Collective from Indonesia (ID)

Members live and work in Jakarta

Coming from the massive capital city of Indonesia, people from the art collective Gudskul believe that we can never work alone. The Jakarta-based collective is run by a total of 57 members, from security team, art managers, artists, designers, cooks, curators, researchers, and educators. As a collective of three collectives: ruangrupa, Serrum and Grafis Huru Hara, they work on art ecosystem building, community engagement, art educational programs, and collaborative sustainability models as their artistic practices. For them, the collective is a school, whereas here there is a permission to fail and try again. Art projects are courses to obtain valuable lessons for every member. Friends or fellow members are study partners that may come and go, but each shared experience leaves a lifelong tacit and explicit knowledge carried everywhere. Since meeting and collaborating with Tenthaus from 2019, both of them found in many ways that their practices felt like a kindred spirit to each other, and more so, that they are like a long-lost sister collective from Oslo.

Gudskul space in Jagakarsa, Jakarta, is both private and public in nature, functioning as bedrooms, living rooms, kitchen, dining room, office, art studio, library, storage, lab, meeting rooms, gallery, stage, marketplace, printing station, and playground. When being far away from Jakarta, ten representative members of Gudskul brought a sense of their homemaking, or in another word, sense of their collective space-making, to their areas around Galleri F15 in Moss by the invitation of their sister collective, Tenthaus.

Here, the collective devices various modules embedded with Gudskul’s houserule: make friends, learn from friends, and initiate together. First is GUDHAUS (short for Gudskul-Tenthaus), a third space for both collective and guests to think, host and be hosted, imagining, speculating, melting and manifesting their togetherness inside Galleri F15. Second is the Gudkitchen-Tentskul, a common kitchen operating in dugnad spirit in the outdoor area of Galleri F15. Dugnad as a voluntary collective work for common cause in Norwegian culture is also a similar practice with gotong-royong in Indonesian culture. In this kitchen, guests can self-organize to bring ingredients, cook, feast and socialize with others. Third is Gerobak, a mobile multimedia cart that will be toured in Moss area for regular pop up karaoke sessions during Gudskul members' stay in June. Karaoke is one of the rituals that Gudskul and Tenthaus members consider important after every live encounter for its power to bring conviviality to the space and people. All the activity by the collectives and guests in the semi-living-family room, dugnad kitchen, and mobile karaoke cart, are endeavors for stitching the ecosystems of Jakarta, Oslo, and Moss, their tropical culture and Nordic context.