Transit space in Jakarta

On Tuesday, September 9, 2003, I headed for Jakarta to take part in a project initiated by some friends who worked at ruangrupa. A group of artists was asked to live in a public housing project and an apartment complex for about a month. Following is a few notes I gathered during the course of the project.


I ARRIVED in Jakarta at around 11 AM. As always, just as the train stopped the passengers streamed out in a river off the carriage. The trip from Bandung which took more than three hours seemed like a reason enough for the people to rush in a hurry and melt into Gambir rail station routine, before disappearing into who knows where. I paused briefly at the taxi stand, lit up a cigarette to get a ‘breather’. One by one I watched the people leave the rail station. At about the same moment, a new group of people arrived with nearly the same expression. Just as they arrive, they disappear again into who knows where.

Arrival and departure, it looks as if this is a recurring procession for a city like Jakarta. Almost every moment people come and go, moving from one place to another. Filling up terminals, streets, malls, highrises, to small houses in every city corner. They appear in crowds like ants, to disappear and be replaced by another troop of ants. In this city it seems people are always on the move, filling every parcel of land, corner of building, segment of street, and every house which in turn become just a transit place. A place to pause, to later on continue the journey and make this city alive and pulsing, like a living and breeding organism.

Transit space in Jakarta, a temporary space which is becoming nearly permanent. An imaginary territory that extends into nearly every corner of Jakarta. In this space, the everyday reality is always filled with all kinds of currents from one place to another. In Jakarta we find people who have to be constantly on the move to survive. No different from Nomads who spend most of their lives migrating for survival. There is no truly permanent space here. Even a bedroom can become a transit space, just like an office, a mall, café, buses, cars etc. Transit space in Jakarta is an imaginary space constantly changing shapes and is full of boisterous sounds. Frankly, this makes me wonder, what kind of story lies behind every building, concrete wall, street and corner in this kind of city.

The cigarette is out. I have to continue the trip to Tebet, to meet some friends at ruangrupa. In the taxi, I took the time to read the notes e-mailed to me a few days ago. For the next month, I was asked to accompany a group of artists to work in a specific location in Jakarta. One group will stay in an apartment, while the other in a housing project. In my mind, this project would surely become some sort of a personal study analyzing any situation encountered during the project. By Indonesian standards this could be interesting, since having a vertical dwelling as a place to live is a relatively new habit here. Most Indonesians are used to living in earthbound houses, which are not usually stacked on top of each other.

There are seven artists taking part in this project. They are Arjan van Helmond, Anggun Priambodo, Dimas Jayasrana, Henry Foundation, Reza Afisina, Tomoko Take, and Teresa Stok. We started our activity by doing a series of presentations and discussions to get the picture of the habits of each participant. Exchanging experiences, ideas, and a few specific thoughts about this project. The variety of personal biographies of the artists offers a chance for a very interesting dialogue. Among them is our discussion about the concept of home. As a collective space, a house can be understood as being a piece of varied narratives. Not just a roofed building with rooms, windows, and doors. A house is a social territory that has a relation with personal memory, which on a different level can become an extension affecting patterns of relation, imagination, and expression, privately or collectively.

The following days, the six artists began to fill their activities with a series of observations, gathering and documenting experiences, and attempting to build a relation with housing project and apartment residents. Arjan and Anggun who lived in the housing projects didn’t seem to have problems in connecting with their new neighbors. This is indeed understandable, because the social interaction patterns in public housing projects are relatively more fluid compared to the situation in the apartment complex. It appears that privacy and security are understood differently in either places. While in the projects, privacy and security is a social relationship pattern based on a loose collective consensus, in the apartments, privacy and security is translated into a series of rather strict regulations and territorial boundaries. Maybe we can further explain this issue by considering the social background and the collective narrative of housing projects dwellers and apartment residents.

