An unusual winter unfurled. Had it been an arrival or an illusion —we may not have known the difference. I was desperate to begin connecting with other writers, and late one evening discovered an author whose work I’d yet to come across, the humble and brilliant Wulan Dirgantoro. I wrote an email to a one Lucia Dove at Amsterdam Press, inquiring about how I might get in touch with Wulan. Usually I would plan these things out; sit on the idea for a few days. For some reason though, I felt this immediacy to reach out to Lucia, bluntly stating that Wulan was on my mind. I had to talk to her. Lucia got back to me with a contact email, and at first I was nervous, being that the woman on the other end (if she indeed agreed to come aboard) was someone who I’d quickly come to admire for her body of work.
Wulan was warm and responsive to my invitation, and we scheduled a phone interview. Although over the course of the 6 months that would follow, we continued our dialogue through email. It is my honor to introduce you to one of my absolute favorite nonfiction writers —how fortunate we are to have Ms Dirgantoro join us for a conversation.
GINA JELINSKI: Tell us about your day so far, Wulan. And, if you don't mind, we'd like to know a little bit about what you've been working on over the last few weeks.
WULAN DIRGANTORO: Hi Gina, I'm writing this from Naarm/Melbourne, the land of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation in Australia. This morning started with a dawn chorus from Pied currawongs and Kookaburras, and I can now hear a flock of Yellow-tailed Black cockatoos making their contact calls as they fly among the tall Eucalypt trees. Listening to bird calls and watching them foraging for their breakfast always reminds me of the power of nature as a provider and as a healer.
I've been doing a lot of catch-ups in the last few weeks. I just finished an essay on IGAK Murniasih, a Balinese painter who passed away in 2006, for her upcoming exhibition in Singapore. I was deeply immersed in her vivid imagination and technicolour paintings for several months already, so a walk outside on the local nature reserve is always reinvigorating for me.
GJ: In 2019 you wrote an essay for Emotion, Space and Society volume 31, which navigates gendered identity affected by first (and sometimes second) generation migrants —while highlighting transnational mother-daughter intimacies. You had written, "we consider how independently mobile young women navigate the emotional and geographic distances in their intimate relationships with their mothers, both within and beyond their artistic works." I find this to be a conversation that should be discussed on a more public level - and often wonder why these topics seem to be ‘mysteries’ outside of the academics. What are your thoughts?
WD: I’m actually only one of the three authors, of that particular piece; Monika Winarnita and Raelene Wilding are my other co-authors. Monika and Raelene have been working together for a while about the experiences of female migrants in Australia. They invited me along because many migrant women in their study used art to express themselves, particularly the sense of loss, longing, and building a connection with their new homeland. As a first-generation migrant in Australia, I can really relate to their stories.
As artists, the women we engage in our study already asserted their independence from the status quo and dutiful daughter trope common to many Asian/Southeast Asian migrant women. Creative professions are not valued particularly high in their home countries (Indonesia and the Philippines), but they prioritized their passion above the demands of their other identities. We found out that the dynamic emotional landscapes in their mother-daughter relations are quite diverse, from collaborative relationships with mothers who are perceived as close and supportive to more ambivalent and strained relationships that are nevertheless perceived as intimate. That is, they were close (but also) not close.
GJ: In one of our previous emails, you had mentioned you wanted to have a speculative conversation on how plant matter communicates changes to their environment; relating to how human remains plays an essential role in these situations. I am very curious of your findings here, as I believe plant life plays a crucial role in our development -yet we still have come to arrive so incredibly far from where we should be, concerning our relationship to nature. Our impact has become a tragedy.
WD: Absolutely, it is sad that we take plant life for granted. Maybe because modern humans tend to see them as inanimate, we do not have the same connection as we'd have with other animate beings. Plants gave us so much more than just nutrition or shelter. One of the things that they do is, of course, as a fantastic database of information: they tell us about the soil, the water, the weather, the animals that come to visit them and so on. They also mark a place and time.
In my research about the impact of historical violence in aesthetic practices, I came across plenty of first account testimonies from witnesses, survivors, and perpetrators. I was struck by how many times they mentioned trees as markers for mass graves or as witnesses. Artists, of course, have explored this information and often use trees or landscape as a metaphor for memory and trauma. More commonly, nature is perceived as a source of solace and as a secret archive. On the latter, I'm beginning to think about the materiality of this archive, what can we find out from the trees about what is hidden deep inside the soil. To present the history of humans from the perspective of trees if you like.
GJ: I would love to talk more again on this subject, especially the idea of nature being “a secret archive”. The Senecio crassisimus is a plant that I sing to at night. I feel a unique sort of energy when we interact. Sacred encounters. I met this one water botanist recently, and he was telling me about the Acmella oleracea (the buzz button), and how it tastes like electricity!
