A limited (and speculative) cartography of collectivity in Indonesian art
In 2001, on a wet night in Yogyakarta, my boyfriend and I made our way across town following the map that the residents of Sanggar Suwung had scrawled on a piece of notepaper for us. It was our first encounter with Yogyakarta’s art scene, but Sanggar Suwung doesn’t appear in the numerous annals of Indonesia’s sanggar (cooperative art studios) and collectives. They are just one of hundreds, perhaps thousands of largely anonymous groups of artists bound together by a shared experience—perhaps of ethnicity, residence, mission, language, marginalisation or political ideology—which characterise the Indonesian art scene.
