A number of monitors stand inside the room, and on each screen is an individual performing a different action. The wall is a large mind-map-looking diagram showing the relationships between workers, agencies, and various supporting structures and networks. The map is also a place where workers can share their experience within the city, which is a prototype that workers helped develop and that will become part of Indo K-Work’s online platform. This new work by Julia Sarisetiati (b. 1981, Jakarta) continues her research on Indonesian migrant workers in Korea, which she began in 2011 with Seoul Art Space Geumcheon. Titled Indo K-Work, the ongoing project includes an online platform on which videos created by Indonesian migrant workers in Korea are published. The online video-sharing platform aims at facilitating workers’ telling of their own stories, showing their everyday living conditions, and giving voice to the transactions that they live and embody. Many of these videos are made in Ansan, an industrial city at the outskirts of Seoul, where 80 percent of all Indonesian migrant workers live and work. These videos and maps do not only provide documentation of the lives of the workers; they are also carriers of knowledge accumulated by different individuals, which the online platform then shares and circulates. From July through August 2016, Sarisetiati and two of her team members traveled to Ansan to create content for the video-sharing platform together with workers as well as existing community spaces in Ansan. This trip formed the beginning of the long-term project that will continue to develop beyond gb11.
Sarisetiati’s practice is concerned with global movements of the labor population, particularly that of Indonesia, and the desires and needs that drive its members. She is also interested in how different walks of life consider the role and function of art. For example, in Tagline for Artistic Society, Sarisetiati invited four sociology students to come up with a tagline—a slogan of sorts— for an artistic society where those who live within it see themselves as artists, and their lives as works of art. The students’ discussion, which included rigorous debate on the social stratum of class and the meaning of work and happiness, was filmed from multiple angles and made into a 40-minute long video. Often working collaboratively, Sarisetiati directs and produces films, videos, and publications. She is part of ruangrupa, an artist collective and artist-initiated space (and gb11 fellow) in Jakarta.
self-presentation:
My name is Julia Sarisetiati (b. 1981), and you can call me Sari. I am female, I live and work in Jakarta, Indonesia. I produce things, along with many others. Be it a video work, exhibition, festival, publication, installation, discussion, workshop, etc., and mostly I work together with a Jakarta-based artist group, running a space namely ruangrupa.
Important encounters/events/books/films:
Hannah Arrendt, The Human Condition, Book
The Son of Saul, Film
ruangrupa
OK. Video Jakarta International Media Arts Festival
RURU Corps
Gudang Sarinah
Residency in Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Seoul, South Korea
