Commons Museums

This chapbook centres pedagogy within a new model of museum practice that prioritizes community. It focuses on two cultural institutions in Indonesia, the Pagesangan School in Yogyakarta and the Lakoat.Kujawas in Mollo, East Nusa Tenggara, and uses the concept of the ‘commons museums’, which encompasses heritage, memory, and knowledge production to shape futures. The historical theft of cultural heritage and the extraction of natural resources are situated in Indonesia’s post-Reformation context, with collective archives becoming methodologies for survival. The commons museum expands perspectives around restitution, foregrounding collective research and community struggles as instruments for restoring justice and recovering knowledge. Nuraini Juliastuti is a translocal practicing researcher and writer who focuses on art organizations, activism, illegality, alternative cultural production, and everyday practices of vernacular archiving. In 2024, she was a Research Fellow at the Research Center for Material Culture in the Netherlands, exploring ideas around her concept of ‘Museum Agriculture for Multiple Beings’. She teaches in the Masters programme at the Fine Art Department of the HKU University of the Arts, Utrecht. She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Leiden University. In 1999, she co-founded the Kunci Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In 2022, she conducted a research performance commission from the arts organization ‘If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution’, as part of ‘Edition IX–Bodies and Technologies’, for which she produced an experimental children's book, Stories of Wounds and Wonder (2024). In collaboration with Kunci Study Forum & Collective, she co-edited a special edition of March: A Journal of Art & Strategy titled ‘Tools for Radical Study: A Collection of Manuals’ (2024). From 2022 to 2023, she developed the ‘Nina bell f. House Museum’ for the Singapore Biennale 2022, with others in and around the Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons.