Art to Live: Experimental Survival Strategies for Economic Independence in Alternative Cultural Arts Spaces

This papers aims to analyze the creation of survival mechanisms in cultural arts practices, which are related to spatial management. As a case study, I examine a variety of practices that independent arts and cultural organizations and art collectives have implemented to achieve and maintain independence. I am presenting them as experimental independent survival strategies and ways in different historical trajectories.

In daily conversations, speaking of care in arts and culture means thinking of mechanisms to nurture ideas, promote regeneration while building potential networks for the future. I use the concept of survival to broaden conversations about sustainability. It is not restricted to potential shortages of ideas or funding, but also touches on work-life balance. It is related to the concept of multidimensional forms of care.

An Observation of independent organizations deepens the discourse about developing long-term, grassroots cultural strategies. The history of the development of independent cultural organizations shows that such organizations often function as “fixers”, or intermediaries, that fill gaps in the needs of local communities.¹ According to Melani Budianta, they reflect a spirit of emergency activism, inherited from the political climate of the post-1998 Reformation period.²

This proposition is useful for articulating an emergency situation as a condition that creates political reconfiguration and points to new directions for cultural arts practices. All the case studies analyzed in the article have taken place in a different context from the post-1998 Reformation period. As Doreen Lee put it, the people who have driven these organisations “lived in a post-Suharto world without mystery.”³

Thus, this article will explore the extent to which the struggle for sustainability affects the institutional character of various organisations’ cultural production. What are the sustainability goals of the cultural sector? Is the future imagined by them able to accommodate the interests of common people? How far are these experiments and survival mechanisms designed not only to meet short-term needs but also to reflect the desire to build more sustainable relationships with the organisations’ immediate surroundings and people? Can these desires be encouraged to create solidarity between humans and improve the broader environment in which we live? How does this also reflect the elements of flux and constancy within the development of alternative spaces in Indonesia?

An Alternative Cultural Infrastructure Ecosystem

In referring to the cultural and experimental spaces decribed in this article as independent cultural practices, I use the definition of alternative space from my previous research. An alternative space refers to new cultural spaces—artists’ collective, gallery, performance space, cultural laboratory, discussion room, library, or archive center—for thoughts that would be homeless otherwise in the spaces formed and designed by the established cultural authorities. Founding an independent cultural space has been a common practice developed by a new generation of cultural activists as a model platform for fulfilling their visionary ideas. Such independent cultural spaces have not only evolved to provide a range of contextually relevant responses and infrastructure for local artistic and cultural spaces. These spaces also foster the capacity for self-organization, collectivism, and institutionalization of cultural production. Meanwhile, the word “alternative” serves as a horizon of possibility, flexibility, and openness in cultural practices. I would argue that the term “alternative space” is able to capture the disobedient character constantly being cultivated in the local context.⁴

Local cultural arts ecosystems—of which alternative spaces are only one component—have grown rapidly. Artists, cultural advocates, academics, social movement activists, and art workers move in and out of various spaces. They circulate through alternative spaces, state institutions, non-governmental organizations, international art organizations, and commercial art markets. Some independent cultural organizations also occasionally function as, and collaborate closely with, non-governmental organizations. This article does not have sufficient space to discuss these linkages.

However, in line with Chiara de Cesari’s assertion in her study on art and activism in Palestine, the relations between cultural organizations and nongovernmental organizations pave the way to discuss how grassroots cultural organizations do not necessarily erase state power in the context of difficult and fraught postcolonial histories.5

A truly independent cultural practice requires financial autonomy. Some of these organizations rely on personal financial resources. Others try to develop community-based businesses. Others combine personal funds with cultural funding schemes managed by local and international donor agencies. In the early 2000s, funds from international donor agencies played a vital role in shaping the “knowledge performativity of alternative spaces,”6 indicating a lack of state financial support for arts and culture. Changes in the landscape of infrastructural ecosystem also brought diversity in the funding structure.

Artistic initiatives and alternative art spaces can simultaneously source funding from the philanthropic practices of art collectors, state institutions, and commercial art sales. Some initiatives may be solely funded by significant donations from a single foreign agency while others may lack regular financial support despite having been in operation for almost a decade.

