Mentawai Tattoo Revival

Since humans understand their fateful steps in the Anthropocene epoch, their position as dominant creatures starts to get loose. A human’s role is not limited to rights and self-determination but also as a form of shared responsibility. In the condition of an anxious geopolitical and life among the ruins of nature, awareness of shared responsibility builds an alternative path for connecting to others and ourselves.

If we imagine everything corresponding to each other, we cannot separate the relationship between humans and nature and the care within the landscape. Without care, the land only ends as ruins, forcing all inhabitants to navigate on their own aims. This premise is explored by Tour on Mud (2017) in the unfinished Sidoarjo mudflow tragedy, showing the irony of job and tourism as a dynamic dialogue in an abandoned land. In other places, the results from flawed planning of the transmigration program in the New Order period, 1880 MASL (2016) shows coffee farmers attempt to produce both their guardianship and survivability chance. Clenched by land infertility, they assess the possibility of state-protected forest areas, showing how the imagination of the near future could affect the present economic motive and decision.

Sense and meaning of space could further be a locus of care even when the definition is crucial to the struggle and activism. Mentawai Tattoo Revival (2010) delves into tattoo interpretation as a remembrance and memoir of their relation with nonhumans in the Mentawai communities. The records of practice and meaning from communities’ perspectives serve as guides when many parties contest the chamber of culture, each with its interest. The same premise is critically and poetically used by Salmiyah (2017) through a portrait of natural resources grabbing in a tobacco factory in the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia. Attempts to examine spatial space might be a meaningful reminder when the braid of care between humans, nature, and nonhumans slowly disappears or might be forgotten.

In this program, four films from Forum Film Dokumenter’s film collection strive to start an initial dialogue of interweaving relations of humans, nature, and nonhumans, and a passage to reflect a segment of human struggle.

–Michael Don Lopulalan & Nurrul Nelwan
Programmer