lørdag den 25. april 2015

'ARTIST IN RESIDENCY' YOGYAKARTA/INDONESIA 2015 no.2



I try to give in and just float and enjoy the quiet power

Time goes incredibly fast, even though I have let me lead with a tranquil flowing stream here in Yogyakarta, there should be the most relaxed and most artistic city in Indonesia.

One can not talk about work efficiency, but an emotional positive flow of benevolence meet one. I try to give in and just float and enjoy the quiet power, in an attempt to escape the hectic fire, which has traditionally been given my  blood to circulate faster when I start an installation project. It will take up a great deal in my mind when my thoughts are 100% focused on this.





I have now been here almost 1 month. And there are only 2 ½ weeks to the opening of 3 Installations. The stress has begun to fill my mind. I can not see that I will have enough time to properly try out the technical problems the Installations require because they can only really be tested after they have been installed.

I have begun to downplay my own expectations for that the project technically are going to work 100%. That's the idea, the visual there has to carry the project.

This time I thought otherwise, that I would have more time to test the technical finesse than I usually have, since I already started the day after I had landed in Yogyakarta, to seek out bamboo and ceramic workshops, to search for inspiration for the final details of the installations.




I have ordered bamboo for the Installation under the pergola

After a week of resources, I ordered the twelve, 6 m. long perfectly straight bamboo with a diameter of 14-16 cm. for the Installation there hads to relate to the magical space pergola covers of 9 x 10 m. The outline of the Installation I had designed before I arrived and demanded therefore only natural to be customized area.

Bamboo Workshop promised that I could come a week after and choose the bamboo I needed. I pointed strongly that I would only buy them if they were absolutely straight. He promised. They were also prepared to make the openings in bamboo.  

The bamboo came ofirst a week later. Nissak and I went out there because I needed an interpreter to translate my wishes regarding the cutting of the bamboo tubes to liquid.

Instead of twelve bamboo I had decided to use only nine. It was important that spectators should be able to move freely between the bamboo poles.

He had not ordered enough bamboo home, so it was hard to find bamboo with a thickness of 14-16 cm. on one end. I chose to do a little compromise on thickness and straight bamboo.

As soon as I had selected the nine bamboo, I started with the surveying of the openings in the bamboo since they said were individual. It was important for the opening, I took into account the natural articulations bamboo composed.







Cutting bamboo requires great expertise and knowledge of how bamboo works. For this uses the very few tools. I signed onto the bamboo how the slope of the cut should be.

I quickly gave up to do exactly the same slope. I let him do it by eye. We are half way through the day and the next day I take additionally alone to fix the second half.

As the first bamboo carvings were done and he had to cut it at both ends, I ask, if they did not use circular saw to make the cut completely in angle. No it did not. They could easily cut the angle, with their old saw. I sat on the other side of the bamboo to make sure that he now also sawed in perfect angle.





Bamboo is vibrant and different like humans

Here I was not really at home. I as a perfectionist should relax a little. Bamboo can not get exactly alike. They are like people, very individualistic in many ways and should be treated as such.

We Dane are in a mechanical and technological age, where everything is made completely identical. Here in Indonesia is it still the human hand and a trained eye that counts, creating production.

The leader of the workshop said they had had Japanese visiting who wanted to learn again to use hand tools to process the bamboo with, since they in Japan in many years had used machines for the various processes.

I had also to do a hole of 3 cm. in diameter throughout all the bamboo's, down in the bottom of the tube, with the help of a 6 m. long steel tube. Through these holes can I drain the water at each end of the tubes, so there may drip liquid into jars.

It is a joy to watch a craftsman who know exactly how he with individual tools process the bamboo.


I drew up the bowl 1: 1 so that she could produce a prototype




I was very intrigued by the black sooty pots and vases

South of Yogyakarta is a small enclave of pottery workshops and shops for tourists. At one of the workshops, we saw a kind of open oven burning of various clay pots and vases. The smoke from the furnace burning filled the whole street with smoke at a time, so you could only see a few feet ahead.

The amount of stacked jars and bowls, where the utmost was completely black sooty inspired me to want to use black sooty bowls, with the bound in weather should form the global circle, which I in my sketch paper had thought would be formed of coarse salt. Upstairs the sortsodede bowls I will form a circle of 12 bowls facing upward filled with salt, which is created by concentrated salt water, where the water has evaporated and thus forms a salt crust.

I inquired about the price of 200 pieces. bowls that were burned and sodes black on 2 sides. The price of 200 pieces hand-thrown or molded would be the same, so I chose to get them handmade to give them a more personal touch. (1 1/4 $. for one)

She did not have to check the height and diameter was correct. They might be a little different as us humans.