This paper does not provide an in-depth review of state policy regarding arts and cultural funding. During the pandemic, the Ministry of Education and Culture has been managing some funding programs, such as the Safety Net for Cultural Practitioners Affected by COVID-19 and the Fund for Cultural Practitioners. Nonetheless, the lack of funding for cultural initiatives continues to be seen as a major problem. These highly contingent patterns of funding indicates a state that is prone to reactive policy and is unable to see the funding of education and culture with a long-term perspective. It also reflects problems around equitable access and priority scale among policymakers.

Informal Productivity and a Heterogeneity of Resources

For the activists who organize alternative spaces, discourses of funding are multidimensional. Being active in an independent organization does not always mean getting paid. However, time spent in cultural organizations is not always wasted. Money is not always an essential medium of exchange. In this way, these alternative spaces complicate the category of work. In line with Nicole Cox and Silvia Federici, it is argued here that wage labour’s formal status within the framework of capitalist production oversimplifies the definition of “work” and “nonwork,” and the relationships between humans and capital.7 Written from a feminist perspective, Cox and Federici’s arguments are useful in rethinking the dichotomies that determine the general definitions of work and learning to identify the many emotional and psychological aspects of work in the contemporary art environment. Informal work practices in alternative spaces often seem like merely hanging out and wasting what might otherwise be productive time. Hanging out, which seems to have no clear purpose, conveys the impression of privileged actors with an abundance of “free time”. In practice, hanging out is often an effective mechanism for informal exchanges of knowledge and expertise building. This opportunity to enjoy non-monetary forms of exchange is the main attraction of independent cultural spaces.

Brent Luvaas,⁸ Alexandra Crosby,⁹ and Sonja Dahl¹⁰ all emphasize the productivity of hanging out as a common mode of working together. However, I observe that their research does not discuss how these artists manage their time to achieve a sustainable balance of “hanging out” and earning sufficient income. Meanwhile, artistic and cultural practices are always connected with the struggle for personal welfare and survival.

Independent cultural projects always deal with the daily needs of family, friendships, and personal limits. There is an understanding that in order to be involved in a cultural project, basic needs must be met first. Discussions of ownership of financial resources, useful materials, and other assets are often confined to the lives of vulnerable artists and cultural activism. In daily conversations, this vulnerability appears in various acrobatic financial solutions such as “palugada” (literally ‘hammer’ and ‘mace,’ nowadays used as an acronym of “apa lu mau, gua ada” or “whatever you need, I can deliver”) and “mulur mungkret” (Javanese: an ability to stretch and shrink according to circumstances). However, this financial imagination is often seen as separate from the organization of cultural activities. In addition, cultural organizing often depends on the existence of an informal infrastructure that is often taken for granted as something that serves certain interests without having to be reciprocally cared for. Sustainability, at least how the term is used in this paper, is also connected with humans who function as a kind of infrastructure.

Humans serve as resources in providing assistance and support for cultural projects. Abdoumaliq Simoné proposed the idea of “people as infrastructure” to broaden the notions of infrastructure and human activities.¹¹ His idea of “people as infrastructure” describes adeptness at generating maximal outcomes from the tentative and precarious processes of remaking the city and urban environment. This, in turn, according to Simoné, affects how a person lives, makes things, and collaborates with others. My observations show that “people as infrastructure” comes in many forms—connections, cooperation, volunteering culture, and networks. Some people refer to another group of people as a “support system.” This raises the question of how to dismantle a hierarchy of social relations invisible in independent cultural organizing if it is formed and sustained by a powerful environment and community and, in Budianta’s terms, is considered a “lumbung budaya” (cultural barn)?¹²

Donation is a common type of fundraising. It is considered effective because it conveys an image of human capacity as infrastructure. Donations are given and received through many mechanisms. Especiallyduring the pandemic, I have seen donations used as a method of fundraising to meet various community needs. The practice of donating and almsgiving in general is an important factor in cultural participation and has an ethical dimension in work production processes. It feels natural to implement this practice as an effective form of fundraising. It is rooted in the existing principle in local contexts that helping people, while being involved in a cultural project, is both good and noble. It is important that this practice be put alongside other ways known to fund arts and culture. Local mutual aid (gotong royong) is a set of norms that govern the relationships between members of the public, and also between them and the state. It is part of a political imagination that must be activated in order to function as a cultural project’s foundation.

