It’s been a while since I’ve logged anything in and I’m sorry about that. The last time I was in the live archive I left it with a few cliff hangers. I had some exciting ideas for small essays which are still listed on the main page and probably published in the next few months. These days I didn’t have it in me to write it. As in time and energy so I took an elongated pause, two months to be exact. I have to confess, as a baby researcher like myself, I’ve been afraid to write and publish raw text. As a result, the process itself slowed down and the project became afloat. When the work depends on a firm sense of direction and I’m at a point where I don’t know how to continue, I incubate. It looks like, me, staying at home with my dog, watching the trashiest shows, and going out with friends which sometimes results in a silent arisal of guilt as the work load looms over me. These are moments where suddenly the word “impossible” seem so... well, possible. But I feel that I’m stepping out of incubation mode now. Deadlines are creeping towards me in a helpful and goblin-like manner, we finally got a ceasefire (obviously to have a close eye on) and I’ve started a new study which has injected this process with adrenaline and inspiration. It’s strange actually, the day we we got the news of the ceasefire. We were having dinner surrounded by classmates. Someone showed me their phone and on her screen it said in big words “Gaza Ceasefire Deal...” I remember not even flinching and responding “Check the news source, they’re not always reliable.” It didn’t hit me, you know? Anyhow, in this letter I share with you some of my reflections, a confrontation and a hope to circle around more of these types of conversations.
In 2024, somewhere in October or September, I went to see my dad at a concert. He was the composer, he mostly writes music now among other things. On stage there were several indigenous muscians/maestros from different parts of Java, Sumatra, Bali and Sulawesi, each playing a different instrument. My favourite are the Betawi brothers, each playing a small hand drum. The sounds interlock in a rhythymic sensiblity that felt stumbling to me at first but align in an intricate manner when you, as listener, lock in ( I often feel the sensation of a ‘click’ when I’m in it). They aren’t really brothers but their kinship is pretty undeniable like three drums in a pod. At the end of the concert the band started to play some new pieces that were infused with jazz. I had never heard the musicians (who I’ve known since I was 15 years old) or my dad create music like this. I cringed in my seat, it was pretty bad. Now these are things that I’ve told my dad, which sucked because he’s a HUGE jazz lover. We grew up with the classics in the house, Miles Davis mainly. Jazz was something I hated as a kid. To me, it was this never ending noise in the house. It receded more to the background when I got older but now it’s come forward as one of the only things I listen to now. I spoke to my dad about “the jazz” in the last two songs, I told him the composition and playing lacked a certain depth. Undeafeated by my comments, he’s going to keep trying and maybe work with a jazz musican. My dad is highly intuitive when it comes to indigenous, cememonial and historical music throughout the Indonesian archipelago. It’s a rhythym, which you can tell, courses through his way of being. But with the jazz, he really did not embody that rhythym... this is what I’ve summarised it as. It’s like a lore I know, someone who is so technically trained in a particular genre of music, whose dedicated their life to it and practices everyday but when they play it misses it doesn’t really move you. It’s almost like a lack of perspective you wield and create from. It’s a sensibility. Maybe it’s magic, maybe it’s phenomona or maybe we could propose to wonder about the methods we use to create by asking ourselves: “How can we be more critical in contemporarizing or hybridizing existing cultural and historical practices?”. Sometimes questions like these may halt creative processes altogether, in fact, that’s exactly what happened here with me in this archive of thoughts.
A side note before beginning the next paragraph, this event was quite some months ago so I am recalling as I write. The particulars have escaped my memory so some details will be absent.
This question arose after an event in the fall of 2024 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. A three-day symposium about decolonization, history and architecture from Indonesian and Dutch-Indonesian diaspora artists and researchers. You can already read that events like these are the tools to build bridges between niche discourses. There was a noticeable contrast between the research of the Indonesian artists’ and the different artistic intitiatives occuring in the Netherlands (& Australia?) that work with Dutch diaspora and Indonesian artists. The Indonesian researchers looked at preservation, intervention and reusing buildings in Java(?) or Sumatra(?), these buildings we built during Dutch colonization. There was another intitiative in the Netherlands that worked with Indonesian diaspora artists who organize mural paintings, focusing on visibility of migrative narrative and representation. And last I remember, a Dutch/Australian(?) initiative that worked with Indonesia, mainly navigating from illustrations drawn by a Dutch architect and his drawings of lumbungs and Balinese housing etc. On the second day there was a presentation from a Dutch-Moluccan artist. He was in the Rijksacademie in 2023 and at that time creating new works for Stedelijk Museum. I felt that his work really spoke from that home-life perspective, you know? It expressed an almost ethnographic compilation of domestic-esque objects from his grandparents and other family members which he would lay on pieces of long canvas and spray with photo emulsion liquid. The results were the missing objects outlined on the canvas. I think this style of work is very relfective of a diaspora context, he continued to tell us stories about how he recently visited his extended family in Indonesia (in Ambon if I remember correctly). During the Q & A, someone asked a question that made me feel that squirmish feeling. A young Dutch-Indonesian man in the audience raised his hand and told us he only had a comment “Maybe you should open an art museum for the villagers, they probably have never seen anything like this.” I CRINGED so deeply inside. He spoke as if it were an untouchable comment. The artist laughed it off and very kindly said, “I don’t think they need a museum.” I continued to recoil in my seat.
