Documenta Fifteen: Consonni

The independent publishing house and cultural space in Bilbao, consonni, will be taking part in the highly acclaimed international exhibition documenta 15, open from 18 June to 25 September in Kassel, Germany. This is the outcome of work carried out by the Etxepare Basque Institute within the framework of the ZABAL programme, whose aim is to develop international networks to promote and facilitate exchange and long-term collaboration between creators, professionals, stakeholders, and local and international institutions.

Documenta 15 is held every five years in Kassel, Germany. The curators of the international exhibition, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa, were invited to visit the Basque Country in February 2020. They visited the publishing house and cultural space consonni. The discussions about collaboration that began then have now come to fruition in the shape of various projects. One of these is the exhibition guides, which consonni has produced and created the artwork for, working together with the publishing house Hatje Cantz. Consonni are also one of the editors of the book ´Lumbung Stories´, which reflects the nature of their work as publishers as well as the central idea around which this edition of documenta revolves – collective work.

 The consonni team, made up of Maria Macia, Dina Camorino, Marta Alonso, Munts

Brunet, and Maria Mur Dean, will take part in various professional activities and roundtable discussions organised by documenta in July. From July 6 to 10 they will join the assembly of Lumbung publishers; on July 9 they will hold a public colloquium with consonni and the Indonesian publisher Marjin Kiri; on July 10, Idoia Zabaleta will present a reading of the book in Basque and Spanish, giving the project a voice and presence.

For the exhibition’s 15th edition, they have focused on the idea of collective work, and have developed a concept they call Lumbung. Lumbung is the name of a system of collective rice collection and storage often used in Indonesian communities to make rice available in the future as a shared resource.