From the Kitchen, Looking for the Face of the Economy

I.                 Digging for the Other Face

        January, 2019. At that time, Otty Widasari as one of the curators of a city-scale art festival called Bangsal Menggawe located in the Pemenang sub-district, North Lombok, invited me to participate in an art project at the festival. In that year, she planned to conduct an experiment within the curatorial framework of Bangsal Menggawe 2019. She carried out this experiment by creating a funding framework for the festival that encouraged the financial independence of its organizers as much as possible. To make this happen, Otty invited several artists and observers from Jakarta – I was one of them – to participate in organizing this event by holding a residency. However, rather than just focusing on creating artwork, those invited to the Bangsal Menggawe 2019 residency were encouraged to collaborate with the local residents to help them bring forth their cultural expressions and creative initiatives. These expressions and initiatives will be presented to celebrate the 2019 Bangsal Menggawe festival.

        Since its inception in 2010, the Pasirputih community as the community that initiated Bangsal Menggawe has always carried the spirit of building strong and unified relationships among the residents. This spirit is inseparable from the tourism context in North Lombok which is closely related to the daily lives of residents in Pemenang. Bangsal Menggawe is one of Pasirputih's efforts to build relationships among the residents through the presence of a facility that allows local residents in Pemenang to channel their cultural expressions. This enthusiasm and effort were then continued to be maintained by the Pasirputih community by committing to hold Bangsal Menggawe as an annual people's party.

        In its first implementation in 2016, Bangsal Menggawe took the curatorial theme "Membasaq". Meanwhile, in 2017, Bangsal Menggawe took the theme "Siq-Siq O Bungkuk". The implementation of the third Bangsal Menggawe, which was previously planned to be held in 2018, had to be postponed due to a series of earthquakes that hit Lombok in August 2018. Earth tremors not only shook the physical infrastructure of the city of Pemenang, but also the socio-economic structures that have long supported residents' daily lives. Amid this situation, there is a push among the residents to continue holding Bangsal Menggawe's annual people's party. This is actually not surprising because since Bangsal Menggawe was first implemented, the residents have felt joy and a sense of belonging to Bangsal Menggawe itself. The shock during the earthquake seemed to strengthen the need for happenings like Bangsal Menggawe, especially when the earthquake seemed to have destroyed everything the residents had.

        Otty Widasari and Muhammad Sibawaihi's curatorial in Bangsal Menggawe 2019 titled "Museum of Tales" looked at this condition by trying to recover the remaining "legacy" owned by the residents of Pemenang. Tales are a form of trace of the civilization of the Pemenang people who continued to live even though they were shaken by earthquakes. They are embedded in every aspect of the daily lives of the Pemenang people. It can also be read as a form of knowledge as well as a manifestation of  the intertwining values and social norms of the community, which at Bangsal Menggawe 2019 will be activated and framed in a city-scale art event.

        This curatorial, which was also an art project initiated by Otty Widasari, began by holding a residency for one month in February 2019 with the peak event on March 2, 2019. From Jakarta, Otty curated a few artists and observers by first asking them to submit funding proposals. The aim of this is quite simple, namely to encourage the independence of curated artists and observers in thinking about production strategies without relying entirely on institutionally centralized funding mechanisms. From this proposal, the organization that oversees these arts activists, namely Forum Lenteng, allocated a number of funds as production capital assistance with the hope that these funds will be a trigger for the realization of other possibilities, even though the amount of funds is not much.

        Each of these artists and observers will focus on different areas. Maria Silalahi (artist) along with a Pemenang resident named Mintarja will make a giant trumpet from local waste, Pingkan Polla (artist) will collaborate with local theater artists named Ana and Gozali to explore the intersection of performance and theater, Dhuha Ramadhani (artist) will collaborate with Imran to activate Pasirputih’s audiovisual archive, Theo Nugraha (sound artist) will work with the sounds found in Pemenang during his residency there, and Manshur Zikri (artist, researcher) will read Bangsal Menggawe as a work as a whole. I myself was invited by Otty to try to read another face of economics, which is related to experimental funding practices in the Bangsal Menggawe 2019 project.

        Another face of the economy, what face is that?