When an activity takes place in the spirit of mutual cooperation, a large source of free labour is seen as always present. According to John Bowen, human labour in the spirit of cooperation is defined as “to be donated and not to be purchased” because it assumes that community members are “willing to work in mutual cooperation, that is, without being paid”.¹³ The success of gotong royong is due to its position as part of a tradition of community and civic labour based on reciprocal relations.

Through the analysis of the case studies below, I would like to show how daily struggles to maintain a cultural project’s sustainability and dealing with everyday pragmatic matters are a major part of a cultural production. J.K. Gibson-Graham, Jenny Cameron, and Stephen Healy’s idea of taking over the economy through a series of actions based on ethical values encourages a redefinition of sustainability in arts and culture in the framework of social and environmental justice. Survival is not just being able to continue working or meeting daily needs.

Following their thinking, the idea of survival needs to be integrated with the concept of a good life. Gibson-Graham et al. sum up the meaning of welfare as an interaction between the following: “living well and justly together, distribution of surpluses to enrich social and environmental health, seeking to meet other people in a way that supports common welfare, consumption practices that take into account environmental balance, care for natural resources and shared culture (safeguard, maintain, grow), and investment in future generations for their wellness.”¹⁴ Maria Mies and Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen’s idea about the “good life” enriches this perspective on surviving well. To live well does not necessarily mean to live happily. It is a life based on production for life, not for commodities and surplus value.¹⁵

My definition of sustainability is related not only to the existence of an initiative but also to the dynamics between those who drive it and the space where activities occur. In this research, the idea of sustainability articulates important moments when resources, infrastructure, and access are used, interpreted, created and rethought. Through a mapping of independent survival experiments, I explore how the meanings of sustainability, welfare, and sufficiency are redefined. Can this also lead to ideas about limitation as a perspective in conducting cultural works?

Arisan: Savings for Artistic Projects

The Parasite Lottery is an art project initiated by the Yogyakarta-based artist, curator, and music producer Wok the Rock. It works as a lottery system for art organizations and collectives. This project’s mechanism is based on the concept of arisan—a cross between a lottery and collective savings system practiced in many communities in Indonesia.

This project was initiated by Wok during his residency at Casco Art Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands, in 2016. During the residency, most of the debates in the arts and culture sector in the Netherlands revolved around budget cuts, activity downscaling, and closing of spaces. Even though the project’s trial took place in the Netherlands, the Parasite Lottery was intended to reflect a pre-existing collective mode of survival in Indonesia.

In this section, I would like to discuss how the Parasite Lottery was envisioned as an exploration of new possibilities to support creative production processes into the future. The Parasite Lottery strove to achieve sustainability by drawing on and inspiring local traditions.

Arisan was developed as a practice applicable in many social contexts. In its own way, the Parasite Lottery was presented as a model of sustainability for artists and art collectives. As an activity, arisan cannot be done alone. It is closely related to solidarity building since it emerges as an effort to create a system of funding that must be carried out together.

Prior to developing the Parasite Lottery, Wok had long been involved in Ruang MES 56 (a collective of visual artists working with photography and visual culture) and the Indonesian Net Label Union (an association of musicians, producers, and net labels that distribute music freely via the Internet and encourage a culture of sharing). Wok is also known for creating Burn Your Idol: a music-based art project in which music fans are invited to copy and burn their favorite albums onto CDs. Wok’s work often takes the form of collective projects and uses collectivism as a starting point for discussions about access, ownership, and ways to work collectively. All of this served as the basis for developing the Parasite Lottery. Casco Art Institute, on the other hand, is an art organization that has long been working with issues around the themes of the commons and solidarity.

The Parasite Lottery, being an alternative funding system, is described as the following:

“Adapting and fusing a lottery model for art funding that survives despite the dwindling of other cultural budgets and arisan, a commons-oriented, micro-crediting system popular in Indonesia, Parasite Lottery invites a number of art organisations of different scales together as bidders, winners, and hosts of lottery drawing events that are open to the public. The winners receive a sum of money to be used as a fee for deviation.16 In other words, the prize money should be spent on something that the winning organisation would usually never have the budget for. Beyond the prize itself, Parasite Lottery is a collective exploration of chance effects, not just in the thrill of winning, but also through a series of gatherings that will take place around it, including talks, food, and music.”

