Asian Transformations in Action - Api-fellowships.org

136 REFIGURATION OF IDENTITIES AND FUTURES IN TIMES OF TRANSFORMATIONfragmenting of individuals and community, ironicallyre-emerging as individual voices cut off for three decadesfrom any continuity from groups, community and theidea of nation. They show up the stitchings of the fragileand porous entities of the nation state. In many waysthe post-65 containment, and at times brutal repressionof communities, sowed the seeds for the military’s andSuharto’s own downfall, precisely in the ways that itfeared (but could not foresee) in its own narrativizingof its identities, territories and borders, hidden by itsown obsession with the w/hole of history at LubangBuaya, of the communist specters and the PKI, and allforms of potential dissent, driving “other” voices andalternatives and resistances underground. This createdthe conditions of their own nightmares as in Darah danDoa and G30S for the enemy within, the nationalisttext.Yayan and Rudi’s form of video-making aims at acounter-hegemonic struggle at the level of practice,which goes beyond the frame of representations.What needs to be studied and understood is the entireprocess, right up to the screening and reception of thefinal product, as in what forms of dissemination theirworks take on and in what kinds of context. This, inother words, is to continue and translate the constructsin this paper, looking at in what ways they engage in theirfilm/video-making process spatially across communities,territories, language and cultural borders.Their form of video-making engages and defines theirpractice as instilling political and social awareness withthe issues which are localized, and in their workshopsthis form of engagement circumscribes and prescribesfilmmaking as political, and in so doing by raisingthe awareness in the process of addressing their issuesvia technology transforms the communities selfrepresentation.This form of empowerment that reachesout to the dispossessed, the marginalized and theforgotten, re-invigorates their practice and opens upthe practice of video making at many levels, redefiningand establishing new modes and forms of address. Theytranslate and transform the term inter-disciplinaryof cultural theory into, to cite Irit Rogoff “not assurrounding a chosen object with numerous modes ofscientific enquiry, but rather as a constitution of a newobject of knowledge” (Rogoff 2002) and practice.The current expansion and development in theIndonesian independent video/filmmaking scene has itsown hierarchy of which the kinds of practice that Rudiand Yayan are engaged in put them at the periphery ofthe scene.Their practices contrast but also translate and findmeeting points between theory and practice, betweentextuality and actuality, on the ground practice innarrating the nation. Looking at Rudi’s and Yayan’sworks reveals an aesthetic and practice removed fromthe totalizing force of the nation’s cultural expressions.They also reveal in their subject matter in the post-Suhartocontemporary scene a practice which aligns itself to theissues and ethics of representation in the matrix of intranational,inter and across communities and identities,those from the urban ghettoes to the peripheries andborders, where they “evoke the ambivalent margin ofthe nation space. To reveal such, a margin is in thefirst instance, to contest claims to cultural supremacy”(Bhabha 1990, 4). That they work at the most generallevel, if not under or “in-between” boundaries of race,religion, cultures and communities and those elementsthat constitutes the narratives of nation, describing thisprocess of hybridity as incorporating “new” people, orre-representing others “in relation to the body politic,”generating other sites of meaning that fall outsidethe cultural authority’s orbit, “and inevitably in thepolitical process, producing unmanned sites of politicalantagonism and unpredictable forces for politicalrepresentation” (Bhabha 1990, 4).It is in this respect that Rudi’s and Yayan’s workcan be seen to engage and highlight in their textualengagement and material practices the spaces in whichthe nation is written and re-presented, where to invokeBhabha’s insightful thoughts when he says “The ‘other’is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefullywithin cultural discourse, when we think we speakmost intimately and indigenously ‘between ourselves’”(Bhabha 1990, 4) highlighting authority and power’sneed to contain the narrativizing of the nation into lessof a fracturing and splintering entity but more towards asingular homogenizing force. It provides in some ways,important modes of operation, in answering Bhabha’squestion, “What kind of cultural space is the nationwith its transgressive boundaries and ‘interruptive’interiority?”This reading and analysis of culturally mediated textsand their productivities needs to be seen in this lightand in the light of ground practice.ConclusionsFilms and our relationship to films require engagementand our understanding of their narrative constructionsand organizing principles via our practices in space,the human subject as the location for the destinationAsian Transformations in ActionThe Work of the 2006/2007 API Fellows