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Taman Mini

Taman Mini reflects the view that life is only the status quo—as though in every phenomena, every difference, there is only the everlasting.

Images

Flesh, eyes, skin—the physical and the psychic—have shaped the language of racist violence. In Indonesia, too.

The Flesh

Now Covid-19 can remind us that intimacy with the flesh is the same as simple gratitude when one is healthy, and taking an easy attitude towards pain and death.

The past does not stop. Over and again, we fail to recapture it in memory. Of course, we have history books and think that this is where the past is recorded as memory. But memory is the product of the present, and the present is not a station where memories pause, unchanging. This is why we often try to recall the past in other ways.

Itihasa

Revenge, retaliation, and dark characters make us feel something more than just addiction to stories of violence; we feel that we are discovering stories about ‘justice’, and turn them into moral discourse.

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News, Stories, News

Tempo was born and changed the magazine scene. Previously, weeklies were like convenience stores.

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Tedjabayu

His diary is not a monologue, and not a soliloquy: even in the narrowest of cells and in the most cruel oppression—particularly in Nusabambangan, the camp that was actually even worse than Buru—his voice was one of many.

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Window Shopping

The phrase "the desert of the real" conveys that ‘the real’ is the destroyed world, gloomy, fantastical, inexplicable through language, especially when viewed from the ordered world. In Indonesia, we are actually in that ‘desert’: with incessant floods, landslides and earthquakes.

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Mortality

Death is always with us in the same carriage. Death does not cut the journey. Death is part of the journey.

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Data

With the technology of the Hubble telescope, we see that we inhabit merely one tiny planet in a galaxy, while there are two trillion galaxies sprinkled in space. Humans are not the center.

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Ondel-ondel

The ondel-ondel, which people say used to be part of high-class ceremony in old Jayakarta, is nowadays part of the life of the impoverished, who know they are not in the limelight.

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The Crown

Power succeeds not through oppression with guns and bribery with money, but because it is effective in performing illusion.

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Fragile

Viruses are wars without borders. There is no space or time that can be completely ordered and stabilized in indices and maps. Contagion and healing go on within traces of differing attitudes towards life, sickness, and death.

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Vision

The eye – unlike the ear – does indeed absorb things field by field, not all at once. Sight becomes king. Humans no longer know objects by hearing, tasting and feeling them.

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Nazareno

The Bible prohibits the faithful from making pictures of humans and from worshipping idols, as do the other two Abrahamic religions. The history of the Christian world has witnessed a few episodes of ‘iconoclasm’, movements to destroy statues: in the 8th and 9th centuries in Byzantium, and at the beginning of the 16th century in Europe, when the Protestants burnt statues and paintings in churches.