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[halfcookeddreams]

From Donna Haraway Story Telling For Earthly Survival

And the rate of extinction of ways of living and dying, of peoples of all species including human are truly on the edge of falling off into nothingness…The story of the earth is at stake as we participate in it…The deepening of the destruction of the ways of living and dying on this earth is happening.And the story of this earth, the arts of living on a damaged planet…the absolute obligation to become capable, to render each other capable of changing the story, story of ongoingness cultivating in earth, in the tunnels of the earth….To be at risk with each other and to propose something real…To make a proposition, that which is not yet but might be you know? Until the stories are told like that…How to make the weak stories stronger and the strong stories weaker… in the critique of capitalism and the critique of capital makes us stupid. And it makes us stupid a particular way. It makes us believe that there is nothing else possible in the world. The kind of stupidity that comes from constantly repeating ever newer, ever smarter, up to the minute, latest version of the critique of capital…The smartest possible…you know, you know. I mean really good…The stupid thing is to be so mesmerised by the smartness of the latest analysis of capital you know that we lose all sense of what is important in the world…and the only reason to do this analytical work is to learn how to tell another story….and to learn how to add to the work of those who are already storying otherwise. The only possible thing to do in the world we are inhabiting is to revolt, you know? It’s an insurrection…It’s an insurrection that refuses the paralysis of critique, that the world is finished because we know how it works. And you are stupid because you don’t know how it works because you are just an activist. or you are just a witch or you are just a something, you just believe in all these stupid things….We know how the world really works…That kind of arrogance which is the arrogance of the scholars….The arrogance of the intellectuals. Our poison is that with which we poison the very thing we are doing. We think we are contributing to building a different story and we are feeding it poison but our own relentless of being smarter than everybody else with the latest version of our theory. We do have to practice war. We do have to be for some worlds and not others. We are against some ways of doing the world. We are truly against building the keystone pipeline and sucking the world dry of fossil fuels and many other things…It is really important to be in revolt…So for some ways of life and not others. 

[halfcookeddreams]

Some thoughts after reading: The Orang Laut of the Singapore River and the Sampan Panjang by C.A Gibson-Hill (1952)

The Orang Laut of the Singapore River and the Sampan Panjang Author(s): C. A. Gibson-Hill

The strange turn of events however made this divide between excess and sufficiency even more pronounced. Being confined to the exteriors of the island, as the inlands were still obstructed by dense jungles and marshes, the Europeans developed an interest in betting on different boats and their boatmen for pure recreation. These side sport became profitable for the boatmen too. With their winnings and the support from enthusiastic merchants, the orang laut made considerable improvements to their existing boats; the design and utility, (“fast sailing”, “light and elegant”), serving the sport rather than their survival.

This division gradually erased the orang laut as the originators of the Sampan Panjang. By then many of them were already forced out of Singapore River had started living on attap houses built on water. And although the Europeans wrote highly about the Sampan Panjang, they continue to degrade the Orang Laut or not mentioned them at all, replacing them with Malays instead. The Sampan Panjang however grew and grew; larger, more expensive and extremely excessive. And suddenly it too, like most of the European playthings, grew out of fashion and favour.

“With the turn of the century the form, in both its aspects, disappeared from the Singapore scene. No hull has survived, and the Raffles Museum collection possesses only two indifferent models, both representing the boat in its later stages. Historical records ignore it, and like the Orang Laut of Singapore River, who had brought it through its early stages, it even lacks an adequate public acknowledgement existence”.

[halfcookeddreams]

Since their founding in 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, a savvy group of feminist art-world agitators, have long prioritized their collective power by keeping their individual identities secret. Known for damning statistics and deadpan humor, the Guerrilla Girls were determined to upend and call out the art world’s pervasive sexism and racism. Known for wearing gorilla masks in public, members adopt names of deceased women artists to amplify historic female legacies.

One long-standing African American member who took the name Alma Thomas became the driving force behind the Tokenism campaign, the group’s most pointedly successful attempt to take on art world racism, with its hollow and perfunctory habit of occasionally supporting one woman artist of color in order to give the appearance of diversity. Top Ten Ways to Tell if You’re an Art World Token, produced in 1995, remains one of the classic posters from the series, offering scathing commentary such as #8 “Everyone knows your race, gender and sexual preference even when they don’t know your work.”

Posted by Jenée-Daria Strand Guerrilla Girls, Top Ten Signs That You’re an Art World Token, 1995. Copyright © Guerrilla Girls, courtesy guerrillagirls.com

[halfcookeddreams]

DJdrummer (2021). Saturn Devouring His Son [Balloons].

[halfcookeddreams]

taken from https://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/oral_history_interviews/record-details/e689a365-115d-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad?keywords=ubin&keywords-type=all

Interview with Awang bin Osman detailing how he assisted his father to perform rituals when building jetties in Ubin and Changi to prevent mishaps and ensure good bounty of fish. With the Chinese, who at first were the middlemen in selling their catch, monopolising on the building of jetties and slowly learning the rituals themselves, his father and his friends were no longer tasked to performed. 

Due to a lack of capital, the Malays in Ubin and Kampung Beting Kusa had to slowly sell away their jetties to the Chinese to earn income and took on other jobs such as procuring nibong or the Malay feather palm in Johor.

[halfcookeddreams]

(wrote this for Fitri Ya’akob, To Mother, exhibited for How to Desire Differently). 

"Unexamined assumptions: First that a "natural" mother is a person without further identity, one who can find her chief gratification in being all day with small children, living at a pace tuned to theirs; that the isolation of mothers and children together in the home must be taken for granted, that maternal love is, and should be, quite literally selfless; that children and mothers are the "causes" of each others' suffering. I was haunted by the stereotype of the mother whose love is 'unconditional' and by the visual and literary images of motherhood as a single-minded identity. If I knew parts of myself existed that would never cover to those images, weren't this parts then abnormal, monstrous? As —as my eldest son, now aged twenty-one, remarked on reading the above passages: You seem to feel you ought to love us all the time. But there is no human relationship where you love the other person at every moment." Yes I tried to explain to him, but woman—above all, mothers—have been suppose to love that way."

—Adrienne Rich's Of Woman Born. Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976)

dearest inaya matahari,

since the day you were conceived, i have been writing letters to you to mark these shifts in my life that were dissolving the parts of me that existed before there was you. now that you are turning four in a few months, I realised that those earlier ruminations that I wrote: of my excitement in finally giving birth to you, the preparations of being the becoming the best version of the mother and the struggles of the fourth trimester in which the ideal and what I could manage in actuality wrestled unforgivingly in the heaviness of postpartum mood swings and hormonal imbalances, that those were are all written for me. those earlier letters  made you solely responsible for the disintegration of everything I have known about myself, the expectations I placed in becoming mother and the weight of the failure I was carrying in my body each time you were in some kind of false danger, when you fall sick, when you could not sleep and when you suddenly refused my breast and preferred the bottle, I could feel the weight being too heavy to bear.

no one told me becoming mother is more painful than childbirth itself. we read about the birth story as this amazing, life-changing miraculous event that is celebrating the woman's strength and the resilience of the woman's body, the sacrificial offering for humanity to exist in the world. but what comes after the birth story: when suddenly society is offering you an abundance of advice on becoming mother and you do not hear much of becoming father or becoming parent. i remember rubber time in the fourth trimester, you waking up with your klaxon screams. your father and I would scour through different sites on the search engine, going through a list of solution for every problem. Most of these sites suggest solutions on how I can be better and none of them actually told me that hey it's ok to fuck up today and not find solutions, that it was ok to fail.

if all these were not overwhelming enough, you had your first seizure the moment I was getting the hang of things, when you were only three months old. I remembered holding you in a bath, your eyes suddenly glitched and for a few seconds you turned blue.  in those coming weeks, it kept happening again and again. you'd turn blue and we'd frantically held you flailing about not knowing what to do. I told your father you were time-travelling somewhere on a different plane just so I could feel some kind of ease from the lack of control.

suddenly all those little things, of you not wanting to fall asleep without us rocking you for hours each day or you screaming your lungs out from five to seven because of colic were very minute. all I wanted was for a day where you did not turn blue. inaya, there was always some kind of strange hope that your brain condition would not put you in any risk but each time you grew rigid in my arms and your body becomes a shell, I could feel the guilt of continuing on with the pregnancy and bringing you into this world. suddenly I did not care about becoming mother. what became more important for me was for you to survive and that was when everything shifted my child.

my love for you then was filled with conditions because in honestly it was given to serve my purpose of being this mother that society would approve. but since those seizures, getting you medicated, bearing witness to you reaching all the milestones that the doctors say you couldn't, have been the many major miracles and my love for you shifted beyond my understanding, beyond the conditional. I still feel the weight when a family member casually remarked "Eh how old, how come haven't walk yet?" or a complete stranger asking out of concern if there is something wrong with you. inaya, in these few years you have taught me that failure of becoming (the perfect) mother is all part of the process of navigating this world with you. when you fail and i fail, it is the society that is failing us with these expectations of meeting some normative measure. i learn to read you as a person separate from me and take your cues to whether you were ready or not. you taught me that it's empowering to exist outside of it and suddenly becoming mother is just replaced with the comfort of becoming myself with you and being ok to be myself without being connected solely to you once again.

you make me aware that there is no such thing as the perfect mother, the woman mother, the nurturing mother and the sacrificial mother. there is no such thing as the natural mother. becoming mother is not exclusive for the biological mother. i have seen your father in many many instances become mother. there are domestic helpers who are mothers, trans men who are mothers, single mothers with other mother-systems that are outside of the norm. thank you inaya for dismantling the conventional mother for me. I cannot imagine it any other way.

love you whenever, wherever and always,

mama

[halfcookeddreams]

Day Two: Visit to Astana Ayar

As my work is based on fictional/real narratives, I decided to visit several places that sells used items (barang bekas) that might have some artefacts such as old photos/letters/books to create my own personal perceptions of Bandung’s histories. Continuing on my work with alternative narratives and language systems thats more visceral in nature, I had to also understand the existing realities within the communities in Bandung. Risa and I decided to visit Astana Ayar, a place that is similar to Sungei Road but only five times bigger. I ordered my very first gojek from the app and ordered one for Risa as well. However, there was a delay and risa’s gojek arrived first. I ask her to leave without me and I waited for mine to arrive. The gojek rider used to work at a company that prints t-shirts for fifteen odd years but decided to leave as the chemicals that he was using was damaging his eyes. He said that working for the gojek is really good, they get 80% and the company gets 20%. However, i learn much later from Bule that there is a strong rivalry amongst the gojek riders with the existing ojek riders who are privatizetd companies that have been around for years and is a little bit more expensive. In Bandung where ojek drivers would verbally threaten or interrogate the gojek riders, who can be recognized by their green uniforms. In fact all of the gojek drivers who have been fetching me were not in their uniforms saying its more safe that way. There were even cases of physical violence in Jakarta that has been reported. As Gojeks are more standardised and safe for consumers, the economic structures of the existing ojeks are being threatened. However not many people in Bandung opt for Gojeks as they have their own personal trusted ojek riders who have been ferrying them for years.

Continuing on, I arrived and could not locate Risa. Astana Ayar is an almost endless line of wares (mostly metal spare parts, wirings, tubes and other industrial parts) are arranged by the side of the roads. the vendors were tough-looking and seemed to be characters from a post-apocalyptic film yet still returned my smile sincerely (which is one of the things I love about Bandung’s warm and endearing folks). After twenty minutes of looking around and walking from one long end to the other, Risa, still with her gojek rider, manage to find me. I felt bad as I was not consciously looking for her, especially seeing the petrified look on her face but I was comforted by the fact that she did find me in the end. We had mixed rice at a warteg and mid-way through our food a man came in and pointed to my camera. Mau jual nggak (do you wish to sell it?) to which i replied with an immediate no. He also mentioned that he was watching me walk on my own earlier looking lost and somehow that statement made my dodgy-radar ring pretty loudly. Risa warned me to be careful when I am alone and be my conscious of my surroundings.

After the meal, we went out to scavenge for good stuff. I found a quaint little shop at the start of Astana Ayar. The owner is Pak Haji Asip, a stocky man from Acheh who has the most mischievous eyes. He has been running the place for twenty years. He has dead clocks, chandeliers and mostly barang perhiasan rumah (house decorations). However, something caught my attention right at the back of the shop, almost hidden and waiting for me all these twenty odd years. It was a wooden box which was encased with glass so you can see through it. It looks like a lamp that you’d light up using a candle. It was perfect. Honestly at this moment, I do not really have specifics on how I’d create the physical works. However, with all the sensorial experience, the research I have been doing on Indonesian’s social climate regarding children born out of wedlock and the resistance I’ve faced in the last two days, my work will address the constructs of visibility/invisibility within the societal context. As my practice involves analogue visuals with an overhead projector in a performative environment, I wish to incorporate the same vocabulary that I have developed such as stretching spatial limitations, light manipulations and shadows/silhouettes into the works; invisibility will only be visible if you place a light on it (or if you wish to see it).

I told Pak Asip briefly about my project and mentioned that I was looking for old photographs. He took out a rusty copper tray with a mountain of old and faded photographs. There were photos of old army generals, tourist shots and a large selection of photographs of children and children with their mothers. Some had writings on the back and I thought this would be perfect source material for developing these fictional narratives. Pak Asip asked me if I was from India, and I told him that my father is from Melaka and is part Javanese and maternal grandmother is Bugis to which he mentioned “oh kamu ini anak prahu”  (child of the boat). Bugis were known as maritime traders or pirates. He asked me if I knew who Tan Melaka was, a Bugis pahlawan (hero/fighter). When I asked him why Tan Melaka had such a Chinese name, he said that the Buginese people are diverse as they travel the seas and he mentioned that Acheh is an extension of the Bugis people. He asked me to trace my family tree and said that ancestral lineage is important. Akar kamu itu penting ya (knowing your roots in important). Its funny how a line (to know your roots) was one of the early inspiration of anak anak abdullah, here is the same line being spoken by a complete stranger several miles away. 

We bid our rushed farewells as I hailed for a cab and I told him kalau panjang umur, jumpa lagi (if our lives are long, we might meet again)

[halfcookeddreams]

The best kind of museums are usually hidden within secondhand thrift stores and none quite as fascinating as the one in Cikapundung market. Several shop fronts seem to be devoid of human existence, acting as accidental time capsules filled with artefacts from dead presidents, colonial masters and nameless ghosts. Each object that hangs or sits neatly arranged in an off-balance precariousness seems heavy with weight of secrets that will never be told. If you take some time to listen the shop owners, who seem to magically appear when you require their assistance, they would humour you with a little trivia or some useless historical context for the object that you hold carefully in your hands. However, an epic story is the hook, line and sinker, a strategy for them to clinch a sale.

Cikapundung market itself is a labyrinth of time. The steep incline up those concrete steps have spaces in between them trapping glimpses of the river as you climb up to the second floor. If you miss the sight of the river, the smell of its decay greets you like an old past life. The architecture of the market transports you immediately into a sort of dystopian fallout reality, a black market for you to procure your supplies to ensure your survival. A friend of mine casually mentioned how snipers were placed on these steps during the 60th Asian African conference in 2015 to safeguard the visiting leaders during the historical walk around Bandung. He also mentioned how, during the mayor’s desperate attempts to improve the city infrastructure in time for the conference, Cikapundung river and market remained, an obstinate old king upon the throne of its city’s landscape.

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she sat, almost not moving, quietly staring into space. she caught my gaze moments later, wearing an expression on her face which is probably ascribed to melancholia caused by long hours of waiting for nothing.

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St John’s Island: the old man and the sea

Pak Supar gave a hearty laugh as he carried chempedak the cat on his shoulder. “he is like a grandson and a celebrity cat on this island,” he added.

Pak Supar lived on St John’s Island for over four decades, stubbornly refusing the comforts of our main lion island. “I have a flat in Chai Chee but I hate gong back there. I’m so used to falling asleep with the sound of the waves and the late night traffic in the city gives me a headache.” he said ending each sentence with big belly laughter. hHs eyes though, were cold and detached, probably from the knowledge that we will never fully comprehend his tiring fight against displacement. He seemed exhausted, probably from the random visits of curious visitors who might have asked him the same kind of questions. In truth, none of us could do anything to change the situation he, his wife and several others are in.

Pak Supar is the few St John islanders who remains on the island.Hhe lives in one of the three blue kampong houses. “It’s the one with many, many fat cats outside,” he said when we asked if we could come visit him again. There is also a strange little bird that Pak Supar mentioned, appeared to him one day and refuse to leave him since. “He is my alarm clock,” said Pak Supar proudly.

He hinted on the few more years he has here on the island and when I could not hide the questioning expression of my face, he said “I don’t really want to know what’s next.” This time I couldn’t hear any hints of laughter or that melody of a smile in his voice.

[halfcookeddreams]

[halfcookeddreams]

Norway: playing catch with the sun

the sun was ours for only four hours 

we crave its fragility.

cupped by the beautiful palm-ridged clouds

hiding between mountaintops and layers of heat we put on ourselves

missing slippered mornings and bare-skinned daylight 

as the rays caress us with brightness

that jolt us awake from our sleep.

for those four hours, 

we chased the same sunlit lightness that we took for granted back home. 

we chased it down pavements

between branches

letting it sneak between our bedsheets 

as we slipped carelessly into our gentle dreaming

our limbs slightly apart to allow it to wrapped itself in between

the only other lover we’d allow in our bed

pretending that

it will still be there when we finally wake. 

we chased it down, those four precious hours

 between crevices and cracks

 as it glimmers bright

 reflections upon the callous ice. 

 We chase it precariously

 forgetting it’ll be gone the moment we feel its familiarity. 

 if we are fortunate, we’ll catch it the moment it disappears

 as dancing helios kiss our eyelids spinning gently around our fingertips

numbed from such wretched weather

pulling us closer than before.

[halfcookeddreams]

Hoan Kiem lake: the private and the sacred

Hoàn Kiếm Lake is the fulcrum in which urban folks seem to gravitate towards. one could spend hours walking around the lake without realising the passing of time. I spent three cold evenings and one wonderful afternoon during my stay in hanoi at the lake

Some scenes never left my memory; a man in a leather jacket falling off his motorbike, picking himself up after kissing the asphalt, casually adjusting his hair before riding off again. eating ice-cream for the first time in winter as we walked through a blanket of mist that came from nowhere. green that was darker than emerald, the stillness of the lake hiding what lies beneath it.

The Viets were in constant motion; exercising, walking dogs, taking wedding shots on the Huc bridge, sitting down in a pause; the banal park scenes that we are all familiar with but somehow it was different here. I felt that everyone was moving at the same pace and rhythm. Although every activity was private in itself, it felt as if they were all moving together.

Taking off from the legend of Lê Lợi and his sword, the spirit of the people of Hanoi still resonates, much like myself when I was there, our bodies always gravitating back towards the lake. 

[halfcookeddreams]

astana anyar: a dystopian daydream

The streets were metal parts neatly arranged that stretched for miles on end. rusty rice cookers, locked suitcases, broken baby cribs and nintendo game cartridges are placed awkwardly side by side with only one commonality; the side-effects of invention and innovation. 

Astana Anyar, like every other flea market of spare parts and throwaways, is the place where objects come to die in the name of progress.

Also known as the Pasar Loak Astana Anyar, second-hand goods of all kinds can be found along Jalan Astana Raya to Jalan Pajagalan, Tegal Lega, Bandung. 

Haggling can be heard from all corners as I stood in the hot sun at the centre of it all soaking in the chaos; a dystopian daydream. 

These transaction moves away from the familiar “brand-new bright and glossy latest in technology” habits of us capitalistic consumers. turning spare parts into usable objects is their daily struggle to survive the human condition.

“Why bother buying something that is more expensive? You can get one here for 1/8 of the price, save a bit of cash for other important things” quipped one of the vendors as if he was reading my mind. “But of course you must, above all else,  know how to fix what is broken”