Round Table 1:
Site specific Practices and Remote Collaboration

Can a transnational team co-create works of art without moving across borders?
Ever since TERASIA set off from this question, collective members across Asia have been communicating online via text messages and video meetings, to see and exchange thoughts on each others works, and discuss and develop ideas for new ones. Online events and presentations have also led to welcoming new artists to the collective, which has evolved solely on remote communication and collaboration until September 2022.

On the other hand, the actual creation and presentation of TERA works have been done primarily in the artists’ city or locality, for the local audience, in its social context. Be it a temple in Tokyo or Chiang Mai, the works have a heavy “site-specific” element, that eventually gets shared online with subtitles for collective members and audience in other parts of the world to watch. With each performance entailing new encounters, the project has constantly transformed as artists in different locations create new works freely based on a common concept.

We call this process “reincarnation,” in the words of the Buddhist tradition. Just as the human soul repeatedly dies and is reborn anew, each work gets destroyed and recreated to appear in a different place, in a completely different form.

The first half of this roundtable will provide a concrete overview of TERASIA’s practice as a “remote” and “site-specific” collective, from the perspectives of both the members who have participated in TERASIA since its inception and the artists based in Jakarta. In the second half, we will discuss the possibilities of utilizing these experiences and networks of remote collaboration in the multicultural art communities scattered throughout Indonesia.

Speakers:
Maho Watanabe (Dramaturg, TERASIA Collective, Japan)
Narumol Thammapruksa (Director, TERASIA Collective, Thailand)
Irwan Ahmet (Designer, Visual and Performance Artist)

Moderator:
Yustiansyah Lesmana (TERASIA Collective, Indonesia)

[Overview]
- Jakarta
Venue: Komunitas Utan Kayu - Teater
Time and Date: 14:00-16:00, January 13, 2024
Language: Indonesian and English

Maho Watanabe

Maho Watanabe is a translator and dramaturg who works in and around art, media, and humanitarian work. In 2014, during her year abroad in the West Bank as an Arabic Studies student, she joined the director Yukari Sakata in Rashomon | Yabunonaka, a theatre co-production by Palestinian and Japanese artists. This marked her first involvement in performing arts, followed by numerous international collaboration projects, festivals, and workshops. Her translation of Lilac Duhaa (Death in the Era of IS) by Palestinian playwright Ghannam Ghannam won the 2019 Odashima Yushi Award for Drama Translation. She served as dramaturg for the original production of TERA (2018), and in May 2020, she was part of initiating TERASIA with Kop in Thailand and other artists. She is an Asian Cultural Council fellow for 2022.

Narumol Thammapruksa (Kop)

Narumol Thammapruksa is a performing artist and a self-defense or aikido artist, with a special interest in social issues. She portrays the performer’s experiences by developing a technique called autobiographical storytelling, which tells stories of the individual’s views on societies in parallel with the present world, while also portraying how the individual has been oppressed and how others are affected by oppression. Besides plays, she is also interested in non-verbal movement, including mime, modern dance, and using masks. The director breaks the old tradition of the imagined “wall” that separates the performers from the audience. Throughout the performance, every now and then, she urges the audience not to be taken in by its stories. She uses symbolic language to deconstruct and reconstruct. At present, she is on the committee of the Peace Culture Foundation, whose aim is to build the culture of peace, promoting non-violence through social art activities and aikido practices. She hopes that these activities will help foster love, compassion, empathy, and diversity, aiming for harmonious societies.

Irwan Ahmett

Currently, Irwan is working on a long-term project related to geopolitical turmoil in the Ring of Fire, an area most vulnerable to natural disasters and also haunted by the traumatic impact of violence. He navigates through the process of mobility as a primary medium for participating in interdisciplinary residency and research programs, presenting his expressions in paradoxical areas. He wants to find answers to planetary anxieties related to human existence through an evolutionary perspective, producing knowledge through art and realities related to injustice, humanity, and ecology. Since 2018, Irwan Ahmett has periodically made the Northern Pilgrimage by walking along the coastline of North Jakarta, which has impacted his sensory perception, as he confronts an anthropocentric tsunami, situations of impoverished conscience, or a future space submerged in a sea of industrial-minded humans. After completing the journey, Irwan revisits specific points where he intuitively un-anchors his soul. He channels interventions expressing his anxieties about the filthiness ingrained in the land, water, and air of the city of Jakarta.

Yustiansyah Lesmana

Yustiansyah Lesmana is a performing arts director, videographer, and visual programmer based in Jakarta. He works with Teater Ghanta, an open collaboration platform for performing arts. He is also one of the initiators of the performance studies collective Koridor Miring (Slanted Corridor). His works have been performed in various regions in Indonesia as well as in several international forums. Since 2017 he has been interested in working on models of transregional/national artistic collaboration. He has been involved in the Indonesian Dramaturgy Council and was invited to direct a collaborative project for young Asian artists at the 2017-2018 Asia Performing Arts Forum (APAF). Tian has been active with TERASIA since 2022. His art projects are diverse collaborations between artists across disciplines, regions, media, and generations. He received the award of Best Director by the Jakarta Arts Council in 2013 and 2014 at the Jakarta Theatre Festival. He currently works in the Theater Committee and Archives and Collections Commission of the Jakarta Arts Council.