Feature on PIPELINE

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE ANIMATORS
 
Indonesian artist Febie Babyrose (b.1985), Herbert Hans (b.1984) and Ruddy Hatumena (b. 1984), otherwise known as Tromarama, met at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) where Babyrose was studying printmaking, and Hans and Hatumena Visual Communication Design. The trio produces colorful and endearing works inspired by their immediate surroundings, contemporary issues and spirituality, often touching upon solemn matters through a lighthearted or playful aesthetic. Hans and Hatumena speak to Cristina Sanchez Kozyreva about Tromarama's early days, the cooperative process inherent to their art practice, and their practice development.

In 2006, the three friends teamed up for a workshop where they were commissioned to create a clip for the song, Serigala Militia by rock band, Seringai. They made a video animation with woodcuts, rather straightforwardly illustration the band playing, drawing their inspiration from the roughness emanating from the music and the lyrics. It took them a month and a half to realize 450 woodblocks for a little more than 4 minutes of stop motion animation video. The whole process was so labour-intensive, it inspired the trio's name. "We were traumatized by the experience," laughs Hans, "Then years later after choosing our name we came across the Greek meaning of the word 'rama' - 'view' - as in panorama, and thought that it was a good coincidence that our name meant traumatic view."

There were positive post-traumatic consequences for the group, however. After this first collaboration, Tromarama was invited to do more video clips, such as for the band, Rock n Roll Mafia and their song, Zsa Zsa Zsu, as well as show works as a group for the exhibition, Bandung New Emergence (2006) in Selasar Sunaryo, Bandung. The Mori Art Museum in Tokyo started collecting their work. "Life is full of surprise," smiles Hans. After a break, working in the advertising industry, the collective realized their first video with an original concept, Ting*, in 2008, and quit their day jobs to concentrate on their artistic practice.

For this video, the artists developed a narrative based around their own lives, at a point when they were trying to make space for pleasurable time away from the routine of the office. The porcelain tableware represents each of the artists. "The big one stands for Febie, the medium one is Herbert, and the small one is for Ruddy," says Hans. Creating their own sound, they have endorsed the personality of the cups and their specific tones when played as instruments, hence the onomatopoeic title of the work.

With regard to the media, Hans explains that "when we were starting to develop our own ideas, our computer skill were very bad, and we didn't have any proper cameras or any knowledge for using video cameras. We were trying to find other ways to make videos, such as stop motion animation. 80% of the process is outside of the computer. We call it our playground." Hatumena adds, "We feel freer to do stuff by moving things away from the computer. The computer limited us because of our low skills' level, but my moving things manually, it gave us the chance to play, and feel more intimate with the objects. Since our first video, with the woodcut and the buttons, sometimes it is like we are working, but sometimes it is like we are playing."

It was not until their Jogja Contemporary solo show, Kidult, in January 2011 that the members of Tromarama embarked upon developing philosophical inquiries and more sophisticated concepts in their collaborative works. Typically, one of the members will make a proposal, the trio then discusses scopes of meaning and the appropriate conductors for it. They draw on daily life such as as in Wattt?! (2010) - a work inspired by a high electricity bill where they imagined their electrical appliances organizing parties at night - and current affairs, such as financial scandals in Happy Hour (2010). "Our work is about the relationship between humans and their environment; the relationship between humans and about the human itself," says Hans.

Extraneous (2010), a rotoscoping animation made out of batiks, metaphorically explores the phenomenon of social networks. "You get this intimate feeling; you can feel that the person is really friendly and lovely. But in fact if you meet the person in real life, everything changes. You don't recognize the person that had met in the virtual world once you see them in the real world," explains Hans about conversation on social networks. As for the choice of the medium, Hatumena explains that Indonesia batiks were originally mostly brown in color, and then evolved into more colorful and intricate patterns, such as representations of birds, with the arrival of the Chinese to the North shores of Java. "When we look at the batik, we recognize that this is the time when the Dutch came to Indonesia; and this is the time when the Chinese sailors arrived. We can see a lot of history through the batik the batik clothes. We consider them as recording machines of history and try to use the batik as a media, like a recording media." Tromarama relays the concept of social network by creating their own pattern, using binary code 1 and 0 in the shape of the human eyes, only recognizable from a certain distance. Symbolically it points at the absence of eye-contact connection when dialoguing virtually.

