Centering this project on women and their representation felt menial at first, almost unimportant. I felt shy moving forward with this project, thinking that I am not tackