Nuraini Juliastuti (2018)
Natasha Tontey’s art practice relates to the world of ghosts and the genre of horror. While such things might drive some people to move away and avoid any conversation about it, she is curious and eager to look at the various sources of fear. Tontey has explained that the main reason of why fear takes center stage in her works is because she tries to understand the power structures behind it.
KLENIK FACILITATOR
Javanese ghosts, or the ghosts in the realm of the Javanese people, rely upon its visibility on a medium. The medium is usually an orang pintar, which literally means ‘smart person’. It refers to a person who is known to have knowledge of spirits and ghosts. In everyday discourse, he or she might be attributed differently—a dukun, or paranormal. The orang pintar plays the role of mediator between the human beings and the spirit world. The spiritual world is surrounded with an aura of mystery that not every human being is able to comprehend. There are good ghosts and bad ghosts; the latter of which tend to disturb human beings. Or rather, these are ghosts that are trying to retain what they have lost and caused their forced or unwanted death. The human meets the ghost in various moments of unexpected encounters. It is unexpected because humans are fearful of ghosts. This is the situation where the dukun needs to function and give services; it provides a certain way of communication and settling things down.
It is useful to think about Tontey as performing the role of a mediator. This relates to the idea of klenik facilitator. Klenik is a Javanese word which refers to a practice, or belief, which values and relies on the mythical-self-assembled structures to explain a situation. It is perceived as something that borders on fiction, an imaginary world, detached from the facts. The explanation always seems to be obscure, strange, and bewildering. Rather than defining it as irrational, I tend to see it as an alternative way of coping with certain condition.
In practicing facilitation, she developed various forms of infrastructure to serve as a meeting point where people can share their ghost experience and perspectives of fear. In Familiar Strangers (2014), she provided the space for those with the psychic powers to contribute their expertise to the wider public. She based this work on the stories which she collected from the people who have experienced encounters with the ghosts. They are the ghosts who are believed to exist in Cemeti Institute for Art and Society building. With the assistance of the paranormal, she produced six portraits of the ghosts.
This is a provocative step because Tontey attempted to fill in the mysterious gaps between the human and spiritual world. While mystery filled with fear pervades the gaps, the curiosities to see the actual face of the ghost, or to have a sense of knowledge about it before becoming a ghost, is strong. Everyday myths indicate that for various reasons, the ghost needs to show its presence too. My stories of growing up are also partly made up of stories about the presence of a ghost, which means as both the disturbance for and the guardian of a certain place.
What does it mean to show the visibility of ghost in an exhibition space? Further, for what purpose does Tontey use the idea of ghost?
In Familiar Strangers (2014), The Cautionary Tales (2015), and Little Shop of Horrors (2015), it seems that the ghost stands as some sort of uncontrollable-haunted fear. These projects discuss the shared fear that feels real. It is the kind of fear produced by the mixture of facts, urban legends, gossip, and hearsay. Here, the ghosts lived in the traditional sites such as an empty building, seemingly abandoned house, and streets.
In The Cautionary Tales and Little Shop of Horrors, Tontey went further in her spiritual facilitation practices through designing and reconstructing the meeting place between what is usually regarded as reality and fiction. Tontey has an education background in visual communication design and to be able to convey and explain a particular idea in a specially designed object and space is something she is familiar with.
Tontey created performances and site-specific installation to materialize the physical representation of the spirits. In this case, re-enactment is the key. An actor in a ghostly costume walked around the Sie Kee Gie intersection across Maga Supermarket and Cemeti. Motorcycles, becak, cars, buses, and passersby, looked at the actor-ghost. The people in Tontey’s projects are made capable to witness the appearance of ghost. The actor-ghost looked at the people and everything that was around. It reversed the unexpected nature of the encounter between them.
I wonder whether the intended encounters disrupts the stability of the zone lies between the human and the spiritual. Or perhaps it satisfies public curiosities of anything that remained invisible otherwise. It indicates that re-enactment is a remedy to relieve a sense of communal fear.
I asked Tontey whether she communicated with various ghosts in Javanese—given the fact that many of her exploration about the ghost take place in Yogyakarta. I presumed that all the mythical being in the city speaks Javanese. And because I understand that she was born and grew up in a family in Jakarta, which does not speak Javanese. Tontey replied that she does not speak Javanese—though she can say some patchy Javanese sentences and imitate the East Javanese accent.