The production of the bowls are constantly being pushed out

Firing process and the production of the bowls were pushed out as constantly. After three weeks, they had only produced 30 pieces. sooty bowls.

After my experience with the bamboo workshop, it dawned on me that the Indonesians pushes and pushes time and agreement to the next week and next week.

With the help of Nissak I had to use big words to let them understand that now they could not push the process further into the future. I need 200 bowls more, could they deliver that.

She asked if the last 200 pieces could be made in a mold. She was probably running a little sour in the repetition of so many identical thrown bowls or else it would make the process easier, as another person could cast them. OK by me as I just could mix them with the hand-thrown.

She promised that they could be finished just ten days later April 5. I did not believing that they could hold the deadline with the pace they had so far shown.









Bought 18 jars to the Installation with the hanging bamboo. 1$ each

My son Zabel came to make a short visit from Thailand, which was absolutely wonderful and gave me the option of a natural break from my project. I allowed myself to focus on something else, namely to be a tourist. He stands in front of the Sultans Palace.  








I keep four days off to be active tourist

We start to see the Sultan's palace. Yogyakarta has a special status in Indonesia. The region is controlled by a Sultan who is the governor and thus participate actively in politics. The palace was built around 1755. The current 76-year-old Sultan lives in this white building, a very simple palace.

Hinduistiske stentempler ’Pramabanan’















The next day we drove 20 km. on the scooter out to the historic group of giant Hindu stone temples 'Pramabanan'. They are built in the middle of the 9th century. About 50 years after the second great Buddhist temple complex Borobudur further away from Yogyakarta.



One Sunday I was out with Fauzi, on the photo and his artist colleagues out and see them fish in some closed breeding ponds near Yogyakarta. I'm vegetarian so I just enjoy the nature



After 3 weeks of intensive preparation I got  an assistant

After 3 weeks and the day after my son left Indonesia, I got a assistants.

In the first phase of 3 weeks of my stay, I have concentrated on finding the workshops that could produce some of the important elements for the Installations, I had decided to do and get them customized in site and in the Indonesian spirit .

With the help of Nissak I have tried to find some of the materials and elements my 3 installations require.

Administrator Nissak

Indonesia Institue of the Arts  - Yogyakarta


Assistant Ardi

In this second phase, has Kersan Art Studio made sure that I have been assigned an assistant who the next four weeks will help me with creating and building the Installations.

Ardi is the first-year student at the sculpture line from Indonesia Institue of the Arts - Yogyakarta has offered assistance to all 4 weeks. He speaks fluent English, which is a tremendous help.

The agreement is that he fits his classes at the academy and helps me around 5 hours a day. I pay his gasoline transport, his food and gives him a small payment for his help.

The third Installation I have called ’Life Time/ Time Life’

The third installation, I have given the title 'Life Time / Time Life'. The Installatioen perfectly fits the inner galleri room, with the sunken black floor.


Life Time/Time Life


I have created a symbolic bamboo bed for Indonesian rice farmer who slowly falls asleep with the 3 most important tools that were necessary for his own and his family's survival through a long life.

In the beginning I was looking at different markets after a hoe and seal. It was impossible to find. So I asked the workmen on bamboo workshop if there lived an old rice farmer near here. We was about 10 km. from Yogyakarta center, so we was at the countryside. Maybe I could buy his worn-hoe and seal.





There lived a former rice farmer and his family nearby, so along with a bamboo craftsman we visited the rice farmer. My assistant Ardi explained the rice farmer that I very much wanted to hear and see which tools that had been the most important for him as a rice farmer through his life and his hat. His proudly showed the three main tools that had followed him throughout his life as well as his indispensable hat.


Rice farmer and his tools. I could not bring myself to ask him, if I could buy his tools, there over a lifetime had been his companions, to my Installation. I would not take the chance from him, proud to show his grandchildren the few essential tools that have followed him throughout life.

Jacob

Close by Kersan Art Studio, I saw a rice farmer named Jacob come walking with his hoe on the shoulder. I asked Ardi to ask him if he had an old hoe or seal which he do not used more and therefore had no objection to sell for my artwork.


Yes, he had some seals and an old hoe we could get. We agreed that the next day we would visit him in his house. We found his house and he found an old hoe and a few seals. First he had said that we could get them, now we could borrow them. But when I had to paint them, it was a bad idea, so I asked if I could buy the 2 seal and the rusty old hoe. I could buy the rusty hoe. He demanded more than what a new cost. The 2 seal he still use sometime.

