From 2020-2024 SSW commissioned and worked with MyVillages through their Rural School of Economics (RSoE) programme to develop our Community Making Space programme alongside the wider SSW team and local community. Below is a blog post by Kathrin Böhm of Myvillages sharing her experiences, insights and process on developing this important new area of SSW.
Words by Kathrin Böhm.
Photos by Felicity Crawshaw and Myvillages.
The Community Making Space in the making – via lumbung.
A Rural School of Economics and Scottish Sculpture Workshop trans-local collaboration 2020-2024.
How to connect with the village?
Wapke and myself first spoke with Sam at Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) about a possible collaboration in 2020. SSW has been based in Lumsden in Aberdeenshire since 1979, and was undergoing significant organisational and architectural development. SSW was going to transform the original former bakery shop front, and most recently SSW offices, on their premises into a new public space for Lumsden. The former bakery shop which is sitting on the long main road that runs across Lumsden, was to become a new Community Making Space, to connect SSW with Lumsden on new communal grounds. Leading up to the design and building works, quite fundamental questions were going to be asked and worked through together. From how to connect the amazing facilities and international residencies of SSW with local communities and artists. How to understand, make and present art that can both enable the interest of artists, and support the interests of the village. How to connect SSW with Lumsden? Was “the rural” just a given local condition, or was there a need to give it more space without wanting to define it?
Myvillages started their work soon after. Current and desired connections between the village and SSW were discussed. Plans for me to visit by train and come with enough time were made. Then the pandemic happened – a long, strenuous pause of working the way we were used to. We organised online trans-local drawing sessions instead, learning in a digital way with each other, that would still give us to some closeness. Kathrin travelled to Lumsden once during the pandemic, and Jenny Salmean, SSW’s Programme Manager at the time, showed Kathrin around. A meeting with a farmer on the fields and visiting the spacious and fairly chilly village hall were possible within covid restrictions.
It was eight months into the pandemic and six months after George Floyd’s killing, and the start of a global Black Lives Matter movement. Why mention this here? Because something in the arts sector seemed to be changing. Prevailing institutional racism and white privilege was addressed and acknowledged. The need for structural and embodied change was on the plate, and it became clear that inclusion – even though a fashionable word in the arts and politics and enterprise for a while – was not just a matter of programming diversity, but one of systemic reorganisation and change. The three long evenings in a dark and quiet village were spent discussing this. How to open SSW once the pandemic was over, without just appearing open to the same groups who can assume access. Did we even know who lived in the village? Who were the communities and individuals we couldn’t see? Who didn’t want to be seen? Who might want to come to SSW but not know it even existed. Who might know it existed, and had good reasons for not coming?
We kept meeting on zoom, to work out an approach for SSW that would centre access. SSW wanted a connection to the village where it was at home. Questions of why? who with? how? could not be quickly nor easily answered or rendered. To move forward, boundaries of what art is and might be had to become more porous. The term cultural democracy became useful, the acknowledgement that we are all cultural producers in different realms, and that contemporary art was simply a specific realm. Cultural democracy doesn’t differentiate in order to establish hierarchies, but to acknowledge. This general concept worked smoothly at the start of conversations with individuals and groups from Lumsden. Cultural democracy sounds like something a progressive organisation wants to adapt. Until the very simple question was asked in one of the first public meetings in the new Community Making Space: could villagers propose and have art-exhibitions here? The opinions split instantly. No, SSW was clearly not about exhibition making, it was about process not product. Somehow SSW had inherited a fear of allowing an exhibition as a signal backwards, something the more process orientated and socially engaged art world had left behind. At this moment, sitting around a table in the Community Making Space at SSW in Lumsden, to accept exhibitions as a possible format in which art and cultural work is shown and shared, was a way forward.
In winter 2021 the building work in the former bakery shop started. The shop opened up into a large space and was fitted with equipment for a functional public space: foldable tables, chairs, a mini kitchen, storage, toilets, a kettle etc. The pandemic continued, travel and public programmes were still heavily restricted.
