#bamboocurtainstudio

Zine workshop Uann-Thiap, initiated by Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taiwan) together with Bakudapan, KUNCI, and Lifepatch, facilitators : Annisa Rizkiana Rahmasari and Fiky Daulay.

Zine Workshop : Redefining Our Living Space

In this workshop, participants were asked to narrate their living spaces through writings and drawings with various medium. There were 8-10 people joined this workshop and told so many stories according to their experiences, journeys, and the way they interacted with communities or wider group of people.

I made my personal story about places where i used to live and where I’m currently staying in. Those 3 cities are Ungaran, Semarang, and Yogyakarta. Unlike Semarang, my hometown Ungaran located in higher area. This made the weather cold and calm. It is famous with its tasty meatball tofu. I grew up in this town for almost 20 years and hadn’t moved a bit. There is a mountain near where i live but no one really knows whether it is still active or not but when i was in 2nd grade all the student in class were used to to jogging and seeking fresh air also because this mountain is well known as clean water source for all people in town. When i was in senior high school, i began to visit Semarang more often mostly because i met new friends and there are lots of activities to do in group. Semarang then became my second home, i stayed and interacted with other friends in our community house, we did almost everything there, and in 2012 i began to visit other cities to exchange stories, artwork, and having new experience in face to face with something i never knew before. Since that, i fell in love with small trip. The feeling when you see places through your train windows, and the songs played in your ear through your headphones. All of them are mixed up into some nostalgia that wanted to be repeat over and over again. Even better when tranquility is the one who company you along the way. There is one thing i never want to forget, my diary. Filling it up with memories is one of the most basic exercise on hand writing. We know that before everything exist we always have our first best friend, and that is a diary.

I began to join Hysteria art community in Semarang at 2010. I made zines and at the same time friends at Hysteria already made heaps of print out documentation of their activities since 2004. Later on we work together in various project, from personal until communal activities. Another collectives in Semarang who works on similar print out projects were Karamba Art Movement (visual archive collective),and Laci Kata (Indonesian literature collective). Started from the idea of cuteness and destroy, in 2011 i released my first zine titled Au Revoir. My journey with Hysteria and print out movements gave me so many insights and perspective of independent documentation. It needs 5 years for me to fully understand, to collect glitters and flakes in the art of zine making. And within that year, my favorite activity in documenting is random - structural writing.

But still, it is rare to see independent tangible documentation being used as medium in academic studies. Unless you are a person / collective who has deep interests in writing / print outs, then independent publication is, a strange thing. I think, underground movement made point on this one, by creating idea to make our own media. Then we don’t have to rely on something that is unreliable. We have to train ourselves to make our own world and fantasy, where we can build a security because information out there is no longer as secure as it used to be, for example. And creating independent spaces has the same amount of building a survival kit for us and for wider group of people.

Back in September 2015, i joined an art / science collaborative event held by Lifepatch where i met lots of multidisciplinary artist / makers. It was hard at first to thought about how to make a collaborative project where you didn’t even know about anyone? So this idea came to my mind, being in a collective or community is a matter of making friends. The main aim to be part of this project was to know, to get closer to anyone, to find things that relate to what we do, and found a new idea through it. It turned out that we put friendship as main priority rather than what kind of project that we were about to make. One of the result is, all of us become friends until now. It is even funnier because we finally realize that we don’t have to have that awkward feeling in order to make projects with other group. 

Being in different places gave us different insights, people are different too. Therefore, our abilities to make friends / to connect is required in order to exchange stories or information, also to relate with new group. This is a natural phenomenon, and we as modern homo sapiens are expected to widen that concept of culture, a new learning and creating process that can give an alternative solution. Therefore i found that collaborative process is able to double the power of creative creation. Collaboration is a practice of two or more people who work on different fields but having the same energy, understanding, and goals toward something. The process itself requires process such as, making friends, brainstorming new ideas, adaptation to new conflict, and final result. Each person must balance himself with the other, oftenly this practice can be found in a community where different heads has different egos, and for some reasons this is so challenging yet so fun!

Last, this Uann Thiap workshop wanted us to explore that living space / interaction with people experience then document it inside our own zines. And after it finished, another persons can read it and tell, “Hey, i thought i was the only one!”

Such a cool day.