Aliansyah Caniago's Residency Program in Luzhunan
In the second year cooperating with Luzhunan village, we decided to invite Aliansyah Caniago to Taiwan, which makes our artists-in-residence programs a special project as it includes more interactions with the local community. In this lecture, Caniago will talk about his past projects in Indonesia and then move to the project “Catch the Eels” that he did in his two-month residency in Luzhunan village.
With a background in painting, Caniago’s practice has expanded into the medium of performance as a need to engage with the urgencies of the everyday and to work with and speak to a wider community. Questions of identity and environment, tradition and modernity have been at the core of his work. The notion of ‘landscape’ has always played an important role in his practice and he engaged with it in different ways. In several performances, he explored the close bodily connection with the landscape, how people can blend in or stand out, how people become part of the environment or an extension of it.
The artist have been looking into ‘landscape’ also as his immediate environment defined by urgencies and concerns. This has been the driving force of the long-term project, Titik Balik that continues at present. Since 2014, Caniago started to work with the community of fishermen in Ciburuy, a small village located 22km far from his hometown Bandung. In the past years Situ Ciburuy, the lake around which the villagers settlements were established and which constituted a source of the local economy, was heavily polluted. This process of degradation is partially connected to the activity of a factory where more than 50% of the Ciburuy inhabitants are currently working. The activity of fishing has been replaced by the work on the factory, leaving the lake in a state of neglect, forget fullness and lack of purpose. As a self-initiated project, he decided to spend time and engage with the local fishermen activities. his work unfolded in several stages, an important moment being the act of recuperation of an old boat. The boat belongs to one of the fishermen but due to lack of use has been left derelict and buried under the water. With the fisherman's consent, he pulled the boat from the water and together with other fishermen, artists, and dragged the boat from Ciburuy to Bandung on the dry surface of the asphalt. They walked on the highway built by the Dutch during colonial times, part of a major modernization plan driven by economical interests that has radically shaped Bandung and the way its locals relate to their environment till now. Caniago also developed this work into an installation but also into a series of landscape paintings, a way to mediate and translate the performative actions into the still realm of the image. The project could be viewed as an on-going and wider reflection on the relation between tradition and modernity, the relation between man and landscape and how they shape and subject each other.
The project “Catch the eels” is the new project that is going to happened in Luzunan. This well known folk rhyme depicts the collective memory of the old farming generation; meanwhile, most of the young ones barely experience it. How to rouse the the awareness of local tradition? How to extract the embodiment of relationship?