Ardi said that it was typical Indonesian. They say something and later something else, they have difficult to decide. At the same time it is encoded in the culture that you have to be friendly and therefore promises and say something that has no basis in reality.

We stopped another farmer near a river he was about to clean for plants with his seal, he might, had an old seal or hat for sale. He had some seals, which he on his little scooter drove home after. I bought both seals of him. Now I lacked the rice farmer hat.

Next day I saw close to Kersan a rice farmer hat, pretty worn, hang lonely on a fence as if it had no owner. Later in the day I drove with Ardi back to see if it still hung on the fence and some owned it. We asked some neighbors if they knew of the hat. They thought that it probably was a rice farmer who had forgotten it.

It look tired and just right, the way it was hanging there and looked after his owner

In the rice fields just outside my door, there had to be one of rice farmers who had a used old hat, they no longer had the great emotional relationships to. But I found it hard to ask them. So I got Ardi to ask a few of them. One would come next morning at. 8:00 with a used and worn hat. I offered him a high price, to be sure that he appeared. It had a large hole in the top. Maybe it's too strong a picture with direct hole in the head.


Awangs tools

This symbolic hand seal, seems still to be inherited, as it is used in all gardening and the tool is almost impossible to slide into pieces. Fauzi, who I lived with before, also used the seal in the garden and here where I now live at Awangs house, I discover that he has two seals and a hoe and an old rice farmer's hat. He has given me permission to use his hat. But even if it is very tender of rain, it do not looked worn out, so it is still hanging for decoration.
    



life container

Ceramist who made my bowls, could not undertake to make the kind of big jars I had designed and carved in a cardboard model 1: 1. She referred me to a young ceramist who pretended to be an expert in turning large pots. He wanted to do one first, but could not promise that it was 100% identical with cardboard model. My requirements were that the opening was 8 cm. so I could get into the jar with my arm and adjust the drop system and the system for the rope. The red rope had to disappears down the middle of the jar. The first model he has turned up, looks fantastic beautiful in the form. The next three was similar to the first, only a trained eye can tell the difference in shape and size. He is one of the few that time has complied with the agreements. 
  
Symbolic red soil

Underneath the symbolic bamboo bed, I will make a symbolic spiritual soil mound of red colour powder.

Colour Powder seems to be impossible to find in Indonesia. The type of powder the Hindus in India, is using in religious rites have been forbidden to sell in Indonesia. Some Indonesians have used it in cooking. You can only buy powder in liquid form.

Hindus in Bali use not colored powder in their ceremonies. You can find powder, but it is used for cooking and for dyeing fabrics. So I bought powder. With a teaspoon you can color 30 liters in the reddish consistency, I will use as the symbolic blood color.




Rain and more rain, the humidity hanging in the air

It's only a couple of times that I directly had drive when the raindrops strikes as large hail. It feels like they're going through the rain cover and labeled as massage.

Now I sit in the rain under the pergola and enjoy the idea that I've got a bit more control over the various work that I do not really control.

I try to relax, I have time and I have now also received an assistants that help me translate all the different instructions and questions.

I swing a bit in the stress levels, it is hard when you have so little control over the worksituation.

I have now been here in Yogyakarta 1 month. I thrive despite the heat, humidity and rain every day. I just think there have been 4 ays without rain.

Assistant Liflatul

I get an extra assistants on the project here two weeks before the opening

Lenny, director of the gallery and Artist in Residence program and is itself executive sculptor, has now arrived in Yogyakarta. She has her husband Michael and the smallest son Naufal with. The residents in Jakarta and is only visit for four days.

Lenny can see that it is a big project I have launched, so she offers me her assistant Liflatul there usually helps her in Yogyakarta. He is also a sculpture student at the same Art Institute as Ardi. He has just gone a few more years.

Lenny, which stands for the gallery and Artist in Residence program helps

I have found the solution to the drip system

I have wondered a lot about how I could get the drop system to function in an invisible way. For a while I looked for a form of dripping faucet, but it was hard to find and perhaps a little to big.

Maybe I could use the more simple system that you use when giving patients fluids through a drop system. I got it tested in a bamboo pipes. The pressure from the amount of water in bamboo tubes open vats. It got squeezed through a thicker tube, down to the very thin tubes, where I could place some sort of clamp, that reduces the flow of liquid down into droplets.



Using tact and sawdust seals roughly around the hole and then with latex as the final layer, all openings around the tubes running in bamboo touching he got 100% dense.

