Welcome to documentamtam #2! This is a publication by the Arts Collaboratory network, one of the lumbung artists in documenta fifteen.

For this second edition we are sharing a sort of tour through the Majelis Akbar celebrated between Monday 6 and Thursday 9 of September, 2021. It was the first major virtual assembly that brought together all the people who are making documenta fifteen happen already from now on! The Majelis Akbar was attended by Lumbung members, the artistic team, lumbung artists, and mini majelis —small assemblies of artists.

In this documentamtam we are sharing ideas, conversations, and questions that emerge from the four days of online assembly. It is our desire to share with our ecosystems, starting from the threads and knots that we share on this collective journey.

As Arts Collaboratory, we briefly introduced the present moment of the network and AC School perspective, and participated as harvesters, with our ears and eyes wide open to affinities and possible collaborations that may arise. Some of the questions that guided this harvest are: What is public? What is art? What is Lumbung? The answers to these questions are kept open in fertile dialogues and living processes.

We found important resonances in relation to the possibilities of imaginative and artistic practices, as well as in relation to the means of publication such as the printing press and the radio. While there are other connections that immediately stand out: the notion of school and learning, collectivity, self-organization, and paradigm shifts… perhaps one challenge we have as Arts Collaboratory is our complexity and scale. How to participate as one network-being? Complex, multiple, constantly transforming.

This meeting —which at times felt like a party— was probably the strangest and most peculiar virtual experience we have had since the Covid-19 era forced us to engage in this kind of long-distance linking. More than 100 people logged on each day from many different places around the world, in extremely rare schedules for certain countries. We hope that your sense of time and space will be as altered as ours as you access the contents of this edition.

We would also like to thank Nino Bulling, Safdar Ahmed and Sebastián Díaz Morales for sharing their harvest included in this edition. This is a harvest to share! Enjoy!

– Editorial group for this issue (Andrés, Dina, Jaza, Sari)