Pilgrim, Past Promise

As an artist who grew up in a social context steeped in conflict and shifting identities, my artistic practice stems from the awareness that narratives are never neutral. Narratives always hold positions, memories, and power. Through this project, I want to explore how the collective trauma born from the 1999 Sambas riots in Indonesia moves across generations and is materialized through the bodies, language, and social spaces we share today.

This project is part of my long journey in understanding how art can be a negotiation ground between history and future possibilities. I see art as a space where wounds can be articulated without having to be forcefully healed—a space to re-listen to the echoes of trauma that are often silenced by mainstream narratives, or even official state narrations.

During the process of creating these works, I strive to transform personal and social experiences into artistic forms which resist the idea of forgetting, but also invite the audience to reinterpret the meaning of reconciliation. I believe that there is a kind of melancholy which is not the end of a loss, but rather a condition which allows us to remain connected to the absence, to those who are lost, forgotten, or erased from history.

The making of these works all started from aphoristic texts that functioned as the initial body—poetic gestures that recorded things that could not be said out loud. At each stage, I tried to maintain the tension between the personal and the collective, between the body and history, between silence and speech.

I approach this project not only as an artwork, but also as an attempt to reconstruct social narratives; how memories, trauma, loss, and reconciliation are transmitted across generations and media. I want to show that memory is not merely a static archive, but a living organism that continues to adapt to the body and its social context. Thus, this work is not only about the riots in Sambas, rather it is about how we all, as a society, continue to grapple with a historical legacy we cannot always choose, but must face with courage and awareness.

I take this work as a site of memory, not to numb the pain, but to maintain awareness of the history of violence and envision the possibility of living together beyond the legacy of resentment. Especially when we traveled together for 20 days, crossing Madura, the Java Sea, and reaching the edge of Sambas on Kalimantan. A post-conflict, post-generational performative journey. In this project, the body becomes an archive that speaks—not just the individual body, but the social body that bears the weight of history.

This project emphasizes how art can be a deeply empathetic form of cultural activism; not by wiping away the wounds, but by articulating memory as an ethical foundation for coexistence. It demonstrates how art from the margins of Indonesia can address trauma, identity, and reconciliation on a global stage, in its own unique way.

Artwork format: Mixmedia, variable dimensions