On Viewpoints
When your flight is about to disembark in Yogyakarta’s airport on a clear day, through your right side window you may catch the view of Ledhok Timoho from above, with the bridge as a visible marker of its location.
Then desire to orient oneself, whether it is from vertical or lateral perspective, as one mode of existence is underlined by Setu Legi in his engagement with the group of teenagers living in the wasteland. As part of Made In Commons wave of activities in Ledhok Timoho, he initiated a couple of workshops on drawing.
As the first step, a flag making workshop was held. While the pragmatic purpose of this workshop is to equip the people there with basic skills in drawing on fabric materials, conceptually Setu Legi also invited the youth to highlight the visual aspect of their subjectivity: where is their place within the existing environment, what do they want to visually represent in addressing their surrounding neighborhood.
The second workshop moved on to larger mediums. As a follow-up to Simon Kentgens’ project on the bridge to nowhere, he set up a ’larger than life canvas’ covering the other end of the bridge and asked the inhabitants to visually speculate on possible trajectories that the bridge would lead to. Through this event also he collaborated with them in painting their dwelling’ rooftops as away to accentuate the community’s presence to the flying passerbys. By doing all of these attempts, he posed ontological questions on what does it mean to stand somewhere, knowing where to go and bearing witness to traffic of movements? How does a place that is governed by invisibilized bodies like wasteland produce orientation?