The word “parasite” in this project refers to the popular portrayal of artists as parasites. This depiction shows art organizations’ vulnerable position regarding the sustainability of artistic production and their wellbeing as cultural producers. The description also asserts that the Parasite Lottery is intended as a project that “intervenes in the economy governing artistic production.”

Times of trouble come unexpectedly. They bring with them a feeling of vulnerability. Not everyone has the advantage of being in a position where resources are abundant or wealth of networks are reliable. And there is nothing more terrible than having the burden of debt. The fear of debt is very strong. David Henley’s study shows that credit and debt have a long history in Southeast Asia, forming complex, multi-layered social structures.¹⁷ He narrates the power of creditors and the constraints of those who owe them. Arisan emerged as a supportive institution embedded in familiar realm and at the same time as a mechanism to offer assurance that everyone will be able to fulfil their own needs. Jan Newberry defines arisan as a monthly credit lottery that is part of Javanese rituals and rules.¹⁸ Hanna Papanek and Laurel Schwede read arisan as part of women’s strategy to help ease their family’s economic burdens. Furthermore, they see it as part of women’s deliberate decision to be actively involved in the search and management of family livelihoods.¹⁹ Arisan members usually refer to it as a mechanism for savings—in a somewhat coerced manner. Clifford Geertz’s study points out that arisan serves more as an economic institution than a diffuse social institution.²⁰

In arisan, resources are interpreted as the availability of cash to meet daily needs. It is a mechanism implemented to ensure the availability of these funds. In their book, J.K. Gibson-Graham et al. also discuss the dominance of the economic paradigm as a machine, controlled by the principles of growth and consumption. Their study suggests the importance of dismantling this growth paradigm as part of the effort to regain economic independence. Following this line of thinking, arisan is growth-oriented because, despite it being defined as a savings institution, funds obtained can also be spent on various needs and spent quickly.

From the start, the purpose of Parasite Lottery funds was to fund activities categorized as deviations. The project’s description does not clearly specify what “deviation” means. It can refer to open interpretation and redefinition of expenditure while simultaneously encouraging diverse measures and indicators of needs that are not always dictated by individual ones, but also those of many people.

Figure 1. Panels of Parasite Lottery comic strip. Image by Wok the Rock.
Source: Wok the Rock (2016).

As Wok’s residency in the Netherlands ended, so did the project. One of the reasons he gave for ending the project was that he felt it didn’t gain enough momentum in Yogyakarta. The practice of arisan requires allocating a time to hold regular meetings. I assume that time allocation among cultural and arts activists might have been a main obstacle. An arisan needs certain conditions to be able to run smoothly, such as a warm, comfortable social atmosphere. As a space to manage collective funds, it also calls for mutual trust among participants. The funds themselves aren’t directly accesible once a person joins. The mechanism obliges participants to continue paying dues while they wait for their turn to be able to access the funds. In the meantime, there may be many other ways to obtain quicker funds.

In 2018, two years after the Parasite Lottery trial, a residency and collaboration platform for artists’ collectives emerged in Southeast Asia called Forum Arisan Tenggara. This program was initiated by an artists’ collective based in Yogyakarta, Ace House Collective. In it, Ace House collaborated with other collectives such as Krack! Studio, Lifepatch, Ruang Gulma, Ruang MES 56, and Survive! Garage. In implementing the project, these collectives played the role of host for other organizations in Southeast Asia such as Tentacles (Bangkok, Thailand), Tanahindie (Makassar, Indonesia), WSK! Festival of the Recently Possible (Manila, Philippines), Rumah Api (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), and Rekreatif Gembel Art Collective (Dili, Timor Leste).

