Ugeng T Moetidjo
Is an artist, writer, art researcher and dramaturgist, born in the 1960s. He studied painting (1985-1991) and then film history and theory at the Jakarta Read more ...
Susilo Nofriadi
Born in Tembilahan, Sumatra, 11-05-1996, Nofriadi often experimented with media and photography. He graduated in 2021 from a university in the field of communication and Read more ...
Sanggar Seni Kontemporer
Sanggar Seni Rupa Kontemporer (Contemporary Art Studio) based in Bandung , West Java, is a collective learning group that provides a safe space where each Read more ...
In Search of Lost Time
The penal colony was created for those who were at odds with the status quo as a segregation politics by the rulers. The exile of political prisoners to island of imprisonment is not an unusual practice in any community, nation or state and its history spans through ages. Although these events have their own signature local context, the actual elements indicate that the phenomenon takes place in a global scope involving aspects of colonialism, nationalism, and ideological conflicts. The politics of penal colony, with respect the sentenced groups or communities in these punishment camps, has countless victims, both from the ruling elite itself and mostly, the people. In particular, this type of punishment is often located on remote islands far from the central government, often with unknown and violent environmental condition.
How do we imagine a place of exile, imprisonment and ostracism on an island or on islands? Our world map shows a number of island penal colonies from the early BC to modern era. However, time and taboos bury the collective memories of Asinara, Buru, Papua (Boven Digoel), Ceylon, Dawson, Goli Otok, Green Island, Ikaria, Ile d’If, Imrali, Lipari, Makronisos, Ognenny Ostrov, Robben, Sado, Sakhalin and Solovki as islands of the political prisoners forming an archipelago map of penal colony which leave scars of collective trauma from the geography of violence and oppression.
In Search of Lost Time is an art project dedicated to look back at the map of memory of the imprisonment islands; some of them can still be vaguely traced and the rest may have been completely forgotten. Recalling those islands of penal colony is an act of locating artefacts from collective memory toward the years of violence in a nation, how this collective memory endures ages and generations, if not the other way around, those memories have been scattered, random and definitely temporal.
Work In Progress
Artwork