WD: I had a similar experience earlier this year. My family and I went for a hike at Gippsland on the East coast. We were looking for a Cabbage Tree Palms Walk track to find the Cabbage fan tree palms (Livistona australis). This track is the southernmost range of this rare palm; normally, you'd only see them in Queensland or New South Wales. The track is short, but it is unbelievably beautiful; the palms that dotted around the path have this energy that, until today, I also can't shake the feeling from being around them. Eucalyptus has the same effect on me. I have Yellow gum (Eucalyptus leucoxylon) and Red-flowering gum (Corymbia ficifolia) in my garden. Every day I look at them in wonder and thinking, is it possible to feel such a deep connection to a tree when you're not from the land?
My family and I built a wildlife garden from scratch starting in 2019; we gave away the rose bushes, the agapanthuses, the lilies - all the non-native plants - and we planted native and endemic species as much as possible. Our idea is to make the garden attractive to native birds and wildlife, from nectar-feeders to seed-eaters, and provide some protection for the small birds. We're aware that our garden is tiny and can't provide support for all wildlife, so we talked to our neighbours to share the load, so to speak. There's now shelter, food, and water for all size of birds and wildlife between the three houses!
GJ: Tell us about your childhood.
WD: I grew up in Tasikmalaya, at the time was a small town in West Java, where my parents' house was bordered by a small stretch of forest and paddy fields. My parents used to keep geese, dogs and cats and those geese used to terrorize me. My parents kept them because our house was built just on the edge of the forest. Cobras were regular guests during the rainy season, so the geese were supposed to deter them. I roamed around the paddy fields and climbing kersen (Muntingia calubra) trees around the air force base nearby with my friends. I lost that connection with nature after we moved to Bandung, the third biggest city in Java. We played on the street instead.
Growing up in an environment surrounded by civil servants, I knew quite early what I didn't want to be. Much to my parent's dismay, I went to an art school! I had a great time, and around 1999, after the collapse of the authoritarian regime, I began to develop more interest in the intersection between activism and artmaking. This was a brief window of time where discussion of feminism and gender was part of the national conversation on the media; I began to closely observe my education. The more I observed, the more I was bothered. There were very few women artists mentioned in art history lectures, let alone discussed. So, when I went to study in Australia, I realised that while there are many brilliant artists in Indonesia, yet there were very few researchers, so I started to do that instead.
Having lived outside Indonesia for nearly twenty years now, I have the privilege to be able to observe Indonesia from both insider and outsider perspectives. Indonesia is currently experiencing democratic regression, and it's increasingly difficult for many critical voices to speak their concerns; many of us fear that Indonesia's going backwards towards an authoritarian government. I'm only a tiny part of a bigger network of Indonesian academics, artists, curators, activists and other cultural workers working hard to create a safe and supportive space for creative practitioners and critical voices.
GJ: One of your current research projects is a piece on the artist, and political prisoner, Mia Bustam. What led you to discovering her work, and would you like to tell us about your findings so far?
WD: Mia Bustam (1920-2011) was a memoirist, translator, political prisoner and painter. She was married to one of Indonesia's renowned modern painter and writer, S. Sudjojono, between 1943 and 1959. I discovered her memoirs during my PhD research because I wanted to understand what life was like for women artists during the early years of the Indonesian modern art scene. Her first memoir, Sudjojono and Me (2001), gave a vivid account of the artistic milieu of the time and her role in it. In this memoir, she was still married to Sudjojono, and she was mostly an observer. But this was also when she discovered her artistic awakening; she began to paint with encouragement from her husband and his mates. When I was reading her writings, I focused only on her first book. But her second memoir that focused on her life inside various political prisoner camps, which I didn't go into more depths in my PhD, continued to haunt me.
Mia's second book, From Camp to Camp: Story of a Woman (2007), was written in the style of political memoirs. She spoke of her political interest and active involvement in a Left-leaning arts organisation known as LEKRA. Her involvement with the organisation was after she was divorced from Sudjojono and became a single mother of eight children. She was living in the art co-op that Sudjojono founded in 1946 and later abandoned after their divorce. Mia took over the co-op while trying to make ends meet for her own family. She was later arrested during Indonesia's 1965-66 anti-communist pogrom because of her involvement with LEKRA. She spent thirteen years in various prison camps without a trial, and her children were looked after by various extended family members.
She described how she managed to continue making art in the camps, from portraits of the camp guards (unpaid commission by the guards), backdrops for performances by the camp inmates (to entertain visiting officials) to a small landscape painting. About this painting, she described how she removed the barbed wires on her landscape because she wanted to evoke a sense of freedom in her painting. You can see her remarkable resilience and strength during those times and how making art helped her retained her sense of self and dignity in such a dehumanizing place. Mia stated that none of her paintings and drawings survived, and only one photo documentation that she made before her imprisonment existed.
Her oldest son, Tedjabayu Sudjojono, who was 17 at the time, was also imprisoned due to his involvement with a student organization. I met Tedjabayu two years ago, and he spoke about when he was released from the men's prison in 1979, his mother was waiting for him (Mia was already released in 1978). He said, "Other people were greeted with tears of joy by their family members. I wasn't sure how my mother would greet me. I haven't seen her for fourteen years, and I have changed a lot during my time in prison camps." Mia approached him, offered him a handshake and said simply to Tedjabayu, 'C'est la Vie.'
Tedjabayu passed away this year from Covid-19. I was extremely fortunate to have met him and to learn more about his family history.
GJ: What an incredible story. I am so sorry to hear about Tedjabayu’s passing from covid. Last year you wrote an article which featured Indonesian artists Tintin Wulia and Dadang Christanto - through their works you examine trauma, specifically related to the devastating mass killings of anti-communists in 1960's Indonesia. Might you elaborate here?
WD: This piece was a small part of a larger work that I'm doing now: aesthetic practices and historical violence in Indonesia. The 1965-66 anti-communist killings stand out because of the unresolved nature of the massacre and its impact across generation and geography. Scholars, writers, artists, and filmmakers have studied and produced works about 1965-66 mass killings in the past five decades. The films that Joshua Oppenheimer and his anonymous Indonesian collaborators produced, titled The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014), are probably one of the few well-known films about this event in recent times.
Tintin Wulia and Dadang Christanto are two of Indonesia's foremost contemporary artists whose body of work have been focusing on this topic. They're third and second-generation Indonesians after 1965, respectively. Both artists have lost family members to mass violence. Tintin has lost her grandfather and Dadang, his father; both were taken away by the military and militia at night or early morning in 1965; they're still missing and presumed dead. Their works highlighted the intergenerational trauma of the killings from personal history and simultaneously spoke about this past to the broader audience outside their close family circle. Tintin's work, in particular, situates the memory of the killings as something more mutable and not bound to the past.
GJ: What are your thoughts on contemporary writers; I feel they tend to turn a blind eye toward the academics, and focus instead on fiction. This has been an issue for decades now. I do enjoy fiction, it’s a crucial genre. I remember when I first came across the work of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o —whose work candidly addressed the corruption and hypocrisy of the economic elite of Kenya. But I fear readers may not take fiction as seriously as nonfiction.
WD: Fiction is, of course, an important element in art and image-making. If I may turn to artmaking to elaborate: for many Indonesian artists who were active during Indonesia's authoritarian regime (1966-1998), criticism towards corruption, human rights abuses and environmental destruction had to be carefully deployed to avoid censorship, jail or worse. The artists employed elements of fiction to deliver these criticisms, from allegories to metaphor. This strategy continues after the regime's fall; the mass killings of 1965-66 are a good example.
Because the Indonesian state continues to deny their responsibility for the killings, the topic is largely still taboo for the larger population. There's still strong resistance in discussing justice, let alone compensation for the survivors and their families. So for those who wanted to bring attention to the past must use several strategies to do it. One of them is turning into the world of fiction; Tintin's work "1001 Martian Homes" (2017) is only one example of this. Her video work depicted political prisoners sent to Mars to establish a colony fit for human habitation, set in 2165. The work referenced 1965 and the political prisoners who were sent to Buru, a remote island in Eastern Indonesia. The use of fiction allows visual artists to speak about and with the survivors about the past violence and highlights their resilience, not just as victims from the space of imagination.
GJ: I was curious about your process while working on Transformative Territory: Performance Art and Gender in Post-New Order Indonesia. I also wanted to know more about the Kelompok Perek collective; can you elaborate on their work & origins, and how you came to discover them?
WD: Kelompok Perek is a collective formed by several female artists from different nationalities in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in 1999. This was after the fall of the New Order regime in May 1998, where after 32 years of rigid gender roles, there was a brief window of freedom where women were able to speak about issues such as gender and feminism in the public discourse. KP emerged from this environment and, importantly, as a reaction against the male-dominated art scene in Yogyakarta. While the collective emerged from a specific locale, I think their actions resonated with the discontent felt by women artists across different places in Indonesia. I had heard of the group when I was still based in Indonesia, but I get to know about them more from one of their members who lived in Melbourne around 2004.