The drip system will work perfectly. I had a hard time finding the right solution.

I have been a bit lucky to get Ardi as  assistant because he is punctual and mostly comes to the time we agreed.

Liflatul is a slightly different type. I feel that he needs to feel more like a free bird that pops up when the time is. So he's not entirely to reckon with in the timeline.

Lenny's son Naufal have captured a small cobra

I have moved a little further out, where an echo of the silence occasionally can be heard across the rice fields

Right now the rain pours down, I did come indoors in my new home.

I moved from Fauzi to Awangs house (the Indonesian artist who made my Residency). It is a little further from Kersan Art Studio and a little more rural. Again, I overlooking a rice field.

Morning mist

The next morning at 6:00 am I enjoy my Yoga sesion for open doors facing north with the sun's rays from the east across riskornen.- Here is utterly quiet

Of course there is a mosque just 100 m. Away. Then again the show starts at 4 am, then it is good to have earplugs there take the worst treble. Out here I actually think that the imams are trying to do their blessing of Muhamed, a little more musical and harmonious. They have better speaker than in India. The mosques are so close out here, so I hear all three imams fairs across each other.

So quiet is here compared to my former home. I hear only a faint undertone of traffic noise. Lovely again to feel the silence around you.

At 7 am the silence, however, get broken when one farmer after another placed their bicycles and pushcarts just outside my open doors to freedom. It is now harvest season. I thought that I out here would have some very quiet mornings where I could sit and write before I went to Kersan Art Studio. The road that ran outside Fauzi windows was incredibly noisy. When the small scooter and cars sped past it sound as being close to a main road.


Slightly fascinating to see each farmer go with his seal



Here it is still animal and human, not machine and man, there work together

The thick red rope haunts

From the beginning, I have been searching for a red rope with the thickness of 16-18 mm. In all construction material stores we visited, they only had blue and green plastic rope and only 10 mm. thickness. 

Plastic rope of 16 mm. is no more being dyed in red on the local factory here in Yogyakarta, only in green and blue.

It has taken a lot of energy on my part to push Nissak to call around and contact the factories we have googled on the Indonesian websites also outside Yogyakarta and ask for a red rope or white rope as  alternative. We can get the robe colored, just not in plastic.

There has to be thick red rope in Indonesia with 250 million people who all have different needs. Nissak has now also got her sister Ani who study textile designer to help us.  

It is very important that the ropes for suspension are red, as they symbolize vein. They must also have a certain thickness in relation to the bamboo and the relation to the visual viewing. They must not only be thin lines in the air.

A few weeks ago we were lucky to get hold of a merchant who was in possession of 200 m. Red and 16 mm thick. The day after we checked up with regard to payment, Nissak got told that unfortunately they had come to sell it to another customer.

I try to tell Nissak and Ani that it is not because I want to be difficult, but when you work with few elements which I do, these elements visual expression is important for the whole. When I have an idea that a particular material, will be right in the context of the other elements, I have always fought hard to obtain this material by calling around. Several days of hard work phone can suddenly pays off. Unfortunately, I have not the opportunity to call around because I do not speak Indonesian.

To give them an understanding of how important this red rope is as well as other elements  in my Installations, I compare it to that Ani, I can see is very into fashion, in a week have to be at a large important bal. This evening, she has decided that she will try to be the evening's queen. She knows how much it means to find the right dress, the right shoes, the right color and jewelry if she wanted to stand out from the crowd. She will not only look in the local shops, no she will go online and search and she will go on until she finds the right thing, if she really, really wantedbe the evening's queen.

As an artist I have with this exhibition also that idea that I wanted to be the evening's queen, I wanted with this exhibition to stand out from the crowdme from the crowd. That is why I am fighting so hard to find the right elements, because I know that if all the details are well thought out and worked out, they are helping to create the sublime whole.





Toxic red clouds moving through the sunlight created by the spray gun

I tried to remove from the red color and the toxic diluent clouds  traveling through the sunlight created by the spray gun in rhythmic movements create a deeper and deeper red surface on bamboo.

I bought some masks for them. The spray paint is very strong and they usually do not use protection.

The paint is extra glossy finish. I can not find paint that is not blank. Afterwards we can give them a matt lacquer.

They have nowhere where these long bamboo can be sheltered from the rain, so they have built a temporary covered space, a little sheltered from the rains.

Bamboo poles are beginning to change shape

Finally they got cleaned the bamboo completely after a few visits, so we could get started to spray paint them.