SSW and Myvillages met again in person for a joint study trip into art as social practice during Lumbung documenta fifteen in June 2022. Documenta takes place every five years in the German town of Kassel, and is widely regarded as one of the most significant art exhibitions worldwide. documenta fifteen was organised by ruangrupa, an art collective from Jakarta, who used the word and practice of “lumbung” (an Indonesian word for a shared rice barn) to introduce new collective principles and ways of organising to this global mega event. Together we wanted to see what lumbung looked like as a public offer and space. The Rural School of Economics’ was part of Lumbung documenta, and Wapke had worked on “rural undercurrents” in Kassel already since May 2021. She had rented a large house with garden for the summer, where Sara and Sam were welcome in the expanded shared spirit lumbung: generosity, welcoming and hanging out together, as and with cultural workers and artists.
Lumbung documenta fifteen was not afraid of merging art with the everyday. It wasn’t called an exhibition by ruangrupa, but a “festival” or the “100 days of lumbung in Kassel”- already indicating lumbung as an ongoing practice, instead of a confined art event. Lumbung documenta was not protective or defensive about art, but curious about life. Political, critical, playful. It was a demonstration of practice on the scale of life, which in some parts led to exhibitions. In other parts it led to schools and gardens and archives, demonstrations, occupations and installations. It was about letting be, not equalising towards an exhibition. Impressive paintings didn’t suffer from the cut and paste zine next to it. Sculptures didn’t go unnoticed because they were on the doorstep of a children creche. The precise formalism of banners was strengthened by their political sharpness. Form and intention came together with ease. There was no point of not liking something, there were only points of connecting, embracing, un-learning and learning, and enjoying. Lumbung documenta fifteen demonstrated what was possible when cultural democracy was lived and practiced. It was done collaboratively on a scale of the world, the world we as artists and cultural workers want.
What had been done and wanted and intended at SSW was very similar to all of this. But terms like socially engaged, context specific, community etc. simmered along with a patronising undertone, either towards the artists or the public. Lumbung was more convincing. It was closer to practice, more confident, less discursive, more practical. Lumbung had opened the art space of documenta in an unprecedented manner, demonstrating a pluriverse of artworlds in the being and in solidarity. The actions and positive proposition of Lumbung lasts well beyond the 100 days in Kassel. The call to practice also lifted a heavy cloud of theoretical discourse of whether something was art, or community art, or social art or not art at all. The need to judge was fundamentally questioned not only as a condition for creating safer and inclusive spaces, but also as an unlearning of discourse driven opinion making. Sharp thinking and political analysis shifted to the values of Lumbung documenta: generosity, humour, local anchoring, independence, regeneration, transparency and frugality. Terms that at first seem more universal than more familiar art terms – but ultimately connect art making to the big questions of our time on more common terms.
Back to Lumsden
Going to Kassel was important, to see SSW’s work as part of a multi-local and international attempt to re-organise art and art-worlds towards cultural democracy rooted and away from exclusion. To honour ruangrupa’s enormous achievement at Documenta, and to sign up to Lumbung as a practice and ethics, we called the Community Space Lumbungsden in the multi-local and pluri-vocal spirit of Lumbung. In December 2022 we opened the space, on a dark early Friday evening, the letters Lumbungsden written with lights across the front. Lumbungsden was in memory and in direct continuation of lumbung at documenta fifteen.
The space is now called the Community Making Space, and as a result of thinking and discussing more sustainable longer term economic conditions for the space, Myvillages’ artist fee was part-used to pay for a community organiser, the amazing lumbung by nature Mara Marxt Lewis. The question of Who has the energy? to initiate and maintain communal and cultural efforts became the invitation to join a summer camp at SSW in 2023. The camp with regional and international artists and cultural workers looked deeper into the diverse economic aspects and underpinnings, which allow community spaces to exist and sustain. Who has the energy? Was also addressing the oil driven all-encompassing economy of Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, and a subsequent publication Oil was conceived and produced by Rachel Grant in 2024.
The name Lumbungsden didn’t work for the space. It was too artificial, and took too long to explain. However the connection between the new Community Making Space and Lumbung works, and the confidence, multi-localism and life-scale approach of Lumbung continues in Lumsden.
#lumbungcontinues
Kathrin
Summer 2024
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