I met Heidi Arbuckle when she was doing her PhD about Emiria Sunassa at Melbourne University. She knew about my work on feminism and curation, so we caught up regularly and became good friends. When I finally started my PhD later on, I became more interested to learn how women artists in Indonesia use feminist strategies to challenge patriarchy. So I got in touch with other members of the collective in Yogyakarta. It was really interesting to see how their artistic trajectory evolved over the decades: they were quite outspoken about their feminist and left-leaning directions, in the beginning, the late 1990s, and I see them as very much continuing the trajectory of other progressive women's groups in Indonesia before the anti-communist killings in 65-66. Later, while they continue to do works that focus on women's experience, much of their earlier radical politics have shifted. I think this is also reflective of the organic nature of a collective.
GJ: One of my favorite pieces of yours is from your book Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences. The chapter I departed from was "Reading The Primitive"; it begins on page 110. You're elaborating on the work of a woman named Emiria Sunassa, the painter whose works focused on subjects who were "unable to mourn the loss of their culture, rendered invisible by colonialism and its aftermath."
WD: Thanks! When I wrote that section, I was thinking about how Emiria's paintings give another perspective of the nation. Her portraits of indigenous people from Eastern Indonesia and Kalimantan showed the extent of her mobility (unusual for a single woman during the 1940s) and empathy towards the people that she painted.
Writing from today's perspective, I could see that her works bring out the emotional impact of colonisation, namely loss and mourning, that rarely talked about in Indonesian art history. Indonesian art history is a reflection of the nation's history; it is centred on nationalism and modernism. So, the (male) heroism and the anti-colonial attitude are very much celebrated, yet the loss and the inability to mourn, or the vulnerabilities, are not acknowledged. In a way, the moving forward attitude reflects a postcolonial nation eager to move on and put itself in the international arena. I see Emiria's works as bringing visibility to the fact that there was/is a severe disconnection between the people and their land – not being able to mourn means that you can't move on. Hence, the cycle of violence and disruption continues.
GJ: From the same work, you write on page 139, "When women are typically represented as mute objects with their cultural agency marginalised from the mainstream, self-portraiture is often a strategy to control their representation." You discuss the still image as a weapon. Then, we encounter Lakshmi Shitaresmi, who produced a series of self-portraits while she was pregnant - what do these women represent for you?
WD: The artists and their artworks that I discussed in my book are only a glimpse of what women artists are working in Indonesia. Laksmi and her peers showed that for many Indonesian artists, self-portraiture is important to challenge the representation and perception of women within their community. Specifically, they utilize the imagination to question the idealized representation of motherhood. They do so by showing the conflicting emotions in their parenting and caring roles, not all aspects of motherhood are glorious, so to speak.
GJ: I might be making an assumption, but I'm curious about what languages you might speak.
WD: I speak only Indonesian and English now, but I grew up where my parents and people around me also speak Javanese and Sundanese at home – the two out of seven hundred ethnic languages in Indonesia. I can still understand when people speak Javanese or Sundanese to me, but sadly I can only answer in Indonesian. Indonesians are very adept at switching codes, from formal to informal Indonesian, from their ethnic language to the national language, from English to Indonesian again, sometimes this code switching happens within one set of conversation! I deeply regret that I don't continue speaking Sundanese or Javanese; this means I often lose some nuances of the conversation whenever I come back to Indonesia to visit my family and friends.
GJ: Do you believe that there may be languages out there we have yet to discover?
WD: I think so! Or rather, there are languages that we have yet to recover.
GJ: What are you currently reading? And, what might your plans be for the summer?
WD: I like having several books on the go. I just finished the Rampart trilogy by MR Carey; it's an apocalyptic dystopia set in a post-climate crisis world, and Margaret Atwood's Moral Disorder. I have now Evelyn Araluen's debut poetry collection “Dropbear”; she's a Goori – Koorie poet, her work is a savage and insightful look on colonialism in Australia, and I'm looking forward to reading that.
We're in the middle of winter here in the Southern hemisphere. It's time for the winter garden, something that I didn't get to do last year. Given that we're not going anywhere anytime soon as Australia still closes its international borders, I will spend the time to reconnect with my garden again.
Wulan Dirgantoro is a researcher of modern and contemporary Indonesian art. She is currently a McKenzie Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Culture and Communication, the University of Melbourne, Australia. Wulan is the author of Feminisms and Contemporary Art in Indonesia: Defining Experiences (Amsterdam University Press, 2017). Her research interests are on feminism, gender, memory and trauma in Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art. Her writings have been published in various publications in Indonesia, Australia, Japan and Europe. Together with Michelle Antoinette, Wulan co-curated the exhibition “Shaping Geographies: Art I Women I Southeast Asia” (2019-2020) that highlighted recent contemporary art practices by Southeast Asian women artists.