The bamboo's has already begun to change some form. They were from the beginning fresh and a some a little green. Now after more than a week they're dry slightly through, bamboo fibers pulled them a little differently skewed. Since we also have opened them all the 250 cm. the middle to the liquid, they dried faster than they normally would, which certainly has affected them so they are a bit more quirky.  

Because I slowly had got use to the picture, that ​​bamboo were like individual people, it was no great disaster. I had to learn to live with,- that I in many ways was 'Lost in translation'.

For Bamboo Workshop was my whole process and processing of bamboo brand new, therefore they could not had 'informed me of was happening with the bamboo. They do not really know what I was doing. So they do what the Boss says, who hopefully knew what he was doing.

From the start I should have chosen twice as many straight and identical thickness bamboo sticks, which I needed. Place them vertically and fill them completely with water and let them stand for a few days. I understand that it will strengthen the bamboo. Then they had to dry completely (probably 2 weeks). Then first I would I select the best nine bamboo. First then they would be ready to withstand the opening of 250 cm. length and the ends could then be cut.

First now then bamboo would be dry and ready to be spray painted. The problem in this heat is the paint dry quickly on the surface and thenwe give them several layers of paint. It will of course have difficult really dry through and harden. Every time there came a heavy downpour of rain, what happened every day, work had to stop and the bamboo had to be covered.


They gave me coffee, a chair and stool and appeals to me now as boss

Although everything somehow float, I still think that I have the overview. I actually enjoy the processes, although they sometimes are a bit grueling. For example, we are forced to show up at Bamboo Workshop, otherwise they started other projects. Only when we show up, they continue to spray paint. I am also forced to squeeze them a little to get them to do a fairly decent job.  

Rice farmers bamboo bed is braced with steel in order to stabilize the balance. It requires a different pressure when using a rigid material such as iron. Not something a bamboo craftsman like




Artist who gives her oppressed sisters one voice abroad

Some weeks ago I stopped by an exciting new gallery, where a naive artist exhibited portraits. The artist Dewi Candraningrum denied all the time that she was the real artist and thought that she can not draw and paint. Yet she exhibits at a prestigious exhibition place.

Her background is academic. She has studied anthology and work in this field. So she has a more intellectual approach to creating art. She has chosen a socio-political approach to through painting and art to express her inner frustration over social injustice in Indonesia.

Based on his own situation as a single mother, which is a very difficult social situation in the Indonesian culture, you then belong to the excluded groupe. She has chosen to paint portraits of young women who have been raped. She is trying in this way to give the oppressed sisters one voice abroad.


Portraits of raped women
The portraits of the young women who have been raped, are painted with strong bright contrasting colors, which together with the frightened wide eyes, seems very strong and intrusive. Her naive and expressionistic style reminiscent of Emil Nolde.- dramatically simplified and highly emotional.


Portraits of female straight Icons
She has also chosen to protrættere female icons and self-portrait.

Drawings of single mothers
She has also made drawings of single mothers with their child and provocative nude drawings, when you consider that you are in a Muslim country.

Portraits of male icons and her own son
She has also chosen to portray male icons / people she admire example Jesus and her own son.

Portraits of family members
to some of the 500,000 -1,000,000 communists who were brutally murdered by the army after a failed coup attempt 30 sept. 1965. The communists were accused of the attempted coup.

The gallery is called Song Kring Art Project and is a very exciting exhibition space att Beirut has room for a few artists as Artist in Residency.



In Yogyakarta are there about 20 different galleries and exhibition sites that offer artists from developing country, especially from the Netherlands, since it until 1949 was a Dutch colony, the opportunity to exhibit and be Artist in Residency.

Since there is no real art museum in Yogyakarta, there on a private basis in Yogyarkata has been created 4-5 cultural centers, built up in a traditional style, in addition to exhibitions they also convey other arts.

Some of the artists there are doing well financially, feel that they have an obligation to also support other colleagues, so some of these residency are created to artists.

It is also natural to use colleagues as an assistant, as a way to support each other.
It's like that here in Yogyakarta, has been a kind of prestige or trent in creating Residency and Cultural Houses. A very interesting cultural development.


Yayat Surya

Abdi Setiawan

Abdi Setiawan

Awang Behartawan

Awang Behartawan

Fauzi As'ad

Fauzi As'ad

Desraf Fianda

Desraf Fianda

Taufik Ermas

Taufik Ermas


I have gone into the last important phase where all the elements of two of the installations must be coupled finally together, and only then I can check and see if the drip system function. I think and hope it will.

Greetings here from Jogja as most prefer to call their city.

Bjarne v.H.H.Solberg