Building a House Without Bricks consists of a public programme and exhibition hosted by damdam – a collective of collectives brought together by de Appel Curatorial Programme, Sandberg Instituut temporary master Lumbung Practice, and Gudskul, Jakarta – which seeks to cultivate methods of collective organisation in times of crisis. The festival is formulated around three central questions: How to organise? How to distribute labour and resources? How to share what we produce?

The exhibition at de Appel is the second act, after a three day public programme at OT301 in June, where we invite you into the house, turning to the physical and material structures inside. Acknowledging the limits of an exhibition, we focus on objects and their potential for resource re-distribution through transvestment (transferring resources from one value system to another). The objects are commissioned by the different collectives within damdam, who shared instructions to collaboratively build a house that reflects current needs in sustaining collective practice. With these objects, we build a house that can transvest resources into each collective’s local context, using a framework that balances production budget and fees with their needs.

Building a House Without Bricks seeks to create a house for our collectives through these infrastructures and objects, to continue practicing, gathering, and learning from each other. Through this festival, we celebrate the learnings we have gathered over the past two years together in the Lumbung Practice programme, and share them with our wider community.

Friday 3 July, 16:00–20:00

During the opening, one of the exhibited works, a clay oven, will be activated as the centre of an ongoing ritual gathering. Visitors are invited to gather around the fire, share stories, prepare bread together, and take part in a collective moment of making and eating.

From Friday 3 July on dampack.lumbung.space

The digital programme extends the exhibition into an ongoing online space hosted on lumbung.space, bringing together films (Film Pot and Footage Therapy), interviews (Rice to Meet You!), radio transmissions, reading sessions and knowledge sharing (Low Budget, High Concept), archival materials from the two-year process of forming Lumbung Practice (Rumours and Humours) in Indonesia (Six-Pack) and Amsterdam (damdam), alongside contributions from participating collectives. It functions as a shared infrastructure for staying connected across different localities and temporalities.

The Lumbung Practice Temporary Master received funding from OCW-VIS and DOEN foundation; de Appel Curatorial Programme received funding from Ammodo Art