Indonesia film enthusiast and archivist Hardiwan Prayogo is a resident artist at Rimbun Dahan in February 2024.
About the Artist
Hi everyone, I’m Hardiwan Prayogo; you can call me Yoga. I am a film enthusiast from Yogyakarta and a member of the Cinemartani film community. From 2014 to 2018, I served as one of the programmers for Bioskop FKY (Yogyakarta Arts Festival). I also worked as a programmer for the Festival Film Dokumenter (FFD) in 2019 and 2022. In 2019, I became one of the grantees of the Asia-Europe Foundation (ASEF) to visit Manila, Philippines, for research titled “Re-definition from the Bottom.” From 2018 to 2021, I worked as an archivist at the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA). At the end of 2023, I was selected as one of the participants for the 17th Crack International Art Camp in Kushtia, Bangladesh.
https://www.instagram.com/yogaprayogo27/
Email: hardiwanprayogo@gmail.com
About the Residency
My project at Rimbun Dahan is titled Ceritakan Kisah Tentang Taman Seperti Tak Ada Hari Esok – Tell Me the Tale of Gardens Like There’s No Tomorrow.
The tale about gardens in Southeast Asia is not a recent phenomenon, it has roots that go back before the waves of European colonial expansion. Traces of this narrative can be found in ancient texts, ranging from legends and poetry to reliefs on temples. In some ancient texts, we can find meanings attributed to gardens, primarily their role as resistance against graves (Setra). Graves are often associated with death and destruction, while gardens symbolize rebirth and renewal. Secondly, gardens often represent mountains (Ardi, Arga) and seas (Tasik, Segara), symbolizing land and water as the essence of life. Thirdly, gardens are seen as heavenly oases, places of retreat, meditation, asceticism, and taboo. In addition, Southeast Asian cultural scholar Dennys Lombard also touches on gardens as spaces of aesthetic and symbolic appreciation in post-colonial societies. There is an attempt to harmonize the syncretic life of the East with the European style.
During one month of residency at Rimbun Dahan, I sought a closer context on how gardens and neighboring lives are constructed in Selangor, particularly in Kampung Cempedak, Kuang. Here, I found many houses with spacious gardens. However, on the other side, some residents I met felt burdened by the upkeep of large gardens. One of the biggest challenges is to protect the gardens from wild animals such as monkeys and wild boars. This, of course, became the consequence that the cost of garden maintenance will be quite high. The larger the garden, the higher the price. This presents a dilemma in itself. We can see this as one form of the lifestyle change of contemporary society today. When gardens and fields are no longer seen as economic commodities, let alone the concept of sustainable farming, then the affordable solution for them is only two things: to clear the garden for building or to sell it.
Therefore, this project is titled Tell Me the Tale of Gardens Like There’s No Tomorrow. I want to invite people to collaboratively narrate their stories about gardens through the archives of texts and photographic works that I show. So, if someday these gardens are no longer in our sight today, at least the stories about them remain in the corners of our memory.
