Lumbung Stories

Tequio in Mexico, auzolan in Basque Country, lumbung in Indonesia, ubuntu in South Africa, mutirão in Brazil – all terms used around the world to describe the concept of collective work. Bringing together 8 publishing houses and 7 writers, each writing in a different language, Lumbung Stories is a true product of communal action. From speculative essays and experimental texts to intimate stories that portray collective work as something every day and habitual, each writer presents their unique take on what a “lumbung story” is.

Blurring the lines between realism and fiction, the past and the future, this unique and powerful collection brims with life and is a vital reminder of the ties that unite us all.

—Harriet Brown was the name the Swedish actress Greta Garbo chose when she abandoned the world of cinema and hid away in her New York apartment in the 1940s. Harriet Brown has given name to some women’s rights activists and anti-racist activists and many other activators of beginnings to whom we pay tribute. documenta fifteen, ruangrupa and consonni are written without capital letters, as is harriet c. brown. We use this pseudonym to refer to the collective entity formed by the diversity of bodies of consonni and the involved members of the Artistic Team of documenta fifteen. It’s a being-in-common, a literary being. harriet c. brown is a lumbung body we recover now as a practice of community to manufacture the present and put it into a textual body.