        This question became my main anchor for recording and trying to read the practices that took place during the preparation and implementation of the Bangsal Menggawe residency, until after the peak of the event had passed. Starting from Otty's saturation in witnessing the many bureaucratic processes that always have to be carried out in order to optimally access public funds in government, this funding experiment was carried out by Otty to encourage everyone involved to take the initiative to collect and manage the resources they have. Artists and observers who came from Jakarta submitted proposals to finance their work in Lombok. These proposals are mostly submitted to institutions. But of these artists, there are also some who actually submit proposals to fellow artists, asking for fellow artists' support. It is not uncommon for them to share production funds with each other, especially for the need to buy flight tickets from Jakarta to Lombok and vice versa. This practice of mutual support then continued to the contributions of artists and residents to the Bangsal Menggawe 2019 event. Art events were also built by collecting, managing, and transforming existing resources.

II.                From the Kitchen to the Market and Vice Versa

        When rethinking the idea of the 'economy', resource processing strategies become one of the starting points for understanding the basis of the economy itself. In Bangsal Menggawe 2019, resource management is carried out without always adhering to a transaction-based economic model, which often involves money as an expression of value exchange. Side by side with the transaction-based economic model, there is also an economic model that emphasizes the intensity of social interaction as the basis for exchange. Even though the economy is very material-based, in the end, economic issues are not always about material aspects because the organization of resources also emphasizes social relations, both between economic subjects and economic objects. In this case, social relations built from social interactions often become a factor that changes the value of the economic object or things being exchanged: whether it will become a commodity or not. Through social relations, exchange actions often stop the movement of an economic object (things or services) that would otherwise become a mere commodity so that it becomes something else, which gives more meaning to the ecosystem in which the economy takes place.

        These observations started from my residency experience during the Bangsal Menggawe 2019 process, observing all events from the kitchen, literally and figuratively. The kitchen seems to be the place where community work begins when it is perceived not only as a place where foods are produced but also a place where economic subjects recognize each other's capacities and develop resource management strategies. The picket schedule and allotment of spending money carried out during the preparations for Bangsal Menggawe 2019 are examples of mechanisms that allow this to happen. For each picket, one committee member who comes from outside the Pasirputih Foundation will be paired with one committee member from within the Pasirputih community. This duet then had to buy groceries with money worth IDR. 60,000. The food purchased with the money will then be cooked for lunch and dinner for the entire Bangsal Menggawe committee, a total of around 20 people. This strategy is not only about saving expenses but also encouraging previous cooks and shoppers to be able to do other things besides kitchen-related activities. Apart from that, all parties involved in the preparation of Bangsal Menggawe learned to manage finances, cook, learned to manage the food ingredients that could be obtained as well as learned to get to know and work with new friends. In other words, everyone learns to process what already exists. Whether we like it or not, everyone must learn the details of organizing financial and food resources which are the main support for the productivity of the Bangsal Menggawe preparation process, as well as the productivity of the community as a whole.

        This financial strategy is then carried out in conjunction with various social interactions in the form of chatting or bargaining to be able to access available materials by loosening financial restrictions. Limited funds do not mean inadequate nutrition and food quantity. In a conversation at the breakfast I had with Mrs. An, a woman whose house I lived in during this residency, she shared her knowledge with me so that I could overcome financial constraints when my turn for shopping and cooking arrived. She invited me to harvest the Moringa leaves that grew abundantly in her yard to be used as raw material for food that day. She also applied the same thing to Maria when her turn to shop and cook arrived.

        In other experiences, this strategy of picketing and rationing spending money was not an obstacle at all when the picket officer had good social relations with not only neighbors near the house, but also with sellers at the market. Aceq and Imran, a husband-and-wife team from Pasirputih who are also homestay entrepreneurs on Gili Meno, managed to cook us keke (small clams), crab soup, tempeh, water spinach pelecing, chili sauce, beberok, small and large fish and telang flower syrup. All spent for just 52,000!

        When I asked, Aceq actually smiled and said, "Friendship is the key!" She told about the bapuq (grandmother) fish seller who gave her keke for free because she wanted Aceq's children, who she called her grandchildren, to eat the nutritious keke. Indeed, the kitchen and the market are inevitably two spaces with different characteristics – private and public – but are always closely connected because they are the main mirror of the most basic economic mechanisms: needs (demand) and availability (supply). However, the relationship that occurs between the kitchen and the market is not only transactional because interactions between residents do not always revolve around transactional matters so the nature of the goods or services exchanged does not always have purely economic value. On the one hand, these goods or services also play a role as tokens of a social relationship that has lasted for generations. In this case, certain values in an ecosystem are the main foundation that lives in the principles of interaction among the residents.

