That’s My Girl is a workshop and publication series that uses participatory design to represent the underrepresented everyday women in Indonesian history.

Women from different educational and cultural backgrounds came together to interact with the same set of nine archival photos taken from a news outlet. They were given the same prompt: to find anything that they thought was a woman’s trace. These traces were then cut out, gathered on a photocopy machine, and copied. The original traces were then thrown away, while the copy (which is now the original) was annotated to show the finder’s narrative.

Out of these responses, I compiled them based on similar themes and topics and then printed them in (a prototype of a) publication that intentionally adopts the collage style mostly present in late 90s and early 00s girls’ diaries. It is bound by a rather big, rather gaudy pink ring bind to further mimics the aesthetic of a girly artifact.

Pushing on the idea that the power of the public is the power of many, I try to create a very simple postcard generator. The idea is that with these postcards, women could communicate with more women and reach a wider audience for this reclamation of history project. In the long run, I am hoping for a cyclical process of sending toolkits and having their responses sent back. That, on top of responses from the workshop, would generate a library of assets that could be used to generate more unique postcards, which can be used to communicate with more and more women.

The research that comes with this project can be viewed here: