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The World, Is Not Just Ours To Win—It’s Ours To Build


By Bunga Siagian



The Global South
One of the many critics I read during documenta fifteen was Mi You, a curator and professor of Art and Economies at University of Kassel / documenta Institute, who criticized ruangrupa—the Jakarta-based art collective that curated the event—for the anti-establishment politics of their curatorial framework which centered the Global South. She indicated that ruangrupa was adopting a binary political position between the North and the South when defining progressive politics, while according to her, the politics of decolonization is practiced through collaborative institution-building.1 By looking at some historical moments of the Third World, I will defend ruangrupa in the next paragraphs for two reasons. First, this argument is useful as a reflection on Cinema of the Global South: A Programmers’ Meeting, a three-day gathering which took place in Cairo, bringing together filmmakers, programmers, and researchers from across the Global South. Second, after witnessing the genocide against Palestinians for the past two years, we can no longer afford to entertain liberalism as a way of thinking or its international order. The Global South carries the legacy of the Third World as an unfinished project and we are here to discuss how to carry the struggle forward.
documenta fifteen : Lumbung members and artists meeting and hanging out, June 23, 2022. Photo : Bunga Siagian


documenta fifteen : The moment of dismantling Taring Padi’s ‘People’s Justice,’ June 21, 2022. Photo : Bunga Siagian

Here are some of ruangrupa's fundamental ‘anti-establishment’ curatorial decisions; inviting most of the artists from the Global South who are mostly 'unknown' to the Western artworld, developing a new type of relationship between institution-curators-artists-publics that is relatively uncommon in the Western artworld, undertaking a series of experiments to build Lumbung2 working groups as potential future infrastructures for a new artistic community, and offering something 'unconsumable' for the western logic of autonomous art. Mi You continued her piece by suggesting that instead of seeing ourselves as perpetual victims, what if we put aside prejudices and work together “despite considerable geopolitical and ideological differences.”3

Only a year after documenta fifteen and an aggressive anti-Semitic accusation4 that caused “the swift and comprehensive dismissal of the whole show”5—thus undermining all of ruangrupa's artistic and curatorial experiments—the 7th of October operation that tore down the wall of the Gaza “ghetto”6 happened. Since then, Israel and the imperial Global North –their main allies– have committed continuous atrocities against Palestinians. Germany, as the main context and structure within which documenta takes place, holds a unique position in the war against Palestinians. Overridden with its guilt over what happened in the past, it blindly defends Israel's settler colonial project. Not only is it enforcing anti-Semitic legal action on those who openly support Palestine,7 but it also keeps supplying Israel with weapons and military aid. If this is the collaborator that Mi You suggested we—artists and collectives from the Global South—should work together with, then her approach to documenta fifteen was obviously ahistorical. That was clear then –for us at least– and the absurdity of this claim is only getting clearer today. 

The Global South should not be treated as a neutral geographical signifier or solely as a political identity that is exclusive to particular groups of people. Historically, the term Global South actually refers to class division at the level of a world order. On one side, there are several countries where capital is concentrated, while on the other side, the majority of the world’s population in the Global South is being exploited for resources. Thus, when a curatorial collective invites artists from the Global South to the stage of a major contemporary art exhibition, it is supposed to provide what feminist praxis refers to as the 'epistemic privilege.' This epistemic privilege harbors a particular kind of aesthetic and political engagement that cannot be replicated by hegemonic structures within dominant societies. Otherwise, we will be stranded in the politics of recognition, where the main goal is to be acknowledged or recognized by the West; to think and act according to their terms and conditions. Engagement with the Global South is meaningless unless it demonstrates a conscious practice that links identity to material analysis. As I write this, five women of color have been appointed to leadership roles at documenta sixteen,8 which seems to serve Germany’s imperial goal of artwashing and exposes the limits of the politics of recognition. 

To Build the World Anew

  • “We call upon our progressive artists and film workers in Latin America and throughout the world, the new emerging forces in the old order included, together with the artists and film-workers of Africa and Asia, to strengthen co-operation, to build the world anew, a world free from imperialism and neo-colonialism, free from the exploitation of man by man.”

    - The communique of the third Afro-Asia Film Festival
    (Jakarta, April 30th, 1964)

World-building or establishing a new structure has been a historical and political desire of the colonized, the oppressed, and the peoples of the Third World. Imagining a different world order free of colonialism and imperialism was a promising premise. It defined the political and cultural landscape of the era, which Samir Amin referred to as “the first globalization of struggles”9, a historical moment that started at the Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, in 1955 and lasted until the 1980s, before the global debt crisis and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This world-building project was–I have to say it again–embracing class analysis in its relation to identity, and vice versa. To elaborate on this, it’s important to highlight two powerful speeches by Soekarno, the first president of Indonesia, and to read them in relation to each other.

The banner of the 3rd Afro-Asia Film Festival in Jakarta, 1964. Collection : Oey Hay Djoen

One of the installations in the Museum of Bandung Conference features some archives of newspapers that reported on the conference. Photo : Bunga Siagian
In the first speech, at the Bandung conference in 1955, the opening statement was: "This is the first intercontinental conference of colored people, so-called colored people, in the history of mankind." This statement marked one of the earliest moments of using identity as a political tool. Within the context of the anti-colonial politics of the Bandung Conference, "people of color" refers to the position of the oppressed, instead of solely identity or skin color.

The second statement is from his keynote speech New Emerging Forces at the 1961 Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Belgrade, where Soekarno emphasized that the Third World project was supposed to bring together progressive Third World people as well as “the new emerging forces in the old order.” Soekarno effectively divided the world into two forces. First, New Emerging Forces (Nefos) which are made up of three components: socialist countries, newly independent countries, and progressive elements in the capitalist world. These forces oppose the Old Established Forces (Oldefos), which consist of countries that have been key forces of colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism. The Nefos should be zealous in front of the Oldefos. In this speech, Soekarno clearly outlined the importance of working together, in spite of geographical and identity differences, under a shared commitment to resisting oppressive ideologies.

The last Afro-Asian Film Festival in Jakarta in 1964 was one of the cultural manifestations of world-building by mobilizing New Emerging Forces (Nefos). The Afro-Asia Film Festivals were a series of film festivals founded by the Afro-Asia People's Solidarity Organisation (AAPSO). It was the earliest attempt by intercontinental filmmakers and film workers from the Third World to envision cinematic sovereignty as part of the decolonization process in Africa and Asia. Film served as a form of popular education in the postcolonial world, where the majority of the population was illiterate. During those festivals, they not only screened films, but also had many discussions concerning distribution, co-production, and knowledge exchange.  
The Jakarta edition was a radical version of the two previous editions held in Tashkent (1958) and Cairo (1960). Despite being part of the same network and embodying the anti-colonial spirit of Bandung, the festival was situated in different regional politics. These variables influenced how each edition articulated the definition of Afro-Asian anticolonial cinema. The Tashkent edition linked anti-colonial politics with the Soviet international policy of "peaceful coexistence." At the time, Tashkent was the main hub of Soviet Third World cultural entanglement, also known as the Second World. In Cairo, the organizers were from the studio ecosystem, focusing on business development and film production processes. The Cairo edition is the most inadequate to study, due to a lack of vision and preparation on behalf of the organizers. The official documents of programs, schedules, etc., are difficult to obtain. It is worth noting that, at the time, many leftists were imprisoned in Egypt. Despite the visibility of Afro-Asian cinematic sovereignty, it is clear that the two festivals prior to the one in Jakarta lacked overt anti-imperialist or anti-colonial positions, which were essential to the foundation of the Bandung spirit.

The third Afro-Asian Film Festival was organized by leftist artists and held in a political climate in Indonesia in which president Soekarno endorsed film as a revolutionary tool. Soekarno's government took a significant step by passing a resolution in The People's Consultative Assembly mandating that all communication instruments, including film, should educate people about Indonesian socialism.10 That revolutionary atmosphere aligned with the spirit of the third Afro Asian Film Festival, and the delegations in attendance expressed similar views. Such consciousness encouraged film workers to involve filmmaking in their concrete struggles. One of the delegations from Zanzibar stated that "[t]he articulations of the spirit of Bandung in the 3rd Afro Asian Film Festival became the inspiring source for the film workers and Afro-Asian peoples to fight against imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism.”11

What is crucial, of course, is not the rhetoric, but rather what was happening during the festival. The attempts to build a sovereign Afro-Asian film industry were carefully deliberated, taking into account material conditions. One example, offered by a Pakistani delegate, was to envision barter as a mechanism of film exchange. He stated that barter would be a more realistic method for developing the Afro-Asian film industry than profit-driven mechanisms. As newly independent countries that have undergone long periods of colonialism and mass exploitation, their economic capacity is weak, and barter is a potential solution.

Another significant contribution in which the film industry played a major role was the concrete movement to boycott imperialist infrastructure–an essential action for anyone who supports the liberation of Palestine today. Two weeks after the festival the organizers boycotted the AMPAI (American Motion Picture Association of Indonesia), which monopolized film distribution not only in Indonesia but in the Third World in general (and we know where the revenues were going). For months, cinemas across Java had stopped screening films distributed by AMPAI. The boycott was sponsored by 16 civil organizations in Indonesia. It garnered international support as well. Utami Suryadharma, the festival's director, mentioned that Mali and Vietnam stood up for the cause by sending their films to be screened in cinemas instead of the boycotted American films. Two cinema journals, Cinema Art and China's Screen, described the boycott movement as an unprecedented revolutionary act. They also stated that the third Afro-Asian Film Festival was more than just a film festival, as it also called for concrete collective action.12 This reminds us of the resolutions of the Third World filmmakers' meetings in Algeria in 1973 which took place ten years later and called on all filmmakers to join the anti-imperialist struggle: “Films being a social act within a historical reality, it follows that the task of the third-world filmmaker is no longer limited to the making of films but is extended to other fields of action. . .”13 

Meanwhile, the third component of the New Emerging Forces (Nefos), progressive elements in the capitalist world, also participated in Jakarta's edition. In the list of 26 African and Asian countries with their 60 films, we see Japan, a country that had been an imperial force in Asia and was already subordinate to the American empire at the time of the festival. The delegation consisted of Japanese Marxist filmmakers who aimed to demonstrate their commitment and solidarity with the decolonization process in Afro-Asia. They created their own committee as a dissenting political position to the Japanese government and actively participated by bringing two strong films, one of them won in the best film category at the Bandung Awards. Japan's involvement in the Afro-Asia Film Festival was confusing, since it is inconsistent with postwar Japanese historiography or the decolonization perspective. Yet, looking at this particular juncture allows us to learn about people's solidarity networks and shared anti-imperialist linkages beyond the state.

New Mood in The South
It’s true that it has been a long time since we have lived in a moment of mass anticolonial struggle. Gaza has remade the world–many of us have become more politically engaged since October 7th, 2023, which marks another wave of the globalization of struggles.The Tricontinental's most recent findings on what they call ‘A new mood in the Global South’ are worth reading to understand the current state of emergency as a process fueling transformation.14 They have observed and analyzed the 'movement' of multilateral and regional economic and political platforms in the Global South that have fostered unipolarity throughout the last decade. And even though this is happening differently than it did during the Bandung era, at least there is a 'crack.' This crack could enable countries of the Global South to pursue their world building projects, collaborate with one another, and assert their sovereignty over dominant imperial power structures.

The combination of this consciousness and frustration over the genocide has driven us to gather in Cairo from the 2nd to the 4th of June, 2025, to join a people’s solidarity meeting organized by Zawya Cinema and supported by NAAS (Network of Arab Alternative Screens) and AFAC (The Arab Fund for Arts and Culture). The meeting invited artists, researchers, and film programmers to think collectively about what our ancestors once attempted to do: to build a new world. Looking back at the Afro-Asia Film Festivals may add frustration because we know that the solid ground–the Bandung era–that allowed those kinds of collective projects has vanished a long time ago. However, the aim of looking at the past is not to replicate what has occurred, but to ask whether our current practices of curating and programming can be repositioned as a critical component of global decolonization. To move beyond nostalgia, I brought the historical Afro-Asia Film Festivals and ruangrupa's curatorial praxis in documenta fifteen into dialogue. I think they speak to each other and enable us to understand world-building not only as an initiative from the past, but as an already existing practice.

Those two practices operate across both thinking and doing in order to build both the material and immaterial infrastructures of solidarity. Only by renewing and reworking our practices can we  create a critical distance from the type of decolonization adopted by established cinema spaces, museums, festivals, or biennials. This distance is where our world-building can seem like a true possibility. In the absence of such distance, we can only generate a metaphor of decolonization, one which is devoid of any tangible realization. I would like to cite the term ‘politics of refusal,’ which was mentioned during the meeting in Cairo, as an articulation of this critical distance. We intensely discussed a range of urgent politics of refusal that put protest/strike/boycott on a spectrum –as we can see them in the context of programming and film festivals– in order to transform existing festivals into sites of political visibility for the Palestinian cause and to build the alternative and political cinema ecology for those who quit the old structures. 

