Another version of this article has already been published on the Harry Burke’s website, May 14, 2019. We publish this version on the AKUMASSA’s website with the author’s permission, in the framework of “Darivisual” rubric
Kebersamaan
WE SIT AT the end of the pier. The steady ripple of the waves below us is interrupted only by the occasional scooter buzzing across the nearby Bangsal harbour. It’s dark, and the mountain and the ocean feel close. Entranced, like me, they lean forward, listening to Mintarja’s story.
Mintarja started talking after I offered him a lighter. I hadn’t joined one of the three prayer circles that had just formed. Instead, I walked to the end of the pier. I heard the muffled exchange of voices, which hushed as I got near. Hey, whispered Maria, what are you doing? Ok, sit down. And as you’re here, take photos when we blow into the trumpet.
The first time the festival was held, Mintarja tells me, summoning memories, he’d made a berugaq, a wooden structure that is like a gazebo. These are social spaces, where people talk, or sit, or wait, or smoke, or sleep. During the second festival, he’d made a gate. These structures, I began to understand, shared one principle, like the trumpet. He made a trumpet for the festival this year. Built out of bamboo and recycled two-litre water bottles, like a life-size model of a whale, it sits next to us on the pier. The trumpet makes one sound. The Quran makes one sound, which is heard everywhere. The President makes one sound. The trumpet makes one sound. Mintarja makes the sound of the trumpet. I giggle. I’m gazing at the floor, my ear near his mouth. He doesn’t talk loudly. I feel his hands as they gesticulate in the sticky night air.
During the earthquake, Mintarja sat on the ground all night with his family, holding them. His house swayed from side to side. The whole island shook, the land and everything on it. He asked himself, he says, not whether he’d have a house tomorrow, or whether he’d have money tomorrow, but whether he’d be smiling tomorrow. He didn’t know.
There are, on average, thirty-two teeth in a smile. In each smile, countless lifetimes. I listen, like you listen to the ocean, or to a friend.
The thing that these things he made shared—the berugaq, the gate, the trumpet—this was the secret of the island. You can’t tell someone the secret. But when it touches you, you might understand. That night, listening to Mintarja, I understand. Mintarja sees. He smiles.
Just then, we hear singing. A song, at first faint, drifts across the water towards us. I pick up my phone, and film. The boat bumps into the pier. The performers, dressed in white, repeating the chorus of a traditional children’s song, get out. Otty had said that a performance was being planned, but it was a secret. This is the secret, laughs Mintarja. It was happening. The performers, lighting small torches using a flame that they’d carried with them on the boat, walk slowly to the middle of the pier. Here, they meet the many local people who’d been praying. The three largest local religions, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism, had prayed, for the first time in years, together. A twelve-foot-tall torch is set ablaze; its flames eat the night sky. Mintarja and Maria blow the trumpet. I feel the force of fireworks, like cables shooting upwards, around me. One sound. The memory has the stillness of a photograph.
Afterwards is a daze. People linger, chatting and hanging out. Mintarja introduces me to his family. He’s smiling, not really talking, like he’s somewhere deeper than language. We hold the moment for each other. In the car park, Zikri shares plecing kangkung. From my mother! laughs Anggra. It is not from her mother, but from someone as caring. Sambal dances on my tongue. I pause, listening to the breathing of the wind as it rolls off the sea. I listen to my breathing, and to everything I am feeling.
Fireworks are lit behind Mintarja and Maria’s trumpet.
The three Gilis
BANGSAL HARBOUR IS the gateway to the Gili Islands. Three small island-moons that hug Lombok’s north coast, these are also accessible by boat from Bali. Every year, they draw thousands of honeymooners, backpackers, and partygoers, many of whom, like myself, are European or of European descent. Each day, tourists and workers hassle each other while waiting for the thirty-minute crossing to the Gilis. Last summer, a wave triggered by the earthquakes ripped the sand from the beach, like a mouth stripping a bone of meat. In the 1990s, tourism began to dominate the area’s economy, bringing waves of money, like tsunamis, to the harbour.
Walter Benjamin, in his essay “The Storyteller,” describes how, in a rock, “a human head or an animal’s body may appear to an observer at the proper distance and angle of vision.” Those who look can see tourism’s grin etched across the coastline.
AKUMASSA
FORUM LENTENG IS a small non-profit cultural organization based in South Jakarta. It was founded by artists and media activists, including Otty Widasari and Hafiz, in 2003. Today it counts at least ninety members. ARKIPEL, a film festival, held yearly since 2013, shows a rigorous program of documentary and experimental films to an audience of thousands. Milisifilem, the newest initiative, is a pedagogical platform that gives students the tools to deconstruct visual media, and produce images. A shared studio sprawls across the ground floor of the residential house where the most active members live and work. It is a beehive, its door open twenty-four hours a day.
Boats moored at Bangsal harbour.
