Documenta fifteen

The chapter analyzes the relation between epistemic impasse and epistemic emergence in the context of an art biennal. Departing from literature in the field of energy humanities and science and technology studies, it acknowledges the condition of impasse in which art biennals and other art institutions find themselves. Conscious of their implication in histories of colonization, capitalization, and extractivism, they seem unable to take distance from the institutional models that legitimized these histories. The chapter looks at the way epistemic impasse and epistemic emergence manifested in documenta fifteen, with specific reference to its knowledge infrastructure. How did the lumbung , as an emergent epistemic model from the Global South, intervene in the condition of epistemic impasse of a historical Western biennal of the scale of documenta? The theoretical analysis is accompanied by field notes and observations emerging from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Kassel in the summer 2022.