LIKA-LIKU_LUKA #01
IMPRESSIONS
Pictures by Dico Bascoro and Ariel Orah
Lika-liku means ‘vagary’ or ‘intricate’, whereas luka means ‘wound’ in bahasa. This new healing format - prototyped in Soydivision - helped us navigate our intersectional wounds and stimulate our internal collaborations into a 2-day event of various, empathy-driven artistic outputs.
Based on real encounters our collective had experienced just two weeks before, we quickly developed a 2 day program for us to channel our collective rage and anger into a format to process, heal and educate.
LIKA-LIKU LUKA invoked Theater of the Oppressed Methodology, design thinking, video/body performance, a fishbowl conversation where we invited Vicky Truong to moderate, a slametan tumpeng ceremony and finally a wayang puppet theater to educate others about the intricacies of Chinese-Indonesian identity.
Soydivision would like to further incubate this format within our own collective as well as help other collectives adopt it for building community strength in the unique circumstances they may be faced with.
JOURNAL OF OTHERNESS
BY Monica Tedja, Nindya Nareswari, Cindy Putri, Morgan Sully, Ariel Victor
A performative monologue about retrospecting one’s identity as an overlooked “model minority” - Chinese Indonesian.
Viewed from a personal experience surviving the society’s expectations, the monologue is told through a narrative journal based on some childhood episodes sequentially revealed.
With a mixture of image projections, sounds, and shadow puppet, the performance is a modern rendition of wayang, a traditional Indonesian story-telling through classical Javanese puppet, that attempts to reflect on one’s identity’s sense of belonging.
EYE TO EYE
By Vicky Truong
In a safer space, we come together to share experiences and knowledge. As we may see eye to eye in many regards, we also acknowledge and accept our individuality to create a communal sense of belonging.
Participants take part in an activity that allows for a deconstructed panel discussion to touch on critical issues and perspectives. We do not expect certain narratives and ask for PIE (patience, inclusion and empathy) whilst engaging in EYE TO EYE.
Vicky Truong plants seeds that'll thrive and break the foundation our society was built upon. She wants people to flourish in their own ways as they connect to a movement that works towards a more sublime future. She is a committed activist and community builder working closely with the Asian diaspora in Germany and LGBTQIA+ community; organising festivals, events, workshops and discussions. Her fields of work are in alternative education, food and design. Being Australian born with Chinese-Teochew, Thai and Vietnamese heritage, she is able to connect to many communities through lived experiences. She believes that the richness of mixing cultures should be celebrated and a way to bring new structures into society. She strives for self-empowerment through PIE - PATIENCE, INCLUSION AND EMPATHY. She hopes to build bridges and systems for communities to overcome the constructs that restricts us from coming together and rising.
She began the #mygration festival movement which empowers through the shared feeling of other and to replace it with a sense of belonging; connecting generations, genders, beliefs, ethnicities, sexual orientations and communities. Celebrating our migration backgrounds and owning our unique narratives. She also works closely with DAMN - Deutsche Asiant*innen Make Noise, a collective her dear friend Thao Ho founded.
LIKALIKULUKA
the hybrid empathy forum theathere workshop
From 11-15:00
How can we design methods to address racism?
In this workshop, Soydivision will guide participants through a hybrid, empathy-centered design thinking process based on Augusto Boal’s Forum Theater Method.
Originating from Brazil, Forum Theater has been used as a method for addressing racism in Swedish restaurants, sexual harassment on public transit in Paris and land use rights with farmers in Portugal. Design thinking - hailing from Stanford University in California - has been used as a method to prototype creative solutions to pressing design problems in technology companies, the US military and government institutions.
Hybridizing these two methods, participants will share examples or moments where they experienced racism or oppression with the facilitators. After carefully considering the stories presented, our ‘joker’ (in this case, played by Punakawan Morgan) will select one to be ‘workshopped’ by the group.
The situation will acted out as-it-happened to establish the scene and then re-enacted - but with anyone watching given the ability to say ‘STOP!’ and act out alternative outcomes to the situation by replacing protagonists/antagonists (or any other character) in the scene.
As many possible outcomes are exhausted before arriving at a final ‘empathy forum’ (facilitated by Punakawan Ariel) where participants synthesize collective proposals for empathy and action - a ‘model of action for the future’. This final model will be presented the next day, filled with talks, wayang, ritual, performance and ceremony to close our summer together.