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In their December 2018 proposal for Documenta, ruangrupa started with the question of how they—an artists’ collective from Jakarta—might further the mission of Gudskul, their new educational initiative (founded with two other collectives), to spread the “virus of collectivism.” Aware of the dependency of cultural organizations on an international artfunding system dominated by ex-colonial powers such as Germany—which perpetuate imperialism through, in their words, “asymmetrical and extraction-accumulation logics”—ruangrupa proposed to make Documenta’s “pool of resources” available more broadly through the model of a “non-capitalistic democratic economy,” which (as envisioned by Indonesia’s first vice-president Mohammad Hatta) is derived from the Indonesian village practice of the communal rice. This ultimately led ruangrupa to devise a decentralized structure with nine groups of collectives and artists, known as “minimajelis,” through which resources were shared to the participants, who ultimately determined what they themselves wanted to do in the context of documenta fifteen.