In Pilgrimage (2011), they question the role of religious institutions in Indonesia, as they find that the media tend to show religion as being often used as a weapon to judge and punish those who are different. Using everyday objects, they investigate the position of the Creator in human lives, hoping to shorten the distance between the Creator and the Creation. "To make this video, we just brought our camera to our friend's houses. If we saw something interesting, we moved it and we shot it. There is no specific answer why we choose those objects. We wanted to use almost everything that we could find. The process is about the daily things around us," says Hatumena. They visited more than ten houses. "At first we used our own things. We bought some stuff. We ran out of things, so we went to our friends and tried to see something else." The cycling movement is a reference to religion and how it relates to the artits' lives - and is part of every religion - for example, Sunday church or the salat. "Repetition is the mother of studying," they note.

"A lot of people come to use and say that our work is fun, but most of the time we don't feel it. When you inter your work to be fun then somehow it is going to be dry at the end if you try too hard," says Hans. "We never discuss it […] it is an unconscious thing."

They are also often asked why they remain as a group, to which Tromarama responds with an artwork More we Less Me (2011), an installation of X-rays of the three of them. "Because through X-rays you can only see the bones, you cannot see the outside, like our clothes, our skin. It's in order to produce a new character called 'Tromarama'. So the important thing is not individuals but the group. So becoming 'we' is more important than being 'I' […] We never use the same media, or the same objects for the videos. That is also our character. We like trying new things."

Cristina Sanchez Kozyreva

PIPELINE / The Fun Issue / Issue 30 / Jun Jul Aug 2012 / page 36-41

http://pipelinemag.com/ 

Essay on MORE WE LESS ME

The group Tromarama, consisting of artists Febie Babyrose (Baby), Herbert Hans (Ebet), and Ruddy Hatumena (Ruddy), is probably one of the Indonesian art groups receiving considerable attention from the art public, nationally in Indonesia as well as regionally. Their works have been well received because they show novel approaches, revealing the spirit of explorations in terms of their media, and of moving across disciplines. Their subjects are closely related with the cultural lives of the youth, presented through the play of signs or symbols that are invariably enchanting and entertaining. Almost all the works by this Bandung-based group use the technique of stop-motion animation, combined with a series of installations using elements from their stop-motion works, which make a considerable use of manual skills.

Consider, for example, the work titled Ting* (2008), consisting of stop-motion animations using tableware: porcelain mugs, cups, and plates that come alive, moving humorously. In the exhibition, the group presented such tableware overflowing from a cupboard. Previously, the work Serigala Militia (2006), a video-clip from the eponymous Trash-metal band, uses stop-motion animations with hundreds of woodcut images. The group then presented the series of woodcut panels as a work of installation. Tromarama is quite a young group, but their works have been presented in a range of international events and institutions, such as the 2^nd Singapore Biennale in 2008. In 2010, they were invited to hold a solo exhibition at Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.

As a group, Tromarama naturally does not give emphasis to the solitary work of individuals, as would be expected for a single artist. The three artists work collectively in collaborations, involving knowledge-sharing, learning from one another, and creating consensus. Collectively, they form one entity motivated by a general concern or sharing a specific interest, or collaborating in certain projects. Baby explains that each individual artist in the group can actually propose ideas and with the consent of other members, the ideas would then be discussed and eventually put into action, giving rise to a work of art, with the individual artists having a distinct share of the collective effort. Armed with their experience of working together, they agree to present one special work for Asia One, Hong Kong International Art Fair 2011.

The work that they are going to present at Asia One is in the form of an installation of three crosses, with layers of radiographic or X-ray images of human bodies. The X-ray images are arranged over a plexiglass surface lit from below using a fluorescent lamp, making the X-ray images of the seemingly crucified body appear clearly. Between the three crosses there are texts saying “More – We – Less – Me”, which they also use as the title for the work. The white light on an all-black wall makes the work appear dramatic. This time, however, they do not present animated works.

The cross is a symbol taken from Christianity, referring to sacrifice. In the context of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, the sacrifice is intended for the salvation of the human race. With the three crosses, however, the Tromarama members have no intention to talk about religious values. Rather, the crosses are viewed as sacrifice in the context of the individuality of the modern human. It is especially true for art practices, in which an individual value is venerated and becomes the center of the universe (in the classic Cartesian concept).

Crucifixion, in this case, is present as an allegory for us to talk about the issue of the “sacrifice” of the artists in regard to their individuality and identity, as well as to their experience of working collaboratively or collectively in a group. The text under the crosses seems to confirm that “We” would be better than “Me”. The text seems to serve as a statement from each individual artist in the group, saying that becoming “Me” would not be stronger than becoming “us”. It is a strong statement about collective and collaborative work.

