A Constellation of Collectives: Interview with Ade Darmawan

The word “supersub” is a football term that refers to a substitute player who is brought onto the field during a match to change the game. This is an interesting allegory to apply to artistic activity. Was that the idea behind bringing collective Indonesian practices to Denmark?

The exhibition was conceived as part of Images Festival in Denmark. I was invited to form a curatorial advisory committee for the festival along with N’Goné Fall from Senegal and Sarah Rifky from Egypt. We had a research trip to Denmark and visited numerous institutions to think about the possibilities of exchange. We really wanted to elaborate on this idea of exchange and focus on the artists’ role in society. Some of the previous Images Festivals had been just showcasing art and culture from these regions rather than working collaboratively with the artists and curators. The idea of the “SuperSub” exhibition then came about through a conversation I had with Kit Leunbach, the curator at Den Frie Center of Contemporary Art during my research visit in Denmark and later at the Jakarta Biennale.

The exhibition really came from a necessity to provide an infrastructure. I don’t think it’s about physical infrastructure or financial support, I think it’s more about the content and how cultural institutions in Indonesia are operating, how they can relate, or how they can be relevant to what’s going on in contemporary Indonesia. State budgets for art and culture in Indonesia are big, so there is the support. But at the moment it feels irrelevant. It’s not catching up, and it’s falling behind. So we wanted to test this, to play with format and ask questions. What does it mean to work collectively today? These questions were pivotal for many collectives that emerged in the 1990s across Indonesia. The artist groups in “SuperSub” have been working together for more than 15 years.

What triggered the shift toward collective practices in Indonesia?

It stems from the student movement actually. People were involved in their own movements that bubbled across the country. It was part of the fall of the Suharto regime [1967–98]. There was growing discontent, and students and academics were becoming more active and vocal on political issues. In art school, when I was a student, we were very active publishers. We were interested in making things public. We did a lot of things in Jakarta, like publishing magazines and comics, [and] music gigs and projects on the street and public spaces. The atmosphere was really about bringing up alternative ideas.

In the 1990s, many collectives in Indonesia were occupying domestic spaces to show their work and stage their projects, much like the apartment exhibitions in Paris and Brussels in the same decade. As the European art market flourished at the turn of the century, the nature of domestic spaces shifted from a necessity to survive to a necessity to maintain independence. Does this European perspective correlate to what was happening in Indonesia? Was there an element of protest in the use of these spaces?

I remember in Jatiwangi, we were extremely critical of the Jakarta Art Centre as a very elite, irrelevant institution, rather than a place that provided space for something new or young. We think that art should really relate to something that is going on in reality, and not be something that only emphasizes production, but can exist as a process or as research. And, during that time, [it is also importnat to ask] whether or not it has a place or a space. Our concepts and ideas about art production and community-based projects are drawn from what we call sanggar. Traditionally, sanggar refers to a place where people gather to do a certain activity. In this place, the activities are like informal workshops with a guru or a central figure.

We want to test this to create an even more open, collaborative structure—a more horizontal structure. We do exhibitions that people not only see, but can read; this idea of “making public” that emerged during the late ’90s when we were publishing. I also think there’s a significant difference between artistic practices now compared to the previous generations before the 1990s. The generation that emerged during the 1990s and after has a much greater consideration of sustainability. This is totally different, as previous generations were more concerned with a one-off project focus. Since the 1990s, it has been more about building up an ecosystem, about experimenting and speculating and working with other people. How, for example, can community-based practices such as Jatiwangi Art Factory develop our public? It’s really coming from a bottom-up sort of societal engagement. Public programs, for example, play an important role for many artist collectives throughout Indonesia.

All of the projects in the exhibition existed in some form outside of the orthodox framing of an exhibition. For example, the workshops held at the Centre for Art on Migration Politics and the living room Symposium—what was the importance of processes such as workshopping and how did these manifest in an exhibition format?

It’s always difficult to work in different contexts. In the beginning we need to consider what is in it for us, and what is in it for the people—for the people in Denmark and also for us back home. On one hand, the exhibition showcased collective practices from Indonesia. But on the other hand, it is actually trying to test that. Every collective was asked which projects they thought could be replicated in a Danish context. When we decided which project would be represented as a kind of documentation or archive, we were able to do new research to test it, and reiterate it in Copenhagen. We had no idea how it would work in new contexts; it could have also failed.

A significant thread in the exhibition is the dialogue between local and global values, and the implications of globalization for local communities and their identities. Jatiwangi Art Factory’s “Claynialism” (2015) project, for example, draws from the local history of Jatiwangi and the influence of clay production on the economy and culture. Can you talk a little bit about this project and its significance in a European context?

In Jatiwangi, we’ve been addressing how a small town can survive under the pressures of a global capitalist system. The tile factories and industries in Jatiwangi are drastically changing because of foreign investment. For example, there is a new international airport, and a big highway has been built. It’s a huge change. Culturally speaking, we have to survive.

It’s about trying to make people think about the relationship they have with the land. For example, Jatiwangi Art Factory’s project in the exhibition, “Year of Soil, Claynialism, Clay Testament, Clay Cookies,” draws from the city’s longstanding tradition for making tiles and tiled roofs. The soil there is rich and plays a vital role in the lives of the local community. The project plays with this relationship to the land in a new context in Copenhagen. In the project, the collective host workshops with local Copenhagen community groups to make cookies out of clay, which are exhibited alongside text from the conversation during the process of making them. The point is actually the conversation about the land and the memories and histories shared by different people. When we brought the workshop to CAMP [Centre for Art on Migration Politics], it was very shocking. It was quite a painful experience, but also very touching. As it is duplicated in other places, the project has become a kind of moving oral museum. They are making a short history about the city as it undergoes drastic transformations.

Can you tell me more about the living room structure and the conversations that were held in the space?

The collectives in the exhibition play a lot with structure, and breaking down systems and hierarchies is very interesting for us. One of the main things for many of us is that we always have a certain space or sanggar in our own collectives where people can gather to relax, brainstorm and discuss many things. In this way we can say that it’s like a combination of a think tank and also a knowledge-sharing platform. It’s also in a nice atmosphere, normally like a living room. So it seemed natural to set up a living room situation in the gallery as a space to hold events or discuss ideas around the show. In this situation, it’s not really clear who is a speaker or moderator.

This goes back to the emergence of art spaces in Indonesia happening in domestic environments during the late 1990s.

Yes. It’s really about being domestic and public at the same time.

“SuperSub–On Collectivism” was on view at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, from April 30–June 5, 2016.