In 2008, as camera phones became more accessible as consumer commodities, Forum Lenteng started AKUMASSA. This platform builds media literacy in Indonesia in the wake of the New Order. The deep-rooted censorship of Suharto’s regime, which was intellectually and socially obliterative, encouraged a nationwide divestment in critical thinking. Little has been rectified by the media monopolies that replaced state regulation in the wake of the reformarsi in 1998. Grounded in principles of decentralization and collective struggle, Akumassa develops cultural information from the perspective of working people, focussing on film, video, and digital media as tools of grassroots empowerment.
Critical pedagogy is a socially conscious education philosophy that derives from the teachings and writings of the Brazilian educator Paolo Freire. One of its fundamental ideas is that of conscientização, or conscientisation. This describes the process of understanding everyday realities from perspectives that can sustainably change the oppressive foundations of these realities. It is a practice of transformative education that centres the contributions of oppressed and working people within the social construction of knowledge.
AKUMASSA—which, like much of Forum Lenteng’s work, is, in essence, a program of critical pedagogy—has had four distinct phases.
Community Workshops, between 2008-12, built media awareness in numerous small communities across Indonesia.
From 2012-13, the Rekam Media: Community-based Media Watch Program had ten citizen researchers in ten cities read two newspapers every week for one year. Media literacy led to media critique: weekly reports were shared, and at the end of the program, a book was published.
Started in 2013, AKUMASSA Bernas gives young writers the chance to produce an essay collection. Sore Kelabu Di Selatan Singkarak, by Albert Rahman Putra, who is part of Komunitas Gubuak Kopi in Solok, West Sumatra, is the first volume published. A collection of writings on tourism is forthcoming from Muhammad Sibawaihi, a member of Pasirputih in Pemenang, Lombok Utara.
Lastly, AKUMASSA Chronicle features the production of arts projects, as attention has grown from media literacy to social organizing. Bangsal Menggawe, a festival started by Forum Lenteng with Pasirputih in Pemenang, initiates this phase. It was first held in 2016, when it was curated by Widasari along with Arief Yudi from the nonprofit Jatiwangi art Factory. This year’s festival is curated by Widasari and Sibawaihi. Its theme is Museum Dongeng, which translates to English as “Museum of Tales.”
In the garden at Pasirputih.
Storytelling
IN QUIET MOMENTS, we sit, sleep, or smoke, avoiding rain or sun. Often, I record what happens around me in my notebook or my phone, being attentive to detail. Detail is where the soul lives. Detail defies ownership. Words circulate that we’re heading to a field by the Bangsal, where we’re preparing a football field for the Bangsal Cup. Sharing hands and lungs, we pull out weeds and pick up plastics, which burn in a simmering smoke heap by one side. We also sit, pick at snacks, and watch each other. I think about how “we” is such an operative and elastic pronoun. Later we’re back in our houses or on the berugaq. I think, again, about recording details, and how all I get is these impressions.
Poem
through a doorway in lombok utara
cows and rough grasses
converse beyond artists
who doze under pandan hats
there are many ways not to write home
and this is one of them
Museum Dongeng
STORYTELLING HAS BEEN an important concept since the first Bangsal Menggawe. A catalogue, published in this festival’s wake, was entitled Eleven Stories from the Southeast. It suggests that every festival contribution can be thought of as a story.
“A story is seen by its listener or reader through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration. In every story the lens is ground anew, ground between the temporal and the timeless,” writes the art critic and novelist John Berger, evoking Benjamin’s idea of the storyteller who shifts a reader’s perspective.
Stories are subversive when they harbour non-institutionalised forms of knowledge production.
Initially delaying the festival by some months, last summer’s earthquakes, which caused significant damage and deaths, as well as much trauma, prompt a revised format. Instead of artists receiving a budget to come and produce artworks, it is seen as better for artists to donate time and labour to a collaboratively-produced, no-budget festival, with the goal of helping Pemenang rebuild. Pasirputih offers volunteers a month of free accommodation and food leading up the daylong festival on March 2nd. During this period, a schedule of community-focused activities is collectively conceptualised and realised.
Football has been adored for generations in Pemenang. A field, named Guntur Muda Square, was built, and inter-village matches organised. Fights led to this practice lapsing.
The first Bangsal Menggawe revived the football tournament—it was held, then, on the beach, a luxury not offered by the narrower strip of sand there now. A new field is made nearby. For the first time, this year’s tournament is for under-13s. On February 10th, the opening match pits Akas A, a team from Karang Subagan, Pasirputih’s district, against Manyungsang. Akas A make it to the final on March 2nd, but lose a tense, goalless encounter on penalties. First prize, a goat, goes to Karla, a team from the neighbouring Karang Langu. Announcements are made and photos taken, and a convoy of bikes trails the winning team back to their village, honking and cheering under the vertical sun. For those who remain, there is heartache and tears.
This story is a container for many stories.
Rudat is a traditional dance that is local to Lombok. The dance is accompanied by music. Dancers often sing. Many of its movements, which are performed by groups of around ten people, derive from silat, a martial art that is indigenous to Southeast Asia, though rudat’s emphasis is on beauty, not aggression. Hands chop, and bodies bend down and spring up. The dance retains little of the speed of silat, but much of its balance and grace.