There is a link between the statement of “We” and the X-ray images. X-ray images reveal the different densities and compositions of the photographed materials. The projection of X-ray images on the transparent film layer over the crosses give rise to a distinct sense of alienation upon seeing the shape of the human body. The densest parts of the body such as the skull and the bones seem whiter, while the softer parts such as the flesh would appear more translucent. These are actually X-ray images of the Tromarama members, or you can say that they are a kind of “self-portraits” of Baby, Ebet, and Ruddy. To them, these X-ray images are a means to reveal their respective self identity. By capturing their body using the X-ray technology, they create a certain ambiguity about their self identity, even alienating them.

Today identity is a constantly-changing construction, unrelated to the conventional concept. The self is no longer related with a certain truth about identity. In the contemporary society, identity has become a complex and layered issue. The poet Goenawan Mohamad once wrote in his column: “The self or I was always born slightly out of match, or even splintered. The self is defined by names, and language is a construction of symbols created by the society. Identity appears as differences, and differences appear due to comparison. The comparison is always like an unbroken chain, between X and others in the world.” The self and identity, therefore, become fragile; they are areas that one can re-engineered or re-arranged, reconstructed, as depicted in the action movie Bourne Identity, or like the result of a face-changing operation, or even the more radical sex-reassignment surgery.

The X-ray images of the bodies of Tromarama members become the others, or the alienated self portraits, because they are no longer recognized as representing known people. X-ray images are unlike mirror images that present reflections of the real. Rather, they provide scanned images of the body, projecting arrangements and visual compositions with different intensities. Foreign objects that might exist within the body, such as metallic objects, would be captured by the X-ray. Can we actually recognize ourselves through the X-ray images? How far would we recognize the reality of our body? Perhaps we would still vaguely recognize our internal structure to a certain extent: the shape of the bones or other physical marks that we carry.

The X-ray images reflect an irony of the era, as they are the antithesis for human representation. Goenawan Mohamad once wrote about it, too: of humans who are “in group, or in solitary, waiting for information. Not in Eleusis, but through the rays from the television, films, computer screen anywhere. I see, therefore I am” (Catatan Pinggir by Goenawan Mohamad, April 11, 2011). Today images of the self, identity and the apparent external look, are always celebrated, commoditized, circulated, unceasingly and without limits, uncontrollable. Over the crosses, the body is crucified, marked with images of bones, with white light, and in several parts we see compositions of translucent images of objects. The bodies are present seemingly as the representation of the dark, empty selves, all bitterness and emptiness. The body returns to the nadir, and skin and flesh would come to nothing. Human is not special.

Is this the reality: the negative of the body, or the formless self?

What Tromarama presents through the work is different from what they have made so far, since they began their artistic career in 2006. This is the first time for them to create a highly personal work, presenting a statement of who and what they are, with their “identity” over the crosses. It presents the image of the self, full of sarcastic and ironic signs and symbols. The statement of “More We Less Me” might serve as an antithesis or negation of the existence of modern humanity that we have celebrated so far, or it can also present a play of signs or talking of the meaning of the portrait today, when the body has become a commodity.

Rifky Effendy, curator

References:

1. http://tromarama.blogspot.com/. Accessed in April 2011.
2. http://caping.wordpress.com/. Accessed in April 2011.
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiography. Accessed in April 2011.

Essay on KIDULT

WHEN PLAYING IS NOT ONLY A GAME

Not many people paid serious attention to concepts about playing. Playing is always considered to be related to hobby and have no significant value for life practices, only that it gives pleasure. Thus, playing is always related to pastimes, or leisure culture. Recent development had showed the shifting of role of playing as significant element in the creative industry, since this particular field always demands the new-ness, something fresh yet interesting. Younger generation of people has develop their passion on playing and hobby then encourage themselves to use the idea of playing as their main resource or artistic foundation.

Plays: Globality and Locality
Observing the artworks of the artists group Tromarama, I am inevitably impressed by how they play. There’s a new proposal on the concept and definition of the game itself. With fresh, humorous approaches that still challenges the imagination at the same time, I see Tromarama is representing a new and more personal approach to art, closer to the subject’s daily character.