Forum Arisan Tenggara has no direct connection with the Parasite Lottery. However, both use the arisan as a starting point and elaborate on its potential as a technique for achieving organizational sustainability. This initiative appropriated arisan practice as a mechanism for holding meetings and building networks. The activities included the Commons Credit Cooperativa (CCC), described as follows: “Commons Credit Cooperativa (CCC) is a resource exchange platform by adopting the concept of ‘cooperatives.’ This form of cooperative emphasizes the exchange of skills based on time and aims to support the artistic production of its members, who are actors in arts and culture. This cooperative is envisioned as a space to help each other in realizing each other’s practices by exchanging existing resources. Any resources that the members ‘invest’ will later be calculated and measured as credits that can be exchanged for others.”²¹

The meaning of resources in this initiative moves away from money as a form of currency accumulated in a traditional arisan. It seems to emphasize the support system of a cultural environment as well as an invitation to replicate the empowerment of informal support systems in a Southeast Asian context.

In 2019, Wok and Dina—his wife, curator, and also my colleague at KUNCI Study Forum & Collective—opened Dapur Sleko, a small shop selling traditional East Javanese food. This shop has provided another insight into Wok’s latest ideas about how an artist should reinvent methods to support their daily needs and work. During my research, I observed that the idea of setting up cafes, stalls, and food businesses to support the operation of galleries, art spaces, and families has gained importance, especially during the pandemic. Opening a food stall or business reflects an ideal desire to receive funds on a regular basis through a mechanism that can be managed independently. In our talk about their shop last year, Wok and Dina said that managing it allowed them to reflect further on the how art practices are supported.

What does it mean to be a full-time artist and a part-time artist? Should making art be seen as something that supports life? Or should we define it within a different framework—that we live to support art?

Invisible Female Staff and Support Systems

In this section, I would like to discuss resources in areas deep within art institutions and exhibitions of artwork on gallery walls. I am thinking of those who spend their time and energy helping to produce what is defined as art. They are not artists yet they have many labels attached to them, according to the work they do. These labels include artist assistant, part-time worker, art manager, gallery assistant, operations manager, program manager, and art worker.

They work to manage people, places, and all things related to art. To illustrate this point, I am going to discuss Pengelolaan Ruang Seni (PR Seni—Art Space Management) and Shifting Realities. Their work practices provide another perspective on aspects of work in the artistic and cultural arena. Working in cultural arts is not only a matter of raising funds to produce artworks, pursuing advanced education, or living well and being able to eat every day. PR Seni and Shifting Realities are a reminder that the backbone of cultural and artistic infrastructure is human resources and various forms of work that are sometimes unable to be quantified.

PR Seni takes on the role of a support group and learning space for art managers to discuss art management discourses. The term “PR” (public relations) can also refer to an identical abbreviation in Indonesian, namely “Pekerjaan Rumah” (homework). As will be explained further in this section, PR Seni targets sensitive areas that art policymakers tend to ignore. It gives rise to a common sentiment among art workers in demanding recognition of the importance of their work in cultural production. Currently, PR Seni is inactive. Nonetheless, it has paved the way for healthier conversations about organizing cultural work.

One of PR Seni’s initiators, Theodora Agni (Agni), initiated Shifting Realities in October 2020. It was founded right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to PR Seni, which works as a collective, Shifting Realities works as a collective learning platform with a more flexible structure. Both PR Seni and Shifting Realities are aimed at building a shared awareness that those in managerial positions are more than just curators and artists’ working horses. They have the same role as other stakeholders in the chain of contemporary art institutions, and therefore cannot be considered inferior. At the time of writing, Shifting Realities is preparing to set up a series of arts management workshops.

A new vision is an important element of the various independent spaces that have enlivened the post-1998 local cultural arts landscape. This has fostered a new type of art manager. These art managers are not products of conventional cultural arts institutions, but are born from a specific context in which experiments are an important part of managing space and carrying out visions and plans.

Most managers involved in PR Seni and Shifting Realities learn art management through hands-on practice. Agni’s experience is shaped by her time as an art manager at Cemeti—Institute for Art and Society (formerly Cemeti Art House). It gave her the chance to be involved and observe how other spaces work. Beyond teaching members about independence, the experience of working in an independent cultural arts space also means working in a flexible organizational system, arising from the organizational principle of “learning by doing.” In the long run, this flexibility will potentially lead to work overlap and burnout. Art managers’ inferiority, according to Agni, is partly due to the legacy of a work system that weakens their position.

