NOTE: This harvest is mainly keywords and partial recollections…Good to rewatch the video registrations of the symposium day(s) (online ASAP)
Introduction to the day by Anita Halim Lim (on behalf of Museum Arsitektur Indonesia)
Shifting currents: Added temporal layer, coming back to a place where you have been before. Diaspora as richness, negotiation as bridge.
Home as archipelago, connecting and dispersed. Vocabulary, tools and artistic practice towards shared futures. Sensitivity as a local architect. Harvesting some of the words that resonated: surplus, composting, accessibility, well distributed, informal knowledge, choreography, village, polder, translation, fragments, sedimentation, reading, rewriting, compressed layers of time, reconnecting with family’s past, resistance.
Session 3: Debts and Bonds in Design Legacies
Chairs: Setiadi Sopandi and Robin Hartanto Honggare
Speakers: Amanda Achmadi, Sandro Armanda, Nashin Mahtani and Mohammad Nanda Widyarta
The construction of buildings and infrastructure in colonial Indonesia was often an extractive enterprise, dominated by Western-trained experts despite its reliance on local resources and technical skills. Roads, railways, bridges, canals, offices, factories, warehouses and research facilities provided the necessary tools to integrate the colony into the global trade network and modern monetary system, while at the same time perpetuating inequality between colonial authorities and local subjects. This fundamental feature of colonialism suggests that Indonesian-Dutch design legacies, which are deeply rooted in postcolonial societies, should be assessed not only for their technical and aesthetic contributions, but also for their social, environmental and financial implications. In this session, we ask: What extractive conditions produced colonial architecture? How have these conditions shaped building practices since Indonesian independence? How can socio-economic and environmental approaches shed light on Indonesian-Dutch design legacies? And given the uneven conditions that define colonial spaces, what debts do ‘we’ owe to the past, present and future?
Notes: To confront a problematic past means going beyond the confines of traditional study, considering the role of architecture and design in difficult pasts.
Goal: Aesthetic, socials, environmental implications caused by material changes and to revisit structures.
Examples: Road (Grote Postweg) caused Dutch to establish control and ‘cultuurstelsel’.
Sugar plantations and factories – reshaping Javanese agriculture.
Village system created by the Dutch colonial state – arrangements of peasants and loyalty not bound to a place. Forced marriages. Dessas.
Industrial society, indigenous labourers caused social stratification. Wage labour system oriented at production introduced a new architectural typology.
Interesting additions in the introduction by Setiadi Sopandi and Robin Hartanto Honggare: Industrial society required indigenous labourers, it introduced social stratification. Wage labour system oriented at production introduced a new architectural typology.
Amanda Achmadi
Research work focusing on the revisiting of the formation of built environments, labour and commodity. Through a network of connectivity across borders while empires were consolidating themselves. How we mediate and facilitate the emerging cosmopolitan in the Asian Pacific. Researching the Royal Packet (?) complicates the understanding of the geography – moving across multiple colonial empires. Mutual awareness, awareness across geographies, of the Dutch East Indies.
Exploration of social history of our built environments. Transnational and intercolonial. Labour migration from where the plantation was already known. Our colonial pasts are much more connected, we need to learn to listen to histories and experiences of moving across borders.
Mohammad Nanda Widyarta
Where did the preference for concrete come from, post-independence? Reverberations of colonial policy and foreign agents.
Nashin Mahtani
Reframing the life-giving features of the flood as a crisis – seasonality and anticipate to live safely. Art of paying attention, Isabelle Stengers. Rationalising colonial authority. Segregation access to clean water. Mastery and control and what it means to be a modern citizen. Hygienity. Tillema.
Whose expertise and who is eligible to make decisions? Who is eligible as a citizen? Inherited design legacies.
Inherited design legacies that we try and make sense of, many different modes of sensing. Chain reaction and non-linear time. Take our collective responsibility. MOU Dutch Government – flood risk, great Garuda. Normalisation of urgency, contemporary politics, seeking to exercise distinct forms of control.
These are ways of thinking that continue to shape the way we build our environments. Erasing diverse and local knowledge systems.
How do we regain epistemic diversity?
Sandro Armanda
From the post road to the waterways to the polder to…
Conversation
Call to not smooth out commodity and material connections. Do big infrastructure projects invoke certain imaginaries to the population? Forms of resistance that came out of infrastructure projects. State building agendas – identity
Pride? Poetic collapse. Disciplinary diversity. Way to live with predefined structures. Intangible impacts. Dutch agenda: from aid to trade. Expertise is contextual. Dutch bouwbesluit. Set to fail? Self-determination.
Move beyond what heritage objects proper are, and think of things like floods