Hm, it’s just a question. Why get so worked up?
It’s actually more than a question though.
Does it seem like he is talking about the people in a certain way?
No, not really. He is more referring to making the village a nicer place for them.
So are we assuming this village is not a nice place?
Maybe because Indonesia is a poor country right?
If Indonesia is a poor country, will an art museum help the people’s economic situation?
I guess not, but maybe it could create jobs and people will have some culture to experience.
Ah okay, so there is not really any culture in Ambon?
I’m sure there is culture, but not really like this.
P.S. Ambon is a city, not a village <3
I wish I could be more gracious, just like that artist, just like many people aroundme who overcome interpersonal tensions to hold these conversations or move along. Instead, I needed to
abruptly leave after that comment and I made sure I caused a little ruckus as I walked out. Then I need to write about it. Frankly, I don’t want to continue watching conversations like this unfold. I can’t avoid it though it’s everywhere. Even the other day at IFFR after watching Garin Nugroho’s new film “Nanyi Sunyi Dalam Rantang” during the Q & A an audience member was so fixated on why the lead character of Puspa, played by Della Dartyan, was so... “Chinese looking”. Why am I having these experiences with Q & As?
We have a tendency to get in this kind of position, although we’ve never been to a certain place and we don’t know much about it or it’s history, we conlcude a pretty righteous depiction of the people and their condition, the land and what it needs. The notion of opening an art museum seems to be where the realm of possibility stops in this corner of the world. What kind of ideology are we sitting on where it leads us to believe this? I felt reminiscences of that complex in my own process, in my proximity to particular histories and materials I was working with. It makes me feel a lot of shame, sadness, dumbfounded, angry. It was a recognition moment for me, well it wasn’t so much a moment but weeks of deep contemplation and creative paralysis. I talk a lot about unexpected complicity, where I see it,
What does it actually take to actually create bridges between discourses? I can only turn to my peers, friends and family for this. It’s an inter-generational question.
So I’m going through a process of kindly interrogating my position and creating from a point of honesty. I want to wonder again about the components of my perspective, what the work serves. A big part of this turn is honestly because I entered a masters program where the resources are abundant. I picked up books I would have never thought of reading and that began to reopen worlds. To be clear, I am not commending the university than reaffirming a reality that a lot of us already know -- to be be able to tap into these resources you need money and an expected level of consistent mental stability they call ‘”drive”. The Netherlands has instated a new policy on non-EU students, an additional 12,000 euros on top of the school tution of 12,250 euros. The initial 12,000 euros is money you will get back, it only acts as a guarantee. As in a guarantee that you as a non-EU migrant will not be a burden or welfare nusiance to the Dutch economy. This is basically what it is, if this policy was in act during 2016 when I first came to the Netherlands then I would not be here. How are we suppose to bridge our realities when this country continues to close in on immigration? Why do we keep thinking the art world will save us from this?
I have a growing repetoire of free books from my study that I am happy to give access to.
Email me at arundhati.studio@gmail.com to request access.
Reading:
Red Africa - Kevin Ochieng Okoth
Recognizing the stranger: On Palestine Narratives
Articles:
https://dilardirik.substack.com/p/a-self-critique
https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/
We have a tendency to get in this kind of position, although we’ve never been to a certain place and we don’t know much about it or it’s history, we conlcude a pretty righteous depiction of the people and their condition, the land and what it needs. The notion of opening an art museum seems to be where the realm of possibility stops in this corner of the world. What kind of ideology are we sitting on where it leads us to believe this? I felt reminiscences of that complex in my own process, in my proximity to particular histories and materials I was working with. It makes me feel a lot of shame, sadness, dumbfounded, angry. It was a recognition moment for me, well it wasn’t so much a moment but weeks of deep contemplation and creative paralysis. I talk a lot about unexpected complicity, where I see it,
What does it actually take to actually create bridges between discourses? I can only turn to my peers, friends and family for this. It’s an inter-generational question.
So I’m going through a process of kindly interrogating my position and creating from a point of honesty. I want to wonder again about the components of my perspective, what the work serves. A big part of this turn is honestly because I entered a masters program where the resources are abundant. I picked up books I would have never thought of reading and that began to reopen worlds. To be clear, I am not commending the university than reaffirming a reality that a lot of us already know -- to be be able to tap into these resources you need money and an expected level of consistent mental stability they call ‘”drive”. The Netherlands has instated a new policy on non-EU students, an additional 12,000 euros on top of the school tution of 12,250 euros. The initial 12,000 euros is money you will get back, it only acts as a guarantee. As in a guarantee that you as a non-EU migrant will not be a burden or welfare nusiance to the Dutch economy. This is basically what it is, if this policy was in act during 2016 when I first came to the Netherlands then I would not be here. How are we suppose to bridge our realities when this country continues to close in on immigration? Why do we keep thinking the art world will save us from this?
I have a growing repetoire of free books from my study that I am happy to give access to.
Email me at arundhati.studio@gmail.com to request access.
Reading:
Red Africa - Kevin Ochieng Okoth
Recognizing the stranger: On Palestine Narratives
Articles:
https://dilardirik.substack.com/p/a-self-critique
https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/
Image 1 - Iphone photo of my sketchbook drawing