of the exhibition. Printing technicians instruct the participants in the usage of the machines.

Lumbung Press believes in publishing as a means to build a collective body and is founded on transmission without intermediaries, translation or proofreading outside the logic of each project.
Lumbung Press revolves around the community that emerges with shared effort (everyone helps in some part of the process) and working towards dismantling clients and services, replacing it with compression and adaptation to the local needs of artists and lumbung collectives. This means avoiding focusing on specific results at the expense of materials or production systems. Production can be opened, adapted or modified to find the unexpected, but coherent and precise in each circumstance. It is not about arriving at a product, as much as it is about what you can do with what you have.

Lumbung Press works to dislocate offset printing from commercial objectives and contexts into creative and more social methods and approaches without losing production and the possibility of a mass audience. It studies and experiments around the conception, layout, multiplication, printing, distribution, and value construction of a publication.

There are two strategies of publishing: A fast immediate one that produces daily varying flyers and posters, and a slower process that harvests books and publications from the artistic contributions to documenta fifteen.

The printed material of the Lumbung Press is distributed via three channels: In Kassel through lumbung Kios, by the book trade on a national and international basis, and via lumbung members and lumbung artists in their own ecosystems.