*They say if you have ADHD then double your planning time by 2 or 3. If you had planned to clean the house in 2 hours, give yourself more space. Multiply that by 2 and give yourself 4 hours to clean.
Where are we now?
At this point of the Wayang Mimpi project, we are deep in the belly of the story-making process. To reel us back into the ‘Why?’ of this project, I set off to create tales about the Indonesian and Moluccan diaspora and homelanders. Through using the medium of shadow puppetry, I hypothesized that it would be possible to unfix global and cultural narratives surrounding ‘Indonesianness’. Through practices and tellings of resistance and preservation in the day-to-day lives of native and diaspora Indonesian and Moluccans I hoped to unravel a kalediscopic way to understand these histories and presents’ through the external and internal eye (to which I consider myself in possessing both).
In conducting the story-making I interviewed several individuals to investigate what stories we want to preserve and why they are important to us. I was quite paralysed in trying to due diligence to this process, I had never interviewed anyone under this kind of professional circumstance nor had I ever facilitated research that was this important to me. So like a first-timer I spent many days hidden under the bed-sheets, watching Law & Order while pushing through the myriad of responsibilities, assignments and self sabotage.
Over hotpot a girlfriend of mine asked me, “Why are you so hooked on Law & Order?”. I confessed that it was the only place as of that moment where the predictable and formulaic storylines of each episode were calming. To add, in a weird dystopic phenomological way, it was sort of the only space at the time I could find an easy sense of digestible justice. Especially, positioned next to the ongoing Palestinian genocide and the consistent vetoeing of ceasefire from the typical warlords of our times. I felt really powerless.
Teach Me Something
You’ve Been Taught
Keywords & Wishes: Embodied practices, Resistance, Ancestrality, Preservation, Connection, Kinship, Remembering, A collective memory bank of an ancestrality
Preparation
1. Write an uninterrupted list of questions that may not flow.
Example:
How do you remember your family members resisting?
What were they resisting?
What did it feel like?
What was the consequence of this resistance?
What is this ancestrality?
What are the collective experiences of this ancestrality?
What have they confronted, overcome and resisted?
What do you resist on a day to day?
Where do you think it comes from (this thing thing that your resist)?
2. The interview can be focused on learning something new as an interviewer. “What could you share with me that you’ve learned from someone else?” A practical skill, a story, a dance routine, a care routine, a joke, a recipe... Ask your interviewee and give them some time to thinnk about what they’d like to teach. Also if you need to help orchestrate the right conditions for these teachings.
The Interview
1. Starting Point: Sharing the reason why
I’ve started this project because.....
2. Warm-ups (optional)
I do this to with the interviewee to shake off any nerves or just to dip our toes into the situation.
Example: Close your eyes. Bring yourself to a certian moment of your past. Bring yourself back to this body. Visualize yourself, have you gotten smaller? Have you gotten bigger? Is your hair longer or shorter? Feel these sensations and ask:
What do you smell?
What do you hear?
What can you see? Colours? Form?
What temperature do you feel?
The exercise above is something both interviewer and interviewee can facilitate with each other.
3. The Questions: This interview approach is biographical while also giving room to the unseen or unpredictable happenings. You might ask how one might create the conditions for these unpredicatble moments, how to let the interview breathe. In my particular approach the questions covered were about:
Background (I want to learn about the different colours, temperature, and textures of their upbring, surroundings, the people around them) Who are you? hat do you know about your family history? Where in your family lineage did they move away from Indonesia? How can we describe this upbringing? How would you describe your family members? How would you define inheritance?
What have you inherited? Are there important ideas, beliefs, and teachings your family held? Are there important practices your family held?
Context (I want to learn about their positionality and how they feel, observe themselves being represented by external entities and by themselves) What were the Dutch-Indonesian/Moluccan narratives you grew up with?
Who were they informed by? Were there any narratives you felt were true?
Exaggerate? False? If so, what was missing in these narratives? Did your family ever tell you stories or memories? What topics are you interested in?
Future Action (How do they want to be represented? Is there something we miss in these conversations or global discussions?) What observations or perspectives do you think need to be included in the current discourse?
The Last Question to each interviewee: What story do you want to tell?
While I was doing the interviews, I started archiving family photos. This was long overdue since I had brought this first collection of photos in March 2023. I finally bought a second hand scanner. The picture I am sharing with you below are photos from my parents’ youth in the 80s to 90s. Many of them were stored in ziplock bags and in decaying condition.
Image 1 - Scan / Ziploc bag full of photos
Image 2 - Scan / Dad at Borobudur
Image 3 - Scan / Mom at Borobudur
Image 4 - Scan / Friends with guitar
Image 5 - Scan / Mom & Friend
Imgae 6 - Scan / Mom with friends
Image 7 - Scan / Big group photo