Yang Terbakar Bukan Hanya Tanah
(What Burned was not just a Landscape)
Reiteration #1
Title: Yang Terbakar Bukan Hanya Tanah (What Burned was not just a Landscape)
Year: 2026
Medium: Organza fabric, bricks
Dimensions: Varied dimensions
“Tubuh-Tanah Air”, an expression used by the Mollo people in Timor that translates to Body-Land Water, refers to living spaces, and as a whole, the Indonesian homeland. Using this expression to frame my work, the body becomes more than a physical form; it carries landscapes that have been scarred, deformed, and historically violated.
Inflicting a constellation of violence on both the landscape and the body, the work adopts counter-mapping as a method through the act of melting organza. This landscape is appropriated onto the body with the insistence to remember the injustices that have never been acknowledged, such as the 1965 massacre, the 1998 riots, and the 2025 protests.
Textiles in Indonesia conventionally contain multitudes of stories and memories. Its diversity is what shapes "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" (Unity in Diversity) because all these various textiles still portray the Indonesian identity as one. However, when these memories are suppressed, distorted, and erased, the impact it has towards the affected community is irreversible, not only leading to a loss of identity and a loss of culture, but also creating a chain of generational trauma where the marginalized live in fear and silence. This irreversibility mimics the irreparable change in structure and form when synthetic fabric – organza – is exposed to heat.
If paper is the skin of the land in a way that it archives it through the creation of maps, textiles are the skin, or even moreso, the cultural skin of the body in which identity is found. Hence, I am counter mapping through the use of textiles, rooted in “Tubuh-Tanah Air” where both the land and the body transforms into a living archive of violence and becomes a site of refusal, insisting that what burned was not just the landscape, but also the body and the memories and identity contained within it.