The playful artworks of Tromarama enables for an intensive interaction with the audience. Working with three persons behind the screen, they are exploring on things close to their daily lives, with an imaginative approach and demonstrating high skills on technique and media all at once. Several artworks display a deep observation on daily objects with examples shown in Zsa Zsa Zsu that explored on buttons, or Ting* that explored on ceramic cups. A nearly balanced combination between manual hand-works in creating and playing with objects also the skill of processing the images with moving images, making Tromarama video works far from boring or exaggerating.

The ability of Tromarama to choose their approaches, including their seriousness in playing, seemed to be rarely found in other young artists of the same generation. A few times I observed, the artworks of many young artists, especially those who worked after mid-year 2000, what is called as non-political valued produced more arbitrary and incomprehensible artworks. Compared to the previous generation of artists who seriously processed social-political issues and making it a part of alignment and involvement attitude, younger contemporary artists tend to explore personal themes, related to their personal life experiences or reflecting what they see in their surroundings. Some of them successfully display their interpretation of the slogan “The personal is political”. While in term of the forms, they tend to adopt various visual tendencies that easily be found in other parts of the world. Because of the vastness of possibilities being “same and similar”, issues of “multiplied identity” becomes something that accompanies the exploration of the young contemporary artists today.

Now, in my point of view, Tromarama’s artworks seem to summarize the all-complicated demands into one proper and adequate form. Even though most of their works are not talking “the big narrations”, we could see that their works based on concept that is clearly articulated in their artistic practices. What is also important to be noted, working with a medium where globalism and internationalism is something nearly certain, with specific manner Tromarama managed to create an identity with their own way. If most artists are referring to identity as something local, where something local occasionally or simply refers to traditionalism, Tromarama is infact spared from this type of stigma. What so called ‘locality’ thus being reflected from the ideas, background or the narrations they built, not merely in the forms and aesthetic choices. On the choice of medium and narration, we could see in Tromarama’s works, we do not feel a sense of uniformity tendency that recently easily found in the works of young generation of artists. Their visual sensibilities clearly reflect their total involvement in the global youth movement, marked with the do-it-yourself spirit or the fantastic cross between the rebellious and the mainstream, the high art and popular forms.

*****
Tromarama’s quick rise in the Indonesian contemporary visual art does feel like giving a new energy for artists of the current generation, especially after they succeeded participating in many exhibitions of the international biennales, submitting their artworks in exhibitions in prominent contemporary art museums in several countries. Recently, they were the first Indonesians exhibiting in the Mori Art Museum Tokyo, Japan. I think their energy and creativity had given a quite important contribution in our contemporary art for the last decade, especially when we’re talking about new media art.

In the development of the market dominated Indonesian art, the absence of an authoritative institution related to the variety of medium and discourses, new media art tends to be seen as a marginal since its beginning until today. Although new media art had proven itself as a footpath to a global art, yet in reality public rarely seen a media art exhibition being organized with adequate quality, and presenting the important position of these medium is related to discourses and the aesthetics.

Their solo exhibition, KIDULT, presented in Tembi Contemporary this time is their first solo exhibition in Indonesia, which I think will be refreshing experience for Yogyakarta audiens because their display models are always interesting, creative and imaginative. In the midst of the bustles of preparing for insistent exhibition invitations, they return with a characteristic humorous irony: since the beginning, we can find from the title they chose. Kidult is a mix of two words; kid and adult, two categories that had always been seen as a binary opposition, standing apart from each other. Yet, in this exhibition Tromarama showed how both are complementary and intersecting categories.

They are recollecting the visual creation techniques learned as kids, as part of school lessons, which was more like a game. After an After, for instance, are created from a series of images worked on with a simple stencil technique, like the one taught at elementary school. Although this artwork speaks about something ‘spiritual’, an image of life after death, yet it was done in a light imagery with many spaces for interpretation. To create this artwork they dig for references from narrations developed in religions, or the scientific approach in science. With a minimalistic inclined visual model, this video shows the skilful handworks of the makers. Life after death is depicted more as imagined fragments, shreds of an event the audience must put together.

The same technique and approach are found in the work Borderless, made with embroidery technique turned into an animation. In this work we are taken in an adventure into the world of imagination that breaks our common order of logics. The concept of time and space is manipulated and played at, so we’re free in deciding how we’re moving and manifest ourselves in a space.

Another video, Wattt?!, utilizes a model of photograph moved using a stop motion animation technique. This video makes use of the daily items in their rented house, by taking the desk lamp as the main character. The nearly six minutes video is exploring elements of lights in our daily live, underlining the contradiction between dark and light, between the game and function.