SHOPPING AND WEARING FEAR
Tontey has been directing the visual identity and creative outputs for Satan’s School for Girls brand. The name derives from the 1973’s American TV film classic, Satan’s School for Girls. The brand defines itself as a company to produce various wearable casual items with “bizarre and eccentric design.” To wear a t-shirt, embellished with simple texts such as Maria, Satan, and Santa Sangre Sodality, should not be considered quirky or weird. On the contrary, it can be a new sign of cool as well. Part of the coolness comes from the all well-designed products of this brand. To connect it with Tontey’s obsession with the appearance of the spiritual beings, the brand suggested that the fear for these beings could only be shaken off through transforming them into labels. We should attach the labels to our clothes, and wear them everyday.
In Karma Kameleon Beauty Parlour (2017), Tontey explored make-up as an element to signify certain beauty standard. At the same time, make-up can be staged up and has a potential to bring forward a scary and frightening look. Scary and frightening are the elements invoked from Tontey’s works. At this point, I understand the fear in Tontey’s works as something interesting. Sometimes, ‘interesting’ is used to start off a commentary about something, before providing further elaborate explanation. In other occasions, ‘interesting’ can also represent a general expression towards a certain thing. It is used because the person who said it might not be able to find a better way to articulate her thoughts. To follow a scholar Sianne Ngai (2012), I perceive ‘interesting’ as a certain ‘aesthetic category’ that Tontey actively used for grasping the social condition surrounded. In her case, interesting is intersected with ‘whimsical’—a word that Tontey prefers to define interesting. To be interesting is to offer something skewed, naughty and unusual.
CORPSE, DEATH, GHOST
Ghosts are inseparable from death. As reminded by James T. Siegel in his research about the criminals and the New Order politics in Jakarta, the close relation between the ghost and the death brings back to the corpse. For example, a policeman was shot dead by some criminals in Jakarta in early 1990s. To avoid getting caught and erase the traces of the murder, the corpse was disposed in a small village in Cianjur, West Java. The unexpected encounter with the corpse led not only to the confusion, but also a sense of terror, among the villagers. The unknown source of death was dangerous. This kind of death causes anxieties. The locals feared that the anxious dead souls might come back in the forms of ghost, haunting, and expecting an explanation of their death. The alleged master plot implicated in the police death in Siegel’s research was the son of the high official in Jakarta. He enjoyed a certain impunity, and roamed freely, without being worried of getting punishment from what he did. He was untouchable and invisible. The upper class criminal in Jakarta during New Order era, to follow Siegel, was like a ghost, or acted like one.
At the same time, as the event unfolded, Siegel’s research shows that this created a moment of reconciliation between the villagers and the police—as the representative of power authorities. It served as a way for trusting the police to provide security for the village. This was the kind of security and safety felt more urgently needed. Although the encounter with the corpse still left unease feelings. The villagers were more terrorized by the fact that some criminals were able to kill the police. It made their position was even prone to crime. What would happen if the criminals came to the village and decided to do something awful to them?
In 2017, Tontey developed a project called “Fresh Flesh Feast” and falls beneath the umbrella of her ongoing project, the Little Shop of Horrors. She created a fictitious orphanage run by a nun. The nun also had a side business to sell the flesh of the babies that she would kill. The project was organized in a series of performative dinner format. Various dishes served during the dinner were designed to challenge the conversation about cannibalism. The name and description of the dishes stimulated disgust and horror. In Tontey’s words, imagine to “swallowing a baby’s arm with a splatter of blood with another dish made out of mother’s milk.” Tontey made holes in some parts of the plastic baby dolls, and used them as food trays. To spoon over the food from there gave the impression to eat some body parts of the babies.
To bring the notion of corpse to an exhibition space is challenging enough. Eating the baby corpse as performed in Tontey’s dinner event was regarded disgusting. It transgressed the conventional social customary laws. Later the notion of death was further explored through the way people usually treat the corpse in La Danse Macabre (2018), a performance piece that she worked in collaboration with the dancer I Putu Bagus Bang Sada Graha.
In her own way, she produced fear and the consequences of this were swift and hard. When the pictures taken during the event went viral, she was bullied and reported to the police (included to its cybercrime division). The ground of the charges was because Tontey presented a taboo and disturbance to what everyone else thought of what art should be. She was required to take a psychological test based on the assumption that perhaps her project was driven by mental health problems. Hours and hours were spent in the police headquarter in Jakarta for interrogations. Questions, and some sympathy, but more of them were questions, and debates, sparked by the project, directed personally to her email, WhatsApp, Facebook, and other online-based communication platforms. The whole process was tedious and exhausting; and, ironically, it took a toll in Tontey’s mental health in the end. She wrote a reflective note on this and titled it, Emotional Labour of the Cyborg Age and Sorrow.
