What Water Could Remember (2024-2025)
Yang Timbul dan Tenggelam serta Ingatan yang Terukir Pada Air
Sound engineer: Hengga Tiyasa
Installation of fabric and ready-made object, digital audio video projection
650 x 180 x 200 cm, 13 minutes
This work explores the dynamics of landscape and memory, inspired by the shifting landscape around the Gajah Mungkur Reservoir in Wonogiri, Central Java, constructed between the 1970s to 1980s. This multipurpose dam—designed for electricity generation, irrigation, fisheries, and tourism—submerged 45 villages and relocated around 50,000 residents for its construction.
In recent decades, remnants of these submerged villages annually resurfaced during the dry season. This cyclical surfacing and submerging serves as a metaphor for narratives and memories that never fully disappear, but instead depend on the momentum of ebb and flow. Like the dam’s waters, history is written by amplifying progress while drowning collective narratives.
When the waters recede, locals transform the exposed reservoir area into vast agricultural fields—a symbolic act of reclaiming land and its function from the state. Yet, beneath this act of survival, the constant ebb and flow gradually erode the remains of a civilization, turning them slowly into livelihoods. In this continuously shifting landscape, the tension between survival and remembrance becomes a fragile threshold.
Through layered transparent fabric that captures projections on each version and distortion, this installation creates a reflective space to examine how landscape transformation affects memory, strategies of survival, and reshapes identity.
This work has been presented in:
Makassar International Writer Festival, 2025
Padepokan Seni Bagong Kussudiardja, 2025
The Unconformity Festival, Tasmania, 2025
This project underwent a process of R&D and Creative Development in collaboration with PSBK and Assembly 197, Tasmania, beginning in 2024 with support from Regional // Regional, an initiative by Asialink Arts at the University of Melbourne, supported by The Yulgibar Foundation, Circle 5 Foundation, and Konfir Kabo and Monica Lim.