The adult and the kid, these are juxtaposed not in theme alone, also in approaches. Like they had stated: It turned out from the discussion and experiments, we have deep interests in things that are childish or coming from the world of children. All the childhood memories are coming back in our age which had gone over half a decade.

We miss things that are pure, honest, the feeling of not scared being wrong. Choosing to see something and then mix it with imagination instead of considering and matching it with the already formalized knowledge in mind like adults do.

(e-mail conversation with TROMARAMA)

*****

This exhibition underlines the exploration of Tromarama in new media arts, especially related to various visual techniques and possibilities. When most video artists are concentrating on using the camera to record the reality, their effort to keep working with hands is a form of dialectic with technology. Technology is not accepted as something given, but reinterpreted, redisplayed with a new approach. I am thinking, in the midst of the simple narration they develop, I feel this might be a space of rebellion they’re offering. Is technology had created a distance between us and the memory of the past?

Alia Swastika

** This essay is published in TROMARAMA's solo show "KIDULT" catalogue. Published by Tembi Contemporary. Date of Publication: January 6, 2011

Curatorial Note (VideoZone V)

You and I, We’ve Never Been So Far Apart: Works from Asia Program 1

Positioning Asia, in particular Southeast Asia, beyond geographical borders, is more often than not a self-conscious exercise in constituting a unified field of practice characterised by commonalities that are held in opposition to a similarly constituted ‘other‘ – the ‘west’, or the rest of Asia (such as China, Japan, Korea and India for instance), that has as its purpose, the marking of difference. Given the sense of peripherality that Southeast Asia is associated with, culturally and economically, an obliging exoticism is generally seen as the least painful of routes. However, nonspecific differences bracketed into an imaginary category of ‘Asian-ness’ of the region, implies a fundamental unity that is simultaneously made contradictory with assertions of the cultural specificity of each nation state, where both the shared and distinguishable are if not non-existent at the level of its individuals and member states, are at least deeply problematic. Yet that is not to say the regional and nation state paradigms and narratives are not useful and efficacious in navigating within a global setting such as an international exhibition that expects it. It is thus with a certain disquiet that a few recent video works have been selected, less for their representativeness, and more for their ambiguous and inflected modes of expression within their own contexts. Nevertheless, such an undertaking is not without potential conflict of its own, as a selection is made of video artworks by artists who live and work in this ‘region’, with little effort given to expanding the category (as it would not challenge the form of mapping) – with an artist each from Hong Kong, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, and it is likely that casual readings will inevitably slip into formulations of ‘nation’ and ‘Asia’. While appearing to acquiesce to, and perhaps unable to escape from, this familiar mapping, an attempt is made to complicate a predictable conclusion: not all nation states of Southeast Asia are included; a couple – Vietnam and Myanmar, are deliberately privileged given their relatively less prominent cultural and economic visibility; the work of the Japanese artist is by virtue of collaboration with the Vietnamese artist; and Hong Kong, as a Special Administrative Region of China, is not of the Southeast region, yet it has a certain affinity with other parts of Southeast Asia given its colonial past. The desire for juxtaposing these artworks thus is to allow for other readings to emerge, to create a condition for reading, and not the reading itself.

In a witty re-staging of a previous work The River of Ink (2008) at The Future of Exhibition: It Feels Like I’ve Been Here Before presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore, July 2010, Shubigi Rao’s de-gendered and de-ethicised alter-ego, S. Raoul, is killed in a most banal fashion – “In what appears to be a tragic accident, S. Raoul tripped and broke his neck while attempting to negotiate space in a cultural context. The obstacle responsible for the fall is believed to be a collection of artefacts, survivors of violent acts of cultural genocide, collectively fished out of the River of Ink (also known as the Dustbins of History).”^[1] Rao’s pithy summary of the mortal dangers of immutable cultural contexts highlights the perennial problem citing ‘Asia’ as teleological defence for presentation, if not its explanation. The question that needs to be asked is therefore less ‘what are artists doing’ in Asia, but ‘what else are artists doing?’ Ambiguous manifestations of cultural context, a burden alleviated by increasing reflexivity (a burden curatorial texts have a tendency to exacerbate), mark the video artworks selected. Deliberately loose, curatorially speaking, these artworks play on notions of distance, separation and proximity of assumed cultural contexts, in an attempt to produce aesthetics of dialogue, of shared yet individual subjectivity, exchange and influence.