The villagers in Siegel’s research relied on the police to give them a sense of safety. In the villagers’ mind, the ghost came in the possibly anxious dead police soul, the upper class criminal, and the unexpected crime attack. Tontey was reported to the police because she was regarded a disturbance to the society. Her art was unusual; it was considered too weird. It was too difficult to identify a range of people who spurred their anger and harsh comments towards her work online. The main point of the difficulties was not on pinpointing the online accounts of the commentators. But it was rather on the transient and immediate nature of the communication which occurred online. Images, photos, videos, and texts, from the event, were circulated in the forms of chunks and bits. It led to a hasty conclusion and fast action.
The movement from what spun online to the formal charges and interrogation at the police headquarter was unpredictable and unexpected. It was an unexpected encounter for Tontey. It was like meeting a ghost. To choose cannibalism as a way of approaching fear might be part of Tontey’s strategies for inciting ghost to appear. The Makan Mayit, or Eating a Corpse, performative dinner provides moments in which Tontey encountered the powerful non-state groups and matters to regulate the contemporary media saturated society like Indonesia.
To go back to Tontey’s statement that her works are directed to understand how the fear production, in producing Makan Mayit, she masters how to produce one. Further, she met another kind of ghost. They might not be too invisible, like the ghost discussed in her previous projects. They were more real, closer, and able to send real terror. Religious groups, gossip, mobile phone, Netizen or the citizen of the Net, are always moving, and fleeting at the same time. As they are on the move, they seem to be ready to go hand in hand with the state authorities. From their perspective, Tontey might be perceived as a ghost too. She was too shocking.
MANIFESTO OF TACTILE AND FANCIFUL TACTICS
Tontey wrote “Manifesto of Tactile and Fanciful Tactics on How to Build a Speculative Future” for her recent project titled Almanak in June, 2018. The project is based on her interest in the existing ways for predicting the future. According to the project description, she started seeing various dukun, paranormal, and fortunetellers, in order to collect the “future archives” since 2015. In her view, many of the predictions given were still very much based on how the everyday norms and power relation are socially structured. In this work, she tried to make her own speculative and alternative prediction. An excerpt from the project description reads that this is the prediction, which “crossing the borderline between what is real and what is not, drawing together past, present, and future. Its plot involving some kind of inscrutable time paradox, a glitch digital animation, a lost Indonesian space age characterized by the Semarang building Apotik Sputnik and a giant, immortal cockroach.”
There are ten points in her manifesto. Point number 8 reads as: “Demon, ghost, fiend, terror, dreams and fear are synonyms of future. We fear the unknown. The future is unknown. Why do we fear the unknown? Why do we fear a place called hell as well as the repression of chasing nirvana? Am I forever wrong? Is that all we have? What if I said that in our present condition, fear is fabricated by the one who has power? Fiction and speculation are antidote of fearfulness.”
Tontey has met her own ghost in Makan Mayit. She understands the capacities that her work has to induce fear for others. In Almanak, I feel that Tontey chose to take a more circuitous route to fear. The route is a complicated one—it takes one to alleys, mazes, and wide empty roads, with bushes on the sides. She talks about the curse to inherit mother’s inability to sleep and the impossibility to choose the best gene for the development our physical wellbeing. Where does such detour go? What kind of routes to the future it will lead one? Or more aptly, would Tontey be able to meet a different ghost through here?
The connection between the corpse and the ghost in Makan Mayit is straightforward. Almanak feels more abstract – which is something that is perhaps intentional. Almanak moves away from the gory, and tries to build a new argument about the possibilities of fiction as the reliable foundation for the future. Point number 10 in the manifesto reads, “ Let fiction be our speculative future. Let the psychonautic method be our bible to determine the past, the present and the future.”
Fiction can be perceived as a platform for reimagining a new world order. New subjectivities emerge in the process and Tontey’s fiction is an absurd one. The more absurd something has become, it actually has more potentials to cause public annoyance. But to reflect back to what had happened in the aftermath of Makan Mayit, it irks me to think about how Tontey seemed to beat about the bush just trying to convince that the unknown future lies in fiction. The future can also be short-circuited. It emerges in the form of shock, mixed with hoax, and propelled by virals. The manifesto might be Tontey’s way for considering subtlety in fear.