Jul 10, 2019
Photograph by Kassian Cephas, the first photographer of Javanese descent active during the Dutch colonial period.
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Photograph by Kassian Cephas, the first photographer of Javanese descent active during the Dutch colonial period.
“I often wish I had photographic equipment and was able to take pictures of our people - in ways that only I could do, not in the ways of the European. There are so many things I want to convey in words and in pictures so that the Europeans can see the true image of us, the Javanese.”
Raden Ajeng Kartini, Through the Darkness to the Light
“Completely outside this rich sphere of Balinese tradition is a comparatively small commercial traffic with tourism. Inferior carvings and paintings, special performances of music and dance out of their proper context are served up for the eager tourist who predictably is overwhelmed by the exposure. One might speculate that when greater political and economic stability is achieved in Indonesia, tourism in Bali will reach considerable proportions and that a much greater commercialization of the arts will result. Even in the context of this eventuality, however, there will always remain two worlds of the arts in Bali: that of the tourist and that of the Balinese.”
Mantle Hood, The Ethnomusicologist
Javanese artist FX Harsono
“Imagine yourself, with a passion for traditional textiles, walking into an antique shop in Sanur, Bali, in the summer of 1994 and finding a five-foot-high stack of wonderfully embroidered Balinese cloths that you had never known existed. I had already visited Bali more than a dozen times over a period of forty years and yet these embroideries were unknown to me. I unfolded cloth after cloth in amazement, feeling like an explorer who has come upon some great undisclosed treasure. I felt that as an outsider I had ‘discovered’ them, although I later learned they had been around for more than eight decades.”
Joseph Fischer, from the Preface to Story Cloths of Bali
“Ruben imagined turbulence to be like the dark border around the frames in a reel of film. As soon as the film is running at twenty-five frames a second the border vanishes; the separate pictures cease to exist; the connection between them disappears. In reality, turbulence works like a transcendental kitchen, not bound by time or space, endlessly intersected by a multiplicity of non-local signals, snaring all kinds of probabilities, potencies and quantum leaps. All kinds of definite and specific life soups are served from that kitchen; they make up the reality that we taste and smell. But even when we know the turbulence is everywhere - from the life of a simple bacterium to the myriad of interactions of the stars of the Milky Way - it is still difficult to fathom existence as a totality or the whole of existence. It is also difficult to see disorder as anything more than the crackle of a poorly tuned short-wave radio or the static on a television screen after the night’s transmission has finished.”
Dewi Lestari, Supernova (translated by Harry Aveling)
“‘Now we are free,’ Nur smiles. ‘And in an explosion of participation.’ He looks to Omi for confirmation. She is his wife, aide, and interlocutor; his anima, conscience, and constant companion. She, the wide-eyed one, nods. Her eyes are round and her face pale for a Javanese. She looks startled by the world she sees, but trusting nonetheless.”
Theordore Friend, Indonesian Destinies
“Tanah Air Kita is not a book for the scholar, nor is it to be considered as a text book. It does not wish to be propaganda literature; it merely intends to be an honest intermediary between the world and Indonesia...For several weeks our collaborators crossed the vast seas and islands of Indonesia (some 735,268 square miles). This was done with the sincere purpose of promoting a better understanding between the world and Indonesia. We wish to express our great appreciation to the many field workers for whom no mountain was too steep and so sampan boat too unsteady to obtain valuable photographic material from the interior. May the result of their labors be accorded a favorable reception so that they will see their efforts rewarded and their goal attained.”
Niels Douwes Dekker, Tanah Air Kita (Our Country)