Garden Amidst the Flame (Natasha Tontey, 27′ 2022)

Garden Amidst the Flame continues Natasha Tontey’s ongoing research into the ancient knowledge, technologies and cosmology of the Minahasa, an Indigenous nation in the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia. In this most recent work, the artist emphasises core Minahasa cultural beliefs in the all-encompassing equilibrium between the human and non-human. Drawing on her experience of karai, a ceremony that grants Minahasan warriors an armour of invincibility, the artist seeks to establish a queering approach towards gender, youth and ecology.

Becquerel (Riar Rizaldi, 20’36”, 2021)

In an alternative future of Indonesia, when nuclear technology reaches the point of generating an artificial sun for endless energy resources, a lazy philosopher Sajad Ali wandering around seeks a place to sleep. Told in a semi-essayistic approach, Sajad Ali reflects the dynamics of nuclear technology in the future, the politics of materiality through the search for minerals such as thorium in Indonesia, as well as the complexity of nuclear issue in the tropics and its tension with ecology, energy consumption, nation-state, and productivity.

Notes from Gog Magog (Riar Rizaldi, 19’32” 2022)

An exploration of the interconnection between ghost stories, tech company culture in South Korea, and the economy of logistics in Indonesia told through a notebook/premake film and dossier of an unmade techno-horror feature-length film set in between port in Jakarta and an unnamed employee assistance programme office in Seoul.

Fossilis (Riar Rizaldi, 12’56” 2023)

What separates the Earth, mind, body and machines? ‘Probably nothing’ argued a future archaeologist. A glimpse into the far future: in search of the ultimate truth about the past, meditates with her brain-machine interface of a crude neural network, machine learning and virtual world-building, a paleo-media-ontologist—with the help of a researcher—digs and scavenging the imagination of the past to recontextualise and reflect what it is called fossil relic in their time; a mountain of invisible electronic waste buried in a tropical landscape of the South.

Of Other Tomorrows Never Known (Natasha Tontey, 15’54” 2023)

Natasha Tontey’s speculative fictional stories, Of Other Tomorrows Never Known, are about complex caring works entwined with an urgent need to talk with ancestors. They focus on spirits and how to renew relationships with them – spiritually, materially and technologically. In this work, caring is always entangled with the need to regain long-overdue respect for Indigenous principles, values and beliefs. However, built-in features of our lives are structured around histories of inclusion, exclusion and normality. Acknowledging the existence of multiple worlds accepts the risk of appearing illogical or incomprehensible. Tontey encourages us to embrace this illogical aspect of caring, which expresses a willingness to take further steps to let go of our dependence on established institutions to tell us what is primitive, modern, irrational and rational.

Episode 0: Metanoia – Prelude (Riar Rizaldi, 2023)

The film is the first in a series that reconfigures and interrelates two parallel modes of inquiry into the nature of reality. Formatted as a Hanna-Barbera and early Disney animation short set in the distant future—moving images format that is frequently used as tools of science communication in the mid 20 century, it rehearses a conversation between two cosmologists about the presence of God in atoms. Particle physics and Malay-Indonesian Sufi metaphysics are brought together as different expressions of the same human endeavor to grasp the transcendental in the material. The film positions Western science as one methodology among many in a constellation of pluralistic worldviews.