While building a collective structure is by all means necessary, what I think was equally important to focus on during  the meeting was the articulation of different types of ‘politics of refusal’ that are rooted in our daily artistic practices as cultural workers. Yet unfortunately, they were not highlighted in the meeting. Since there is no solid ground as in the Bandung era, the collective building project has become a lengthy process rooted in the patient work of many individuals. Therefore, it is important to look at the different individual practices of those who believe they can radically transform the world–including the art world– through their artistic interventions. The rich experience of world-building should be the starting and primary reference in any congregation or meeting aiming for excavating  alternative ways of being and living, with text and theory coming second. 

I am thinking of one of the presentations in the meeting in which the issue of restitution was explored in a radical manner. The presenter's project was about inventing the metadata for the colonial regime's photo and video archives of Palestinians. These archives have been used to dehumanize Palestinians. The proposed metadata thereby illuminates entirely different perspectives and therefore restores ownership over this archival material to the Palestinians. That kind of artistic engagement transcends mere representation for consumption in museums or festivals; instead, it addresses concrete causes and facilitates material transformation. This project embodies revolutionary potential that is as significant as any major collective building project we envision and undertake together as the people of the Global South. Yes, here, decolonization is not just a metaphor.

Bunga Siagian


Bunga Siagian is an Indonesian artist, film curator, and cultural producer. She holds an MA in cultural studies from the University of Indonesia. Her current research and practices explore Afro-Asia's political-cinematic commitments during the decolonization era of the 1950s–1970s.

Footnotes

  1. Mi You, “What Politics? What Aesthetics?: Reflections on documenta fifteen”, e-flux Journal, November, 2022, https://www.e-flux.com/journal/131/501112/what-politics-what-aesthetics-reflections-on-documenta-fifteen
  2. Lumbung is a term for the communal rice barn of Indonesian traditional society that ruangrupa used as the commoning method in documenta fifteen's curatorial framework. There are some lumbung values as basic principles, such as generosity, humor, local anchoring, independence, regeneration, transparency, and frugality. https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/glossary/
  3. Mi You, ibid.
  4. Right after the opening of documenta fifteen, an ‘anti-semitic figure’ was spotted in a massive mural, ‘People’s Justice’ (2002), by Indonesian collective Taring Padi that was placed in the public space Friedrichsplatz. The work was immediately removed, and the whole show was undermined by heavy censorship. Taring Padi offered some context for the history and creation of the work, which they said was intended to 'expose the complex power relationships' in the Cold War : https://documenta-fifteen.de/en/news/statement-by-taring-padi-on-dismantling-peoples-justice/
  5. Shiddartha Mitter, “Documenta Was A Whole Vibe. Then a Scandal Killed the Buzz,” New York Times, June 24, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/24/arts/design/documenta-review.html
  6. Amy Goodman and Denis Moynihan, “From The Warsaw Ghetto to Gaza, Starvation as a Weapon of War,” Democracy Now, July 24, 2025, https://www.democracynow.org/2025/7/24/from_the_warsaw_ghetto_to_gaza
  7. German Courts Fine Woman for ‘From The River to The Sea’ Chant”, Aljazeera, Aug 4, 2024. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/8/6/german-court-fines-woman-for-from-the-river-to-the-sea-chant
  8. Maya Pontone, “Controversy-Ridden Documenta Gets First All-Women Artistic Team,” Hyperallergic, August 9, 2025, https://hyperallergic.com/1035513/controversy-ridden-documenta-gets-first-all-women-artistic-team/
  9. Samir Amin, The Long Revolution of The Global South : Toward a New Anti-Imperialist International (Monthly Review Press, 2019), 16-18.
  10. Abdulgani, Dr. H. R, “Kriteria Pokok Bagi Dunia Film Asia-Afrika Harus Menentang Dunia Lama”, Merdeka, April 22, 1964.
  11.  “Imperialisme AS Musuh No.1: Pidato Delegasi Zanzibar”, Harian Rakyat, April 26, 1964.
  12. Ssutu Hui-min, “Revolution in the Afro-Asian Film World”, China’s Screen 4 (1964): 7, Quoted in Jessica Ka Yee Chan, Chinese Revolutionary Cinema : Propaganda, Aesthetics and Internationalism 1949-1966 (New York: I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd, 2019), 417-418.
  13. “Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting, Algiers, December 5-14,1973”, Black Camera, Vol. 2, No.1 (2010): 160.
  14. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s team, “How The World Looks from Tricontinental”, The Tricontinental, July 15, 2025, https://thetricontinental.org/dossier-tricontinental-anniversary-global-south-sovereignty/#toc-section-4




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