From place to cosmos
And unminded time
There couldn’t be any more to bring
But things that have already been given
Not held, but said or remembered.
Part 1: Why this project?
It’s hard to be vulnerable, a theme that continues to pop up. This project comes from a vulnerable place. I go back and forth about what stories I should tell to give more context, but it seems inevitable that the sad, intimate, and mundane things will follow in their own pace.
First, I share with you why I’ve started this project.
Who am I?
In 1996, my family flew from Jakarta, Indonesia by plane to the United States. This was also towards the end of Suharto’s Regime (1998). My dad recieved a scholarship to complete his Master's in Ethnomusicology at the University of Madison, Wisconsin during this time mainly living in small towns around the state. After he graduated, we moved around to Canada and Singapore following different job trails until my parents decided it was time to move back to Jakarta. I was 12 years oldby this time. At 14, I went to an international high school in Bali. It was difficult for me to fit with the student body at my National Plus school, in fact it was quite lonely. Then in 2016 I moved to the Netherlands for art academy.
(National Plus schools are local curriculums that also include English speaking subjects.)
A lot of my professional/artistic work is based on my upbringing. I define myself as Indonesian diaspora because my family emigrated in the rise of globalism. I relate my diaspora to a larger transnational context and throughout this research will closely examine the intersections to the historically recognized Indo-repatriation in the mid 20th century (1945-67), and the ripple effecst of colonization and coloniality in the intimate lives of this diaspora and Indonesian homeland natives. I will examine these intersections with individuals through an formal/informal interviewing process, tracing subjectivity and personal impact in this work.
(My use of homeland natives refer to Indonesian people who were born and raised in Indonesia. The term is not necessarily informed by any theory or textbook, but is more me in searching for words to describe the connections and difference between groups of people.)
Through this project I am connecting with other Indo-European and Moluccan diaspora, and Indonesian people living in Java and Bali. Some are my age and were born in the West with immigrant parents. Some have moved out of Indonesia as they grew up. Some families refuged a long long time ago. All of us migrated and embody an Indo(ness) inherited from our guardians, ancestry, memory, movement and trauma. It is also a -ness supressed in history by different -isms. This first series in no way represents a majority of culture, identity or narrative. It is my journey to unsettle my own frameworks that have been constructed by living abroad for eight years, from being trained in a Dutch art academy, and for the purpose to reconnect and share practices.
(It is important to note that ‘Indo’ derives from a colonial term used to classify mixed individuals of Indonesian and European descent during the Dutch East Indies, post-repatriation and post-liberation. I also heard that it can be an offensive term for some. Nowadays in Indonesia, this term is commonly used to refer to an Indonesian person, although it still may be used to refer to mixed race. I was confused by this when I first moved to Rotterdam since I am more familiar with terms such as ‘anak campur’, literally translating to mixed kid from Bahasa Indonesia. Here, I attribute to the term ‘Indoness’, a sense of self related to ancestral and inherited connection.)
When I look at my upbringing, there are many memories that this history skews. I can no longer ask for clarity because family members have passed away, estranged, or no one has any recollection. I’ve found closure through closeness, in the form of conversation and with channels of people whose links were also destroyed by violent histories.
My focus for what I am currently calling, “The Wayang Mimpi Series”, (Shadow Puppetry of Dreams; Bahasa Indonesia) is to gather a collection of stories from Indonesian and Moluccan diaspora, and Indonesian people from old and contemporary generations. With the departure from Wayang Kulit (Javanese shadow puppetry), the endeavour is to transform the traditional figure, the form and story it is presented in, and create more images and representations based on sensation and feeling.
This work is interested to explore ways to transmute the context and symbolism of the wayang craft and to create a folk art form that names the impact of colonialism, imperialism and late capitalism. Most importantly, the individuals impact over time. There is so much left over that is embedded within the psychological and subconcious, reminent and foundational affects of white supremicist structures.
How can we construct a liminal Indonesia, from islands and overseas, to retell stories about our trials and wishes? What tools are made and inherited to cope, resist, preserve, and endure a shared past? What tools can we create when the inherited connection is severed? In this project, storytelling is one of these resilient tools to explore narrative and subjectivity surrounding these themes.
I met a magical person who said to me, “The destruction that colonialism succeeded with was in erasing the connections to relational worlds.”
I wonder how this ancient network can be reawakened.
I wonder if we can call it kin.
Maybe
magic,
could be,
should be,
must be somewhere,
real.
Although I should be preparing questions for an interview process that is meant to start now, I find myself and my attention dilly-dallying to other processes like city foraging and paper-making. There’s a lot of pressure and worry with conducting research, it’s a big word to me. I often go into paralysis mode when I don’t have enough information about how to move forward and it looks like days spent in my bed, staring at the wall.
Luckily, I spent those day in moving smells than stagnant thought. Mainly sniffing gaseous fumes from bacteria at the Papierlab Rotterdam with Marieke de Hoop. I’ll speak more about these adventures in the next entry!
In refocusing on the methodical elements of the research, I look back to an online session with advisors, Sessi and Moonray. They helped me come to an important understanding. I share some insights below which are particular to my project but maybe helpful for others doing personal research.
1) Make sure that the selection of the interviewees is diverse. If selection is very closely categorized than it speaks of the experiences of one generation and is exclusive to these narratives rather than inclusive of the experience of diaspora.
- This was my first criticism on my first selection, as I asked mainly friends. Although there is a love and poeticism that comes with interviewing friends, bringing in intergenerational perspectives, even if they are conflicting, gives a larger range of the social texture over time. It also pushes you out a certain comfort zone which is important when considering this type of work. Only then, are we doing and thinking inclusively.
2) There is a social, historical and political conflict between the Moluccan narratives and the tradition of Wayang, a Javanese art form. The historical conflict lies within the ways that Javanese Imperialism is implicated in Moluccan history. The severity of violence is famously minimized, absent and denied.
- Rather than sticking to the foundations of wayang, I will depart from it and see how each individual interview process deconstructs the craft, context, and practice. I think this could give each storyteller space to decide the proximity of their stories to colonialism and imperialism.
3) Be careful of the colonial gaze and framework that is internally possessed.
- Moonray reminded me that I’ve been operating and practicing within a Western European context for the past 7 years. I need to question how my observations, education, and thinking is influenced by this. We can frame it as: What parts of me adopt a Western and insitutional gaze? What and how am I, this project and the collaborators effected by this? Where do my ideas of postcolonial and decolonial come from? How does this inform my interest or motivation to rework concepts on Javanese traditional craft? How does my proximity to these cultures in the past decade effect this? I think these are vital questions to ask, especially when we continue to practice and perform in white structures, systems and institutions, while also participating in global circuits of anti-colonial knowledge. Remembering one’s positionality and privileges always.
I can begin to follow these questions with continually asking at each stage: Who you are responsible to and does it it serve them?
4) A good departure point is to research my personal desires for initiating the project. Understanding this can help open or set the tone of the interviews and guide the process.
Here are a few things I’ve been reading to help prepare for the fieldwork and inform more about the context I’m entering:
- Queer/Migration: An Unruly Body of Scholarship by Eithne Luibhéid
- Transnational Circuits of Queer Knowledge In Indonesia by Evelyn Blackwood
- Doing Sensory Ethnography by Sara Pink (Chapters 2 & 4)
- Postmemory by Marianne Hirsch
- Theatrical Speech Acts: Performaing Language (Part 1: Doing things with words: Indonesian Paralanguage and Performance by Hypatia Vourloumis
Credit:
Image1: Wayang Png from internet
Image2: Passport photo
Video 1: Milling old paper
Image3: Screen shot of an old poem