A video, showing a routine choreographed by Zakaria, the local rudat maestro, is made in order to teach the dance to classes of school children. A huge crowd—perhaps everyone in Pemenang—gathers on the beach not long after dawn on the morning of Bangsal Menggawe. Columns of children, in their colourful school uniforms, are orbited by parents and other adults. Together, hundreds of people dance, led by the example of Menggawe organisers at the head of each class. It is like a huge and ancient K-pop ritual. The youngest children get bored and droop into the sand, where they play. Onlookers drink Lombok coffee while watching, and nod or sway along to the blast of the PA.
That evening, groups of Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus form praying circles by the water of the Bangsal harbour. Weeks of meetings have de-escalated religious tensions to the point where this is possible. The head of the regency makes sure not miss the opportunity to be photographed with the three religious leaders after they together light the torch on the pier. Menakil, an ancient tradition of eating together in which everyone contributes their own food, happens afterwards.
Reviving a principle of democratic exchange, I note down that evening. Peace. Kebersamaan. Stability, after the tremors and shakes. These are the words in the air.
Stories nourish. Widasari’s curatorial text poetically acknowledges this: “These stories helped us to survive during thirst and hunger when the low tide dried up the hot sand.” A festival of small, often unwitnessed acts that are threaded through Pemenang for one month of collectivised work and dreaming, Bangsal Menggawe: “Museum Dongeng” germinates modest interventions that are springboards for epistemic movements. Stories nourish, but they are seeds, not foods. Heal the soil, and things grow.
Preparing the football field for the Bangsal Cup.
Artists as organizers
PASIRPUTIH, WHICH DEVELOPED out of Forum Lenteng’s AKUMASSA program, formed in the first month of 2010.
Its members, before taking part in the media literacy workshops, had been teachers, students, and scouts. Though they didn’t train as artists, the group’s activities increasingly resembled art—Bangsal Menggawe framed these activities into a city-wide celebration. It revitalised the Bangsal harbour—historically, a cultural centre of Pemenang—as a site of gathering. Locals believe that the Bangsal water, Siba and Gozali together told me, is medicine.
After the earthquakes, Pasirputih moved to a new plot of land on the edge of Pemenang. Its architecture mirrors its decentralised character. A cluster of wooden structures surrounds a central fire pit, meaning that you spend time outside as you navigate between the kitchen, the toilet, the berugaq, and the small shelter in which you can sleep or work. There are beds of vegetables and herbs, which Ipeh plans to expand. Pasirputih don’t consider their work to be art or activism, Siba often reminds me, as these words aren’t in the vocabulary of most people in Pemenang.
MTL, a New York-based collective behind initiatives such as G.U.L.F. and Decolonize This Place, have asserted that, “As MTL Collective, we are engaged in a practice in which the artist’s work does not add only an artistic flair to this or that campaign, but rather contributes research and organizing, aesthetics and action, theory and debriefing and analysis—this entire dialectical process is the art practice. Today, the artist is an organizer, recognizes capitalism has always been hostile to human and non-human life, and understands that people fight where they are.”
The impacts of tourism in Pemenang is indicative of a wider process in which Indonesia, like many places, is being brutally reconfigured by neoliberal capitalism. This consolidates wealth and power in cities, gentrifying urban neighborhoods while systematically depriving rural areas. Raquel Rolnik details this process vividly, describing how, “Within the contractual language of finance, territorial ties are reduced to the unidimensionality of their economic value and to the expectations of future revenue streams . . . the expansion of the boundaries of land and housing financialisation goes hand in hand with the increased fragility of other forms of ties to the land, generating a machinery of dispossession.” The fatal resonances of the earthquakes in Lombok are an expression of this machinery, as are the luxury waterfront real estate developments displacing low-income communities along the north coast of Jakarta.
The fruit of a nearly decade-long collaboration between Forum Lenteng and Pasirputih, Bangsal Menggawe rehabilitates traditional values of community empowerment in the wake of the debilitating impact of tourism and financialisation. The notion of the artist as an organizer is provocative, in this context, because it requires a commitment to de-institutionalisation, in which even the category of the artist is, to a certain extent, disidentified with. This does not negate the possibility of art, but foregrounds the empathetic struggle of recognition, relation, and reciprocation, in a movement beyond the delimited and conventionally valorised work of representation.
Fred Moten, in conversation with Stefano Harney in The Undercommons, declares—and this is just an endnote to this text—in an exquisite evocation of revolutionary love: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too, however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know?”
Poem
around the fire at night
mosquitoes bite
thumbs thumble phones
soon
Imran will bring tempeh chips
and much laughter
we do not know this
Karla win the Bangsal Cup in a penalty shootout.
Pemenang on a cloudy day from the end of the Bangsal pier.
Herbs growing at Pasirputih.
Preparing food for sale at the Bangsal on the morning of Bangsal Menggawe: Museum Dongeng.
Religious and political leaders post for photographs with festival organisers on the Bangsal pier.
