Meeting in Jakarta

As I start writing this article, organizational issues that no longer interest me are being discussed in the next room. We have been in Jakarta for exactly a week now, taking part in a lengthy and exhausting sequence of meetings planned with the intention of analyzing the progress during the last year of a project involving many artists and institutions.
We are at the Ruangrupa headquarters, in Jakarta, one of the initiatives of a project launched three years ago by a group of artists who, after completing their residence at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam, wanted to develop an activity within their own contexts as an extension of the work and training they had done there, and the community life they had experienced.
It was then that the RAIN Artist’s Initiatives Network came into being. It later grew into a complex network of institutions and small groups of local artists associated by specific objectives related to their own countries.
Seven initiatives –name they chose to define their function– were organized from countries in four continents, namely Asia, Africa, North America and South America: The Centre Soleil D’Afrique, in Bamako, Mali; Pulse, in Durban, South Africa; Open Circle, in Mumbai, India; Ruangrupa, in Jakarta, Indonesia; El Despacho, in Mexico City; Ceia, in Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Trama, in Argentina.
The network was set up with the chief intention of generating a transaction of knowledge, ideas and exchange programs for artists, in an attempt to look for ways of avoiding the all too well-worn authoritarian relationship north-south, and establishing the will and the need of a south-south relationship.
Each initiative started defining its own starting point according to its particular perception of the need for action in each context, the possibilities of insertion in its area of interest, the support received, and the priorities established by each artist or group of artists.
This has resulted in the development of a variety of strategies involving a wide range of ideas about every subject of interest. In general, when there is a great diversity of stances, evaluating the results tends to be difficult. Nevertheless, this may be considered the great achievement of the experience so far: the degree of emergence of a great variety of conflicts and the search for ways in which they can be resolved.
The meeting in Jakarta has been the third since the creation of RAIN. Now we can consider that the experience has finally taken hold, that the initiatives have won a space of their own in their respective countries and that, at present, people are looking for appropriate and more enriching ways in which the circulation of projects, ideas and works can be established more effectively.
There are initiatives like Trama, in Buenos Aires, and Ruangrupa, in Jakarta, which in this short period of time have become really significant in their contexts and are an indication that there is new potential for the development of young artists.
Last year, Trama, who has had the support of the Fundación Antorchas as well as the collaboration of other institutions like the Fundación Espigas and the Goethe Institute, has definitely made the most fitting public intervention by proposing a workshop to deal with the social importance of artistic activity. This workshop showed the degree of political awareness and critical capacity of young artists, few days before the will of the people, who taking to the streets, forced President Fernando de la Rua to resign.
Some of that sentiment runs through the work of RAIN’s initiatives. As it can be imagined, the places of origin of these initiatives are as threatened as Argentina. But ideas differ. For Tushar Joag and Sharmila Samant from Open Circle in Mumbai (Bombay), who are among the more radical, the aesthetic space disappears when artists and intellectuals are asked to actively interact and participate in social conflicts, and actually intervene in the public space.
Greg Streak from Pulse, in Durban, on the other hand, seeks to generate, with the participation of both international and local artists, a solid referential place in a context that is hostile to his purposes, and plans a big event, Violence / Silence, to which he has invited Adriana Lestido through Trama, among others. This project will be carried out in two different locations: a big city and a small town in the middle of the South African landscape.
From the outset, Hama Goro, in Bamako, Mali, has chosen to inquire into the relationship between Art and Craft, so as to find the connections between the productive intentions of both activities in that particular corner of the planet –one of the poorest in the world– where concepts and meanings can vanish into thin air.
In Belo Horizonte, Brazil, Marco Paulo Rolla and Marcos Hill from Ceia attempt to interact with a group of initiatives from Fortaleza to São Paulo with the intention of generating an alternative for artistic practices, one that is not tied to the market, for the market can be a strong influence but also a limitation. They also look to engage in education systems to help direct the new generation of young artists.
