The main purpose of the Media and Heritage Workshops and Activities is to provide a space for and to facilitate exchanges between practitioners and grassroots communities from Ternate, North Maluku, and Surabaya. In the age of digital media, images have played a pertinent role in mediating everyday social relations and sustaining collective memories. They have the capacity to address/redress marginalized histories, contest official narratives, and envision narratives to imagine a more sustainable future. Seen this way, images and image-making practices are potent sites of creativity and political engagement. In this series of workshops and activities, we would like to centre the work of heritage, arts, and environment-related practitioners to experiment with their medium in situ and to discuss what issues and concerns, through their practices, emerged and the challenges they face. The experiences from two Indonesian urban centres, one in Java and the other one in Ternate, North Maluku, offer unique perspectives on concerns of using visual media practices that articulate contemporary issues surrounding urban and heritage activism, alongside environmental struggles.
This programme is a part of the SNF-funded research project: Images, (In)visibilities, and Work on Appearances (IMAGEAPP). Please consult our Instagram (@imageapproject) where we use the platform to document, exhibit, and interact with the work of our interlocutors, including those from this programme.
Exhibition description: The work reveals stories about the lives of spices from various events. It narrates how spice plantations became targets for mining, resulting in the lost of many spice gardens - nutmeg, cloves and cocoa (spice farmers lost their gardens) in Halmahera, North Maluku. In fact, historical traces reveal that the spice trade was a glorified period for the country that should be celebrated throughout the ages. Today, we seem to have lost our identity because of the power of the state itself. In this context, Fadriah Syuaib explores these ideas that transform into what she calls Jampujingga. Like compiling collective memories that were stuck in the cranial nerves, where one part of the fibers was trapped by colonization, Jampujingga uses symbolic parameters that Fadriah Syuaib deposits in the body through thought sensations.
Then, in her last work called Long Line, she manifests what still can be read of the city today with all its anomalies. The long line reveals a different side and sense of direction in this space: from the mountain to the sea and into from the east to the west.
.png)