In the Indonesian context, art management is an area largely populated by women. Speaking of art management often means speaking of forms of organization and support that revolve around gender-specific discourses. Every day, and in their own ways, they demonstrate assorted practices of support that must be performed to ensure that artistic events are carried out. However, this kind of work is usually not recognized as legitimate artistic work. According to Macushla Robinson, it is often hidden behind the perspective of being a labor of love and passion for art.²² This view tends to make room for exploitation and appropriation while seeing women as an inexhaustible source of natural energy. Robinson calls it “invisible dark matter,” because it is rarely discussed openly. Moving along this similar line of thinking, the two speakers at a meeting on the topic of “Landscape and Management Work Relationships” in a series of art management workshops organized by Shifting Realities, Brigitta Isabella and Hizkia Yosie Polimpung, respectively refer to the phrases “bucin” (an acronym for budak cinta, ‘love slave’) and “just helping around” as markers of the manifold dark matter that often characterizes work in the arts and culture area.

Contemporary art operates at a fast pace. It often leaves nothing but work to meet the targets of a series of tasks from production to exhibition. Discussions about management are often seen as trivial, or in Agni’s words, belittled and considered only as “curhat” (curahan hati, or ‘heart-to-heart conversation’) and “baper” (bawa perasaan, or ‘taking things too seriously’). In the end, these discussions are largely swallowed up by the obligation to compromise to ensure daily needs are met.

In September 2017, in a moment defined by Mierle Laderman Ukules in “Manifesto for Maintenance Art” (1969) as an epiphany, PR Seni decided to showcase their artwork in an archival festival organized by the Indonesian Visual Art Archive (IVAA). The festival is analogous to a realization creeping up from behind the scenes, always hidden, as opposed to an art presentation that emphasizes the performativity of an artwork.

Before the archive festival was held, there was another initiative to collectively translate Ukules’s manuscript, “Manifesto for Maintenance Art,” into Indonesian. This translation was initiated by Cemeti, as part of the kick-off for the Maintenance Works, a long-term project. There is no direct connection between PR Seni’s archive exhibition and this translation. But her involvement in the translation, as Agni sees it, was a moment of enlightenment about the reproductive patterns of art management. The exhibition can thus be read as a critical response to the way independent art spaces have been organized.

The exhibition, initiated by PR Seni, functioned as an event that presented the mix of desire, obstacles, doubt, and fragility that characterises working in artistic spaces. It showed the daily struggles to carry out various cultural projects while confronting pragmatic issues, which at the same time exposed the problem of support at cultural production’s core.

In the exhibition, PR Seni’s members presented a site specific installation, in the form of maps and pictures that imitate everyday workspaces as well as the workloads they are normally expected to bear. I quote the exhibition note as follows:

“This simulation room is built based on various elements present in our workspace every day. We carry our tables and chairs, crucial to accommodate meetings with a wide variety of people. We carry various tools and equipment, all the essential things imperative in any installation in an exhibition hall. Coffee and tea are equally important in every meeting and work process. Our notebooks are our personal production tool.”²³

One of the charts on display indicates several points, or areas, that they have to deal with on a day-to-day basis. They can all be categorized as non-curatorial work. Nonetheless, they are routine and essential work in the industry—email communication, networking, cleaning rooms, creating workspace friendliness, and ensuring spaces have the capacy to entertain large numbers of people.The pandemic has been followed by travel restrictions, cancellation of exhibitions or residency schedules, and the closure of art buildings.

Some managers and art workers work on a part-time basis and are governed by the arrangement that no work means no pay. Many of them have lost their jobs. I have explained how art workers’ vulnerable position is created by an institutional climate that tends to devalue non-curatorial and non-artistic workers. For art workers themselves, the pandemic has meant turning this reproductive energy around to meet their daily needs. Staying at home has not slowed down the rhythm of life. The total absence of—or at least decline in—the number of artworks and artists to be handled have forced them to try various new types of work outside the arts. These new jobs have ranged from selling food, working in hotels and shops, to teaching English. Apart from the issue of survival, this indicates that people in the art community lack financial savings to sustain themselves through unexpected periods of disruption. As experienced by Agni, it has not left enough time for personal reflection.

