This issue is the result of more than two years of intensive engagement with aspects of commoning in curatorial and artistic practice, stemming from our encounters with ruangrupa on the way to documenta fifteen. At its core, this issue follows our research into the discourse on commons and its implications for the exhibitionary complex. We have conducted interviews with lumbung members, curators, theoreticians, art historians and artists.

With practices of commoning entering a large-scale exhibition like documenta, a novel approach meets the curatorial-artistic complex. And with that, various conflicts loomed on the horizon, not to mention the internal difficulties of “scaling” a resource infrastructure and its principles of sharing, originally intended for a rather small village community or small group of people, to a global scale. The question is in what form, with what instruments, with what knowledges, and with what new alliances this apparent paradigm shift will come about. We offer a critical review from different perspectives.