Broadly, and briefly, the curatorial intent is for the selected video works to present as a whole a less trenchant view of the artists’ national and regional contexts than they could be made to seem to have, thus allowing the works to demonstrate with subtlety, sensitivity and humour, the true condition of the artists’ practice. Another conscious deliberation was for the video artworks to have a certain purposive employment of sound, music or ambient noise, though more to create an audience experience that would be highly sensitive to non-visual suggestion. In terms of subject, a few loose themes emerge, a sense of space (and time) in Hayati Moktar’s Penawar’s unhurried and muted observation of the clearing and closure of a family estate in Penang, that stirs with its sense of loss and longing. The home of multiple generations that has been the setting for family weddings, parties and social gatherings which various prominent public figures of the time attended, in Moktar’s hands, seems almost impossible to be emptied out; and Universe Just a Fathom by Tin Win Aung and Wah Nu, a reflection on Buddhist ontology that is inspired by invasive medical technologies, creates a compelling journey that escapes its simple visual aesthetic. Likewise, the collaboration of Japanese artist Takayuki Yamamoto and Vietnamese artist Hoang Duong Cam, On Each Milestone, fuses a fictional quest for an unspecified object with documentary research on an ethnic group, the Raglai of the Kingdom of Aman, now part of Vietnam, focusing on a Raglai musician’s performance not only of Raglai’s tradition tunes but also popular international tunes at a naturally preserved park.

Two video artworks explore notions of influence, drawing attention to the assimilation of cultures rather than resistance: Ho Tzu Nyen’s EARTH (((radio))) borrows from French post-Revolution aesthetics while sampling music popularised by the expanding American music culture and industry in the 80s and 90s, its far-reaching effects felt by his generation growing-up in Singapore; and Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook’s The Two Planets series presents conversations and observations of Thai villagers encountering paintings by Jean-François Millet, Vincent Van Gogh and Édouard Manet, with the villagers themselves the subject of Rasdjarmrearnsook’s own monumentalization of rural folk.

Finally, on a lighter note but still on the topic of the blending of cultures, methods and imagination are Kwan Sheung Chi’s doing it with Chi… making an Exit Bag that caricaturises instructional home television programs popularised by global media with a more dire recipe; and Indonesian collective Tromarama’s Happy Hour, reminiscent of children’s fiction where objects come to life, depicts money on holiday, cheerfully forgetting their other more solemn role. While the banknotes are Indonesian, the tune they sing to is traceable to other historical and cultural trade and influence, that illustrates how economies in Southeast Asia are dependent on larger more powerful markets.

The selection of video works by these artists collectively defy reductive and simplified evaluation, and it is hoped that as the title suggests, beyond stock cultural characterizations and bland universals, different readings will surface that then serve to indicate that cliché differences and similarities aside, the distance between audience and artist (and between artists) isn’t so far, and perhaps did not require the artifice of mediation, of nation and Asian-ness, after all.

Curated by June Yap

Independent curator and write based in Singapore, previously with the Singapore Art Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her curatorial work and research focuses on contemporary art practices in Asia.

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^[1] In Passing: Visionary Felled by Tragic Misstep – Tragic death of Author, Thinker and Inventor S. Raoul allegedly caused by tripping over cultural artefact, Time Machine takes you to September 2006, Shubigi Rao “No Cover no Color” (2006) and “The River of Ink” (2008).

**This curatorial was taken from here.

How to Turn Trauma into Video Art: A Brief Story of Tromarama

How many people are willing and able to transform a traumatic experience into creative energy? Not many, presumably. Among the few are three art students from Bandung Institute of Technology, Indonesia—Febie Babyrose (a.k.a. Baby), Herbert Hans (a.k.a. Ebet), and Ruddy Hatumena—who have successfully come through a traumatic experience and made it into the start of a career in video art.

The story of this trauma began in 2006 during their last few semesters of university. Their days had become boring, perhaps because everything they did, all the assignments, had become routine. One day, a group of alumni and artists in Bandung (who formed the video production collective Cerahati Artwork) hold a series of workshops. They invited the participants—mostly university students—to appreciate and learn about the technical aspects of (music) video making.

Baby, Ebet, and Ruddy took part in these workshops as something new to do that moved them away from their university routines—at the time they knew one another but had not formed a group. Both Ebet and Ruddy were enrolled in the Visual Communication Department. Ebet specialized in advertising, Ruddy in graphic design. Therefore, both were comfortable working in the fields of animation, video, and film. However, Baby was far removed from these fields as her major was in printmaking: “They (Ebet and Ruddy) were the ones who introduced me to the works by the artist/film director Michel Gondry,” she later said.