In this project, each artist performed an investigative process with varying personal approaches. Occasionally there’s a common point that enables them to do an activity together. Anggun let the process move fluidly and simultaneously. He gathered visual marks and every so often interviewed the housing project dwellers with a very casual approach. Meanwhile, Arjan seemed to try to build a more intimate communication. Not merely attempting a verbal connection, he also asked the projects residents to draw on a piece of paper where each of them used to live based on personal memory and imagination. At one instance, he invited children who lived there for a drawing get-together. Each child was asked to draw a house. The results were very impressive. The children drew houses not only with different colors and shapes, but also with metaphorical and highly imaginative depictions.

The artists who stayed in the apartment showed a different response and approach. Tomoko started the project by interviewing people she met around her, with a simple question about a house/home. Then she tried to collect photos of people she interviewed. Sometimes she asked these people to be photographed with objects that have personal meaning to them. From several interviews gathered by this artist, apartment dwellers typically did not see their place as a home they would live in all through their lives. For some of them, it seems that an apartment is just a transit space filled with hopes and dreams, about an ideal house represented by their collective imagination.

Unlike Tomoko, Dimas seemed to enjoy observing the situtation in the kampong near the apartment. The distance between the apartment and the kampong appears to have affected Dimas’ expression to be bleak and cold. In one of his works, he created a postcard with a building landscape dominated by black and white. This was also felt in Henry’s work featuring the text “WE ARE A PART BUT WE ARE APART”, which was distributed throughout the apartment environs in small stickers, t-shirts, and slide projections in and around the apartment. The presence of this text surely implies an irony when superimposed on a partitioned and unfriendly apartment building.

Reza decided to do a series of performances in the project presentation session. Using a backdrop of buildings, music, and available equipment, he uttered his personal notes of his stay in the apartment. For me, what Reza expressed more or less suggests a feeling of tension, boredom, and personal conflict. He tends to view the apartment space as a collective place composed of various contacts which are inseparable from friction and conflict patterns. A different form of tension can be found in Teresa’s work series, consisting of digitally processed images printed on a photographic paper. Teresa presented images of buildings, streets, and other objects she encountered during her stay in the apartment as a loose collection of objects. For almost an entire month, she filled her days commuting from the apartment to other places in Jakarta. From inside the car, every road, building, and impressions she encountered on a daily basis is a collecton of layered images, which sometimes touch or overlap each other or even get tangled up in a chaos.

In several notes I gathered, the daily reality as an index of lived experience, has surely affected the patterns of relationship and existing social consensus model. Working for almost a full month in a specific location such as a housing project seems to have encouraged the artists to accommodate the collective desire present in their respective places. All through the project, they intensively delved into issues associated with the problem of housing, with all its problems. Although this project didn’t result in a definitive conclusion, one thing I found interesting to note is the emergence of several personal biographies that live and are present in housing projects and apartment. Every building curve, road section, parcel of land, including every space in housing project and apartment is a collection of narratives filled with subjects with different histories, complete with a load of expression that are personal or collective in nature.

To close this article, I would like to contemplate one aspect of this project that I think as salient, i.e. the tendency to conduct surveillance on an area that has so far is considerably silent and forgotten in the studies on Jakarta’s urban society. Through the various offers unveiled by the artists in this project, at least the intention to deconstruct the multitude of narrations within such an extra-territory becomes important in order to complement our understanding about the realities of daily lives in the urban space of Jakarta. Therefore, we can say that this project has been successful in revealing spaces of opportunity to analyze the daily problems of the people in Jakarta and serves as a gate toward knowledge, although we still have to work on creating the path so that these problems can become a public discourse.




November 24, 2003 and February 15, 2007





GUSTAFF H. ISKANDAR was born in 1974. He graduated in 1999 from the Department of Fine Art, Faculty of Art and Design, Bandung Institute of Technology. In 2001, along with R.E. Hartanto and T. Ismail Reza, he founded Bandung Center for New Media Arts, an organization working in the field of research and development in media arts and multidisciplinary art practices in Indoonesia. In 2003, he founded the Common Room Networks Foundation (www.commonroom.info), an initiative managed by Bandung Center for New Media Arts and Toko Buku Kecil (Tobucil, or The Little Bookshop). Partnering with Reina Wulansari and some friends, today Gustaff works in Bandung, curates exhibitions, writes, and speaks in some discussions and symposia.