Shifting Realities is intended to provide space for events like discussion forums that will hopefully teach participants something beyond technical and pragmatic skills. In the long term, it is designed to be a forum for art workers to share and advocate for a healthier
work environment in art management.

This discussion of invisible resources is intended to lay bare the internal formation process of a vision and plan. PR Seni and its art experiment are still young. Even so, they have uncovered something previously invisible. They illuminate other coordinates that can be used to navigate forward. They question the purpose of doing something and provide an in-depth look at the ethics of working for a goal.

Moving with a Lens of Limitations: Creating a Chain of Self-Subsisting Way of Life

The availability of funds may be only one of the many conditions needed to work and simultaneously carry on living. Humatera is a collective garden located on the rooftop of the rented house of Kerjasama 59—an independent space based in Surabaya. On the rooftop of their house, they grow the various plants they usually consume—eggplant, spinach, tomato, chili, and rice. Humatera’s garden management shows that a minimal and effective survival mechanism is to operate and plan for the future by centering the very idea of limitations themselves.

Figure 2. Identification map of PR Seni’s managerial work.
Location: Yogyakarta (2017). Source: PR Seni.

Figure 3. Kebun Humatera.
Source: Instagram @humatera.

Kebun Humatera is managed by live-in activists at the center of Kerjasama 59’s activities. Officially the house functions as a base for Kerjasama 59’s activities. Most of the activists there do not have permanent jobs. Some of them are freelancers in film production and creative digital content. Some of them are actively engaged in the empowerment of urban communities. On a daily basis, the house is more like a place where members and a diverse network of friends come together and share ideas. For those who are active in it, hanging out at Kerjasama 59 is part of the process of learning many things.

In this section I would like to show how the organic way they work at this house creates the freedom to produce diverse activities designed to achieve independence. These activities appear less burdened with, and even beyond, programmatic targets. They are executed in a relaxed manner, moving according to the rhythm of existing needs.

The dynamics brought forward by the everyday social climate at the house result in other independent initiatives being formed organically. Belang Telon Initiative and Pawon’e Arek-arek are a couple of examples. Belang Telon Initiative is a film collective, while Pawon’e Arek-arek is a community kitchen that aims to meet the food needs of many vulnerable communities during the pandemic. This house has also thrived as a place where many people try to put business ideas into practice on a small scale, such as managing coffee shops and merchandise stores. At the time of writing, another business is about to take off, which is a tobacco shop. Pawon’e Arek-Arek depends on donations. Most of the activities run in this house do not have fixed financial backing.

Kebun Humatera was born with the simple idea of making the most of everything that is owned and available for use. According to Cahyo Prayogo (Yoyo), before it was turned into a garden, the rooftop was neglected and filled with various unused stuff. The house activists who also live in it also cook for their own needs. The idea of tending a garden came from a desire to be able to meet their regular food needs, in the hope of reducing daily living costs.

Kebun Humatera has taken on a new significance during the pandemic. The pandemic has left many people at Kerjasama 59 out of work, so cooking food using the various garden products is increasingly valuable for daily survival. The garden’s produce can also be used as cooking materials for the food donations organized by Pawon’e Arek-arek. In this way, the practice of cooking becomes a gateway to liberating food from being a commodity that negates the power of traditional female knowledge, as Vandana Shiva puts it.24 This practice is also actively used as a way to improve relationships with other people (through building collective kitchen) and nature (through gardening).

The property used for these activities is owned by Redi Murti’s parents, one of Kerjasama 59’s main activists. This makes it easier because they don’t have to pay rent. This property can be considered as a grant, or a fortune, in the form of organizational infrastructure. The house then is a form of economic capital, obtained through the strong ownership of social capital. It is largely used by its residents as a means of survival or, in Redi’s words, a place to be productive together. Although there is no obligation to pay rent, the home users contribute what they can to cover regular expenses such electricity, Internet, and water. That is the minimum thing to do so that the house can function and be used for various activities, being also an expression of the members’ appreciation of Redi’s family’s goodwill.