The workshop gave the three of them new skills in the processes of video as a medium and an opportunity to make new work together, but also became an experience that the Tromarama members dubbed “a traumatic experience,” and which spawned the artistic name of the group.

The ‘trauma’ was experienced while completing the their first video project together, which involved producing over 400 woodcut panels to be used as the basic visual material for a highly-unique music video clip for the trash-metal group Seringai, titled Serigala Militia (2006). The woodcut images were transformed into moving images using stop motion animation.

They felt that the visual style of video clips by other participants in the workshop were largely homogenous: using a video camera, with similar visualization and presentation/staging. They wanted to produce a clip that maximized all the possibilities presented by the medium, while using ‘simple’ materials. Therefore, the trauma of creating hundreds of woodcut panels was actually their own doing, a result of their own choices.

For one full month, in the midst of completing a range of other university assignments, they worked towards finishing the video clip. Their collective name was based on this experience—the word ‘trauma’ was turned into the rhythmical sounding name: Tromarama.

Their hard work was not in vain however as Serigala Militia is indeed a unique and intriguing video clip. The combination of handmade images with rough lines, contrasting colors of the brownish yellow plywood panels and the black background form scenes of broken movement. All of this works in harmony with the pounding beats of Seringai’s music. This clip launched Tromarama’s careers as important members of the latest generation of video artists in Indonesia; whose work feels fresh, different, and captivating.

***

Video art, among a range of new media art, has long been recognized in the Indonesian contemporary art landscape. Bandung—the city where Tromarama live, work and studied—has a special role in relation to the development of video art in Indonesia, especially at the end of the 90s and in the early 2000s.

Krisna Murti is one Indonesian artist who has been a forerunner of video art and has untiringly worked to introduce video and new media art to Indonesia. He also lives and works in Bandung.

In 2002, Krisna Murti initiated and organized the first international new media art event in Indonesia; the “Bandung Film, Video, and New Media Arts Festival” (BAVF-NAF). This event captured the spirit of a new generation of artists in Bandung who held a great interest in video, film, and other technology-based new media, whether analogue or digital.

In the early 2000s, there was a proliferation of groups of young artists with similar interests in video/film/new media art, collaborating with one another within a network. Some of them only existed for a while before merging into other groups; some remain active today.

Some of these groups deserve to be given greater attention. The Bandung Center for New Media Art was established by a number of young artists in 2001. They hold discussions and video screening events and link artists with other communities from a variety of backgrounds, enabling them to collaborate in interdisciplinary projects involving three main disciplines: art, science, and technology. There is also the VideoLab group, who hold monthly video screenings in public spaces on the streets of Bandung. These events go by the name of CinematicLab. Another noteworthy group is VideoBabes, who share a more-or-less similar pattern of activities and the same focus, video art.

In short, in the early-to-mid 2000s, there were exhibitions, video screenings, and events in this area (“Bandung Music Video Festival,” for example) almost every year. In 2006, this development of video art and new media in Bandung was documented in a video compilation titled Bandung Timeline 2001 – 2006.

Another important event during this time was “Beyond Panopticon: Art and Global Media Project,” which took place in 2004, consisting of a number of video screening events with an international scope. This was organized by the young artists from the VideoLab group (Herra Pahlasari, Andri Mochamad, Prilla Tania, and Jordan Raspatie). What was rather special about this event was the venue. The event was not held in an art gallery, or any other venues that usually host arts and cultural events, as at the time there were almost no art galleries that were bold enough to present video works exclusively and routinely. It was therefore natural for the young artists working with new media to seek out or create their own spaces to start interacting with a wider audience. Therefore “Beyond Panopticon” was held in a mall selling electronics and computers, the Bandung Electronic City mall.

This choice of venue correlates with the social, economic, and cultural issues that were characteristic of activities of the youth and artists in Bandung at the time; similar situations could also be seen in other big Indonesian cities.

After the economic crisis hit Indonesia in 1997-98, bringing down the authoritarian New Order regime of Suharto, Indonesia entered a period of prolonged social, economic, and political crises. The economic crisis put pressure on middle-class urban Indonesians. The middle class youth dealt with the economic crisis by seeking out and taking part in a range of creative activities which then formed the basis for a ‘creative industry’ relying on social networks to distribute its various products. In Bandung, the range of activities was truly extensive. Some of these youngsters created and produced different functional objects based on simple product designs and computer software, as well as films, music, and videos. In Bandung, Yogyakarta, and Jakarta, many of these small enterprises are still going strong.

