with eyes closed
a
sea knows the mangroves are calling
they’ve always been calling
we sweat like the dirt sweats
like the bright red clay sweats
feeding roots and getting fed
and healthy vines wrap round me
my mother’s sarong
in the cool warmth and dark
they show me pictures
of a place, running with blood
my blood, her blood, their blood
How Might We?
The research process is beginning to take it’s own form, of it’s own will and vision. Of course, I warily remain the main research/narrator in conducting this work but there is always the sensation that I am always being led.
Each month I have a session with two trusted advisors, Sessi and Moonray. I’ve also been having open conversations with friends, family and fellow researchers about this process, leading to reccommended readings and wild google chases at the height of caffiene frenzies. I’ve interviewed several people at this moment, a HUGE eye opener towards the direction of the storymaking and really getting a grasp from different perspectives on the dilemmas of fixed cultural narratives, overpopular Western discourses and suppression, and feeling the sense of nonlinear time throughout this discussions.
It’s funny... in school you learn to follow a process. You plan the steps and follow-through with changes and adjustments along the way. It’s the same for application writing, which at this point seems to be my go to. You are taught to plan the process, anticipate goals, outcomes and challenges but it never turns out the way you expected. I would argue that funding application give a feeling of solidifying the process, solidifying the plan.
I’m currently at a crossroad where my intuition tells me to follow the doors that have unexpectedly open which would mean to derail the schedule and planning I applied to this honourable grant for. Or stick to the process, stick to the plan. There is also a social-ethical reasoning to follow my intuition, a perspective is starting to form... something is revealing itself that feels like a matter of utmost importance.
It was my my initial planning to draw stories from each interview and recreate a poetic, surrealistic imaginative tale from the information. But as I interview each person, diaspora and homelander, I am seeing strong patterns of relations and shared ways of being that to draw the “border” of the story in relation to individual would sever the tie... the very thing I am trying to reconstruct or connect through storytelling and puppetry.
I feel stunted and tied, bonded by an old plan that no longer serves me, the interviewees and the legacy I want to contribute to.
So howmight we navigate this process?
How might we create a story that encapsulates dilemmas and seemingly contraditcing concepts from different indviduals?
How might we create a work that gives access to these stories but also protects the storytellers of these tales?
How might we unsettle the essentialist categories that are tied to “Indonesianess”... The forieign, the Indigenous, The internal/external?
How might we engage with intergenerational perspectives through these endeavors?
How might we confront the dilemmas with modernity, coloniality and globalism through these narratives?
What are people rethinking as important to carry over time?
Image 1 - Scan / Photo taken in 2020 of mangroves in Banyuwangi