In Mexico, Diego Gutiérrez Coppe’s El Despacho has proposed a very particular line of thought and a novel strategy, even for RAIN. Their projects are not developed with reference to the artistic context of their city but to ordinary people, the subjects of their documentaries. He has summoned international artists to work with him: Kees Hin and Bibo, from Holland, who were also present in the Jakarta meeting, and in the near future, Sebastián Díaz Morales and Patricio Larrambebere from Argentina will collaborate in the production of six documentaries and a film, the definitive format of the project. In this way, they intend to incorporate points of view and approaches that will diverge from the everyday reality of the protagonists.
Trama, originally set up by Claudia Fontes, Leonel Luna y Pablo Ziccarello, and recently joined by Marina De Caro, Irene Banchero and Flavia Da Rin, has this time been represented by Pablo Ziccarello, who presented the documentation of the last workshop carried out in Buenos Aires, plus a documentary about the events of December 19-20, filmed by a group of independent filmmakers. He also presented a new project that is going to be carried out in the next few months, Contexto. This new project includes all the initiatives in an effort to concretely generate the circulation of works of art and ideas making it a common experience to all. Starting in Tucumán and ending in Amsterdam, this project will embody, in a sequence of works, the idea of collaboration and interaction that constitutes the very basis of this network.
For many reasons, the star of the meeting was Ruangrupa, Jakarta’s initiative. Its main orchestrator, Ade Darmawan, was in Argentina last year collaborating in one of Trama’s projects. Ruangrupa is a group of artists who are truly interrelated with the whole universe of artistic activity, not only in Jakarta but also in Bandung and Yogjakarta –some artists from these places also participated in the debate. The strategies of Ruangrupa have focused on the innumerable ways of intervention that can be done in the public space, plus on the coordination of the activity of other groups of street intervention, in a display of extreme activity. But they also hold exhibitions –one of them coincided with our visit– and produce or collaborate in the production of video material, ranging from documentaries with guest artists to author videos made by any of their very young members. Ade, Indra, Oskar, Hafiz, Reza, Elim and the others express in their everyday way of life a communitarian idea that is perhaps the most accurate image I have in my mind of a clear example that other ways of doing things and of being artists are possible, and are already working.
Agung Kurniawan, artist from Yogjakarta; Agung Hujatnikajenong, curator and writer; Kees Hin and Bibo, already mentioned; Janwillem Schrofer, Els van Odjijk and Edith Rijnja, members of the Rijksakademie; and the writer of this article also joined the debates.
A special mention has to be made to Gertrude Flentge, coordinator of the RAIN project, who makes a veritable effort towards the proper functioning of this complex mechanism, so that it can move progressively forwards, a project that, due to its novelty, has no models to follow, thus having to generate its own paradigms of effectiveness and excellence.
At this point, the project faces its most difficult dilemma, because it has to deliberately look the other way and stop considering the beauty and quality standards usually sought. Otherwise, it would not deviate from the direction of the mainstream, which is consistent with a universe of exclusion that also rejects languages, that endless universe of deficiencies, uncertainties, weaknesses and babblings. In other words, it would exclude all that can be considered the true universe of differences, of otherness.
The debate on this arena can be exhausting, but to accept that this debate is possible is already a way of recognising that these issues have to be discussed, as deliberation contributes to a process of groundbreaking legitimation.
The riskier the experience, the less likely to produce results. But risk is the only way to break with the predictability of experience. However, there is an issue of responsibility, of professionalism –as the acute Kees Hin likes to point out– because paradoxically, the experimental model demands much attention, care and deferment. Because what we are always talking about here is deep feelings, profound personal experiences, lives that, well looked at, are always deep.
Unfortunately, I have to say that nothing of this was solved in this meeting. But also that the fact that we have reached this point of development in the RAIN project means that we have built a good portion of a yet unknown bridge, a task that had never been attempted at this scale.

Tulio de Sagastizábal, Jakarta, June 6th 2002