Technically, all the creative-productive activities were made possible thanks to the easy and cheap availability of computers and all kinds of pirated software and films in Indonesia—notwithstanding controversies regarding copyright. This provided the hardware and software to make graphic and multimedia work as well as access to thousands of films, from the past and present.

Meanwhile, the demise of the authoritarian New Order regime brought Indonesia into a process of democratization. The Indonesian middle-class gladly welcomed political freedom. Today, everyone can express their social, cultural, and political interests and needs. The production, distribution, and consumption of information has become accessible and open to anyone.

All of those factors led to the emergence of a highly independent new generation of artists working across disciplines and depending on their own vast social networks—globally and locally­—with a good grasp of IT and new technologies. At the same time as this was happening in Bandung, similar communities were also emerging in Yogyakarta and Jakarta. This new creative network has been widely exposed to the Indonesian art public through OK Video, a biennial international festival which began in 2003, held by ruangrupa—a community of young artists based in Jakarta.

Since Krisna Murti held “BAVF-NAF” in Bandung in 2002, video art in Indonesia has grown to be quite extensive in terms of its players and audience. The members of Tromarama have grown out of this political and cultural environment in Indonesia.

***

The video clip for Serigala Militia first caught the public’s eye when it was presented in a group exhibition, “Bandung New Emergence #1,” in 2006 (Selasar Sunaryo Art Space, Bandung). From then on, Tromarama were given opportunities to create other video works, such as Zsa Zsa Zsu (2007) and Balonku (My Balloon, 2007).

All three music videos—Serigala Militia, Zsa Zsa Zsu, and Balonku—were created using ’unusual’ materials. Serigala Militia was made of a series of hundreds woodcut panels; Zsa Zsa Zsu, of arrangements of thousands of types of buttons with a myriad of colors; and Balonku, of a series of collage images using colorful bits of paper. These three music videos were the group’s visual interpretations of existing songs by others. And it is only in their work Ting* (2008) that they started to think of the narrative, visualization, and audio/music aspects as a whole.

Ting* was also made using stop-motion, affirming Tromarama’s confidence in creating video works using this technique, and at the same time showing their courage to keep on trying new things. The cheerful video depicts a range of white chinaware taking a walk in the city, before eventually returning to their ‘dormitory’, the kitchen cupboard. The work’s strong presence was enhanced by being screened within an installation of hundreds of real chinaware pieces.

These first four video works made Tromarama’s name and gave them access to a variety of video screening events and subsequently to art exhibitions in many galleries in Indonesia. However, they were not immediately convinced that the production of video art could have a bright future in Indonesian art.

After graduation, Ebet and Ruddy left Bandung for a while to work in Jakarta, while Baby stayed in Bandung. The future of the group became unclear, so much so that the 402 woodcut panels used to make Serigala Militia were almost destroyed. The hundreds of woodcut panels were a burden for Baby, who had to take care and store them while she was living in a small, cramped rented house in Bandung. Thankfully, the panels survived and the work was exhibited at the 2^nd Singapore Biennale in 2008. After this, invitations to present their works in a variety of exhibitions came one after another, from inside the country and abroad.

Prior to its exhibition here at the Mori Art Museum, Serigala Militia grabbed attention in the “Philagrafika” exhibition in Philadelphia, U.S., leading to a number of local and regional collectors expressing their interest in collecting Tromarama’s video works. All of these factors have convinced Tromarama to keep on working.

Currently Tromarama is still creating increasingly intriguing video works, as well as a number of installations. During an interview with me, the three of them agreed that the choice of media and form, whether video or installation, is made—often after long and fiery discussions and debates—because the media are considered to be the ones that can most aptly convey certain messages.

It is clear, however, that in the context of recent developments in contemporary art in Indonesia—which is still dominated by paintings and sculptures—Tromarama, with their video works, seem to represent a new generation increasingly open to, and familiar with, a myriad of new media to express their ideas and experience.

Enin Supriyanto (independent curator and writer, focusing on Indonesian contemporary art)

** This essay is published in MAM Project 012: TROMARAMA" catalogue. Published by Mori Art Museum. Date of Publication: August 1, 2010