Obscura

In the chaotic aftermath following the collapse of Indonesia’s dictatorship, a team of researchers discovers a forgotten archive revealing a covert operation that manipulated dreams and memories.

The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.

In his hypnotic ‘Terra Incognita’, Timoteus Anggawan Kusno questions colonial power and heritage by stretching in the liminality of fiction, history, imagination and memory.

A young man sets out on a train journey along a railway route that was previously utilized for transporting sugar in colonial times. While taking a short nap, he encounters an unusual dance and visions from the past, drawing him further into his concealed ancestral memories. As he explores the deserted sugar industry in a dreamlike state, he confronts the spirits, wounds, and venom embodied in his motions.

A call comes from deep within a dream, recalling familial encounters with shadows in a photographic dark room. Haunting memories and ancestral ceremonies captured during the Netherlands' colonial rule of Indonesia come to light. As we see ways of life destroyed and farmers exploited to fuel the Dutch Empire, new layers of meaning and critical understandings of present-day power emerge.

A nineties documentary, investigating the tradition behind the ritual of Rampogan Siluman Macan, celebrated in Tanah Runcuk since the colonial era, that never saw the light of day due to censorship. Now, The Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies has remade this lost film, using the original interviews as its point of departure. Four short stories told by different informants shed light on the obscured history of this ritual from a variety of perspectives.