Renting a house is often a heavy burden for collectives. Not all of them have sufficient financial capacity to fulfill their rental obligations. The freedom from paying rent provides an initial economic foundation that allows a degree of freedom for organizing. The capacities created through property ownership led to new goals and projections for future work. In a situation when access to cultural funds is uncertain, free use of a property is a welcome relief. This reinforces a sense of independence in imagining work orientation.25 In line with Maria Mies, space ownership becomes the capital to build a “survival subsistence perspective,” aimed at “to regain self-reliance and subsistence security, that is, to become ecologically, socially and economically more independent from external market forces.”²⁶

In the context of Indonesian politics, Mies’s concept of self-reliance resonates strongly with Sukarno’s concept of “standing on one’s own feet” (dubbed as berdikari, or berdiri di atas kaki sendiri). In everyday discourse, self-sufficiency becomes an ordinary expression of the desire to achieve broad economic autonomy. Amiruddin Al Rahab analyses how to concept of berdikari was implemented in Sukarno’s economic policy during the Guided Democracy period in 1959.²⁷ According to Al Rabah, the application of berdikari was part of Indonesia’s effort to create a strong economic foundation at the beginning of the nation’s independence. The strength of this foundation was not only Indonesia’s abundant natural resources, but also a will to focus on the welfare of the public, without being dictated by foreign economic powers.

In the previous section, I made the observation that in the early 2000s, success in obtaining cultural funds from local and international funding organizations was seen as an ideal. Acquiring funds from abroad is considered a recognition of an initiative’s importance. An observation of the diverse activities taking place at Kerjasama 59’s home indicates a shift in the view of how to finance cultural activities.

When it comes to doing long-term work in the cultural sector, the possibility of continuing to live together is perhaps more important than obtaining a reliable, long-term source of funds.

Closing

This paper began with the intention of exploring the various survival strategies of art collectives to investigate whether they were also accompanied by visions of building more sustainable relationships with humans and the broader environment. Exploration of the case studies shows that the creation of self-financing models, mixed with the dynamics of thinking about types of non-monetary resources and struggles to create more ethical living relationships. The meaning of resources as a driving force in the creative sector moves back and forth from money, networks, human resources, opportunity, and property ownership, and the ability to fill one’s stomach every day. Awareness of the limitations on cultural projects’ funding mechanisms have led to various experiments in creating new funding mechanisms and ecosystems, as well as healthy ways of life.

The Parasite Lottery, Arisan Tenggara, and CCC are interventions to build an infrastructure of self-financing. All three refer to the arisan mechanism, which in Indonesia is already well known as a collective support system and way to organize savings. However, their experiments show that managing funding and human resources for art production isn’t a job that can be done quickly. While work in the sector is often time-constrained, it often required a significant investment of time to maintain the human networks that allow everything to run smoothly. At this point, it is necessary to reflect on how the cultural sector creates work which can be labelled as either a “project” or “program”, both of which seem to be solely oriented toward project growth and quantifiable results.

In this section, I look at the last two case studies, Shifting Realities and Kerjasama 59, within the perspective of the historical development of alternative spaces in Indonesia. Both cases demonstrate the development of a survival strategy directly related to a dismantling of conventional mechanisms and structures of organizing culture. In the case of Shifting Realities (preceded by PR Seni), a closer relationship with the environment exists via a desire to make explicit the various forms of invisible labour while creating healthy work systems–that is, by including these forms of labor in discourses of cultural management.

The democratization of cultural space must be accompanied by a capacity to eliminate hierarchical and exploitative social relations. The issues discussed in this project have paved the way for a positioning of contemporary art practices within a broader perspective of life.

Kerjasama 59 shows that making friends, hanging out, realizing various ideas together—cooking, building a collective kitchen, opening a shop, gardening—are all part of a survival strategy that works organically, according to the needs and dynamics of the people involved. As these various activities are performed, Kerjasama 59’s organizational structure swells like a large bubble that also holds many smaller ones within it. Shifting Realities and Kerjasama 59’s community shows that mutual respect and fostering social networks, rather than the accumulation of money, can be the impetus for doing cultural work. In the context of Kerjasama 59, cultural work with a strong environmental perspective is built through the creation of a subsistence way of life.

This shows the creation of a cultural framework with a perspective based on recognizing limitations. However, further reflection raises other questions about how it—cultural work—always appears to be preceded by conditions of crisis.

Melbourne, 2021

AUTHOR
Nuraini Juliastuti

YEAR

2021