“The main purpose of DOC Interactive is to merge documentaries with spaces we’d usually call, ‘The Others’,” Kurnia Yudha, the Director of Festival Film Dokumenter (FFD) 2023, explains as pre-event activities unfolds at Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society, on December 3rd 2023, at 13.30 WIB.
Yudha believes that DOC Interactive is one of the many creative ways of introducing documentaries, which includes experimental innovations. There are four interactive artworks that will be exhibited throughout FFD 2023. These works explore different subjects, from retracing our steps through history to pondering on intimate, personal memories. They are presented in four different ways, with four different experiences.
Three of the Interactive Virtual Reality artworks exhibited are part of a collaboration with IFI Indonesia, meanwhile, a Web Interactive project that was initiated by Rangga Purbaya and Sirin Farid Stevy is presented under the title Faith in Speculations. Faith in Speculations (Rangga Purbaya and Sirin Farid Stevy, 2021) presents a narration of drowned whispers in the mainstream news of Indonesia’s 1965 communists massacre, in the form of a map and video. Goliath: Playing with Reality (Barry Gene Murphy and May Abdalla, 2022) is a VR work that narrates the complexity of a man living an isolated life in psychiatric institutions, struggling with his social life. The Hangman at Home (Michelle and Uri Kranot, 2021) opens a conversation on acceptance and participation during the vital moments of a human’s life. Notes on Blindness: Into Darkness (Arnaud Colinart, Amaury La Burthe, Peter Middleton, and James Spinney, 2018) is a journey told in the form of VR about a theologian’s deteriorating sight until he’s completely blind. He decided to document his drastic life changes on audio cassettes.
Aside from the DOC Interactive program, Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society also exhibits six written essays and three out of seven video essays in collaboration with Asian Film Archive (AFA) Singapore under the Monographs program. The artworks exhibited explore the tension between form and formlessness, along with sound and silence through the filmic medium that does not limit themselves in how they are presented.
Three of the video essays in Monographs program that are screened at Cemeti-Institute includes Apat (Nazira Karimi, 2023), mmm (Chiemi Shimada, 2023), and Swimming, Dancing (Ian Wang, 2023). Starting with Apat, a story unfolding on the exploration of postcolonial stories combined with Karimi’s family archive; mmm, a compilation of the clouds captured from a Japanese cinema from 1920s until present day; and Swimming, Dancing, an analysis on the representation of the river Yangtze in different intentions and interpretations for its people. Six written essays on different realities in the Asian landscape–from meditation stories on a glacial Himalayan town, essays on what is reality and what is fantasy, to eco-fictions full of speculations by Udita Bhargava, Łukasz Mańkowski, Ryan Lim, Wiwat Lertwiwatwongsa, Sun Park, and Luca E Lum.
Both DOC Interactive and Monographs focus on individual and group experiences as human beings and circumstances that orbits them. It varies from a philosopher’s reality of gradually going blind on VR to the search of a paternal grandfather ‘lost’ in the past: both of these programs offer genuine stories of human beings in different ways. These exhibited artworks at Cemeti-Institute for Art and Society are open, generally accessible to the public until December 8th, 2023, and free of charge.
Covered by Tuffahati Athallah on December 3rd, 2023.
