Living Room

The OFF-Biennale Budapest team has been invited to participate in documenta fifteen, taking place from June 18 to September 25, 2022. Responsible for the artistic direction of documenta fifteen, the Jakarta-based collective ruangrupa extended invitations to other initiatives and collectives to become “lumbung members.” Lumbung in Bahasa Indonesia means rice barn and can be utilized as a model of collective work and sustainability. lumbung is where crops are stored and the surplus becomes shared common property. Currently fourteen organizations—from Indonesia to Colombia, from Denmark to Kenya, including OFF-Biennale—come together as part of documenta fifteen to build a shared, collective, international lumbung; a symbolic granary made up of intellectual and material assets, beyond the scope of a mere series of exhibitions and events.

Lumbung is closely related to another symbolic space that determines ruangrupa’s way of thinking and mode of operation: the living room. Ruangrupa regards the living room as a meeting place, a community space that accommodates casual conversation as well as initiatives and collaborations arising from it—a space that serves as a base for the collective production and use of real and symbolic goods.

Living Room in Budapest is where the public programs of OFF-Biennale 2021 will take place. OFF will invite lumbung members and the public to its Living Room, where local matters are discussed within a global context, with invited guests. At the same time, Living Room in an Eastern European context, also refers to the situation in which critical voices and themes are increasingly confined to private spaces. In Hungary this phenomenon is one ramification of the shrinking of the autonomous (art) institutional framework and the dwindling of possibilities, which the pandemic has only heightened. 

In addition to being a hub for all the public programs in the third edition of OFF-Biennale Budapest,  Living Room also accommodates the biennale’s publishing and editorial project On the Same Page – Off-Editorial Practice. The public events of the biennale will be connected to the continuous editorial work in various ways (talks, presentations, lectures, workshops).

On the Same Page – OFF-Editorial Practice

On the Same Page is a common-knowledge sharing platform of the organizers and participants of OFF-Biennale. The title of the project reflects on the common publishing surface (online and offline) we have established, as well as on the editorial mission that emphasizes collective thinking, the shared workflow, the links between the individual projects of this year’s OFF and our associations.

 The catchword of the planned publication is “air” (referring to OFF 2021’s title and central theme of Inhale!), and it is about this insubstantial, intangible, yet omnipresent and all-pervading, indispensable medium that we use up, share, and which is the principal token of our survival. In the course of the editorial practice, the publication aims to capture the air that flows between the various projects, to amplify and render the perceivable common resonance.

During the course of the Biennale, we will go live on a weekly basis: in our public (online) editorial meetings we will discuss, read aloud, turn the pages of publications, share inspirations, talk about artworks together with OFF participants, invited guests and documenta fifteen cooperation partners (members of the lumbung inter-local). With these collagelike contributions we connect to issues thematized in the 2021 OFF edition, such as self-organisation, emancipatory pedagogy, artistic freedom and ecological sustainability.

While the Biennale is in full swing, we will focus on the editorial groundwork. “The piecing together of pages” will continue past this year’s OFF. The first issue of our publication will get its final shape as a result of intensive work following the Biennale. On the Same Page – Off-Editorial Practice is a long-term project stretching as far as documenta fifteen, aiming to produce multiple publications.

On the Same Page – OFF-Editorial Practice is initiated by Katarina Šević.

Permanent editorial board members: Rita Kálmán, Eszter Lázár, Katarina Šević

On the Same Page – OFF-Editorial Practice is part of the Living Room event-series.

Venue is not wheelchair accessible.

Living Room in Budapest is a precursory event to OFF’s participation, in the frame of lumbung inter-lokal, in documenta fifteen. Living Room is realized with the generous support of Goethe-Institut.

Time 23.04 - 29.05