        In Pemenang, perhaps things like this are common because the nature of social relations in this area is built on a strong foundation of kinship. Sibawaihi, who is the founder of the Pasirputih community and a native of Pemenang, told me about the term merenten, which is a form of brotherly bond between humans on the land of North Lombok. Once you become a polong, even if you have no blood relations, you will always be a sibling here even for the next generations. With this social principle, harmony among the residents is maintained even though there exist different religions in North Lombok area. Spaces that bring residents together also become spaces for friendship, including the market and the Bangsal Menggawe event itself.

III.              Deflecting The Flow

        When Bangsal Menggawe was held for the first time, the spirit of empowerment carried by this event was to encourage the residents to become the main actors in their living place, producing their own needs by making use of what is scattered around in their daily lives. In line with that spirit, the artworks that filled Bangsal Menggawe were created. Artworks created by Mintarja and Maria, for example. They process the materials they found in Pemenang in such a way. They processed it until it became a moving energy that plays between the existing systems. They also collected used bamboo and plastic bottles of mineral water which are often found in Pemenang to be used as construction materials. Interestingly, something that was thought to be useless waste actually has significant economic value in Pemenang. Instead of becoming unmanaged waste, the used plastic bottles of mineral water in Pemenang have been channeled to a number of collectors to be diverted to a new function after being sold. This means that the process of collecting plastic bottles often has to go through a transactional process according to the existing economic value, although sometimes it can also be shifted slightly from that system by bargaining.

        When looking for bamboo to make a trumpet frame, Maria and Mintarja easily avoided having to make transactions with money. Even though both bamboo and used plastic bottles have economic value, especially after the earthquake when people looked for bamboo to use as building material for houses which made its price double, collecting bamboo donations from residents turned out to be relatively easier. When the need for bamboo in preparation for Bangsal Menggawe increased because the committee had to prepare torches to light up the coastline during prayer nights, several people in Pemenang were ready to donate bamboo from their lands for Bangsal Menggawe's needs. Dozens of bamboos were cut and transported to support the people’s party needs. Indeed, many Pemenang residents have bamboo on their lands and bamboo grows relatively fast. To fuel the prospective torches, we also collected used cooking oil from residents' homes and food businesses while announcing news about the 2019 Bangsal Menggawe peak event. The need for a celebration with the residents was also met by the availability of materials in the residents' kitchens as well.

        When knocking on doors to inform the people about the highlight of the 2019 Bangsal Menggawe festival, the organizers also invited the people to contribute their smiles for 10 seconds to be recorded. Hundreds of smiling faces of the people of Pemenang were then collected into a video which was played on the videotron screen near the terminal leading to Bangsal port. The Videotron, which was usually filled with the faces of figures involved in politics, was filled with hundreds of faces of citizens from various work and life backgrounds. The video was also displayed side by side with large billboards advertising local government. But occasionally the residents stop to just watch the smiling faces of their neighbors and their polong renten - fellow humans from the land of North Lombok.

        On the morning of March 2, 2019, a mass rudat gymnastics activity was held as the opening activity for the highlight of Bangsal Menggawe 2019. Zakaria, a resident who specializes in rudat dance practice, transformed this traditional dance movement into a gymnastic movement so that it could exercised closer to the daily lives of the residents of the Pemenang, especially the younger generation. When I was about to leave in the morning for the gymnastics location on the west Bangsal beach, Mrs. An immediately reminded me that after the gymnastics I should look for her. She will menakil or bring lunch to eat together. I took this promise with a cheerful heart and became additional motivation to guide this morning's exercise. The movements that I have only learned in the last few weeks have been practiced in front of hundreds of students from kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, and high school. Their teachers and parents were also present. The west coast at Bangsal harbor, which is usually full of ships and passengers wishing to cross the three Gilis, was packed with residents in clothes ready to exercise. For approximately two hours, we did rudat exercises on the beach with the southeast sun shining down to supply vitamin D.

        Mrs. An's promise was immediately fulfilled after the mass gymnastics event. Running a little, I approached Mrs. An who had prepared a breakfast of fried rice with many side dishes. She was not alone. Several mothers who I recognized as her friends were also there, having fun chatting while enjoying breakfast activities together. Every day at Mrs. An's house, we fill this breakfast with conversations about delicious food, cooking recipes, kitchen strategies, and daily life in our respective families. I know for a fact that Mrs. An is never absent from her housekeeping routine. The fruit of her persistence is a garden filled with various tropical fruits, vegetables, and herbs that are almost always ready to be harvested when needed. When the earthquake occurred, Mrs. An said that this garden was a place for her and the residents to evacuate. There, people did not go hungry because the earthquake happened to coincide with the fruit and vegetable harvest season in Mrs. An's garden. Pasirputih friends who are working on the idea of food self-sufficiency often chat with Mrs. An about planting and cooking, just like what happened when I shared my daily food with Mrs. An. But this time, our breakfast was moved to the beach along with hundreds of other residents.

        Mrs. An joked, "Wow, because of Pasirputih, this early morning we aren't even in the kitchen. We even have breakfast on the beach. Nice!" She laughed with her friends. Her youngest child, Khori, then ran to welcome the waves on the shore.

        But not only that. The event of having breakfast together apparently was the moment when Mrs. An and her friends sparked an idea to cook snacks that could be served for the collective praying activities tonight. Indeed, the peak activities in Bangsal Menggawe consist of three main activities: mass rudat gymnastics in the morning, the Bangsal Cup final in the afternoon, and praying together at Bangsal Beach in the evening. At this collective praying event, people from the three different religions in Pemenang will pray together according to their respective beliefs. Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists gathered together on Bangsal beach for the first time after the earthquake and tsunami rocked not only North Lombok but also several other locations in Indonesia. The beach, which has long been a sacred location for adherents of certain faiths and a gathering place for residents to have fun, has recently changed its function as a center of economic activity when tourism dominates life in Pemenang. When the earthquake occurred at the same time as the danger of a tsunami, the relationship between the residents and the beach became more tense even though the beach was busy again because activities at the port had to continue. That day at the peak of Bangsal Menggawe, we invited the residents to gather again at Bangsal beach – which is often said to be the heart of the Pemenang people – to pray together and restore the lives of the residents who had been shaken by the earthquake.

        "We are very happy because this morning we can have fun again at the beach. That's why we intend to make snacks for the praying event. We need to support Pasirputih too. This is an event for all of us as well. "Later, I want to bring some snacks so we can eat together again." That's more or less what Mrs. An said after the exercise. In the afternoon when we were preparing for the 2019 Bangsal Cup final match, Mrs. An and her friends cooked simple sweet cakes and arranged them in small boxes. This is the main dish for the collective praying event tonight. And like after the mass gymnastics this morning, Mrs. An immediately looked for me after the group praying event was over. A cup of rice and water spinach pelecing came to fill my rumbling stomach.

IV.              Is This The Face?

        Siba once told me that for a long time, the residents had often shared various things on certain occasions. Bamboo, for example. For a long time, they have had the habit of giving away bamboo for free when there are celebrations or other urgent needs. Even if it's not free, the recipient will usually pay with whatever they can. Bamboo does not fully act as an economic object because it can also become a token of social relations for residents when needed. Apart from bamboo, the habit of giving each other food ingredients, kitchen spices, coconuts, and fruit also often occurs here. The market never fully operates only as a space for economic transactions to fulfill the kitchen’s needs. It can also act as a space to maintain kinship relations between citizens which are bridged by the exchange activity itself. It is relatively common to find an economic object, whether in the form of goods or services, deflect from its flow to be a commodity form because the exchange action is no longer based solely on economic issues. In fact, it becomes a token of the social relations that have been established and are to be maintained.

        This is perhaps what eases the process of inviting residents to 'contribute' to the implementation of Bangsal Menggawe. The established social relationships, consciously or unconsciously, have laid a solid foundation for the emergence of contribution initiatives from the people to the ecosystem in which they reside. At the very least, this continues to be done by certain individuals in the Pemenang ecosystem which then spreads to other individuals in the same ecosystem, like an unbroken network of communication from citizen to citizen. In the Bangsal Menggawe process, it is this social relationship that continues to be activated to move towards an independent collective economy.

        Various strategies for accessing and managing resources within the framework of the Bangsal Menggawe festival, both in terms of artistic works and technical events, become a form of activating the elements that exist within the community. Artists and the residents who create works are encouraged to become actors who activate social relations between the people which are expected to give rise to other faces of an economic system in a particular ecosystem. So, in other words, Bangsal Menggawe's production also becomes a therapeutic action that re-stimulates the nerve points in the social body of the residents of Pemenang in order to restore the socio-economic constructions that have existed among the residents for generations.

 

Notes from the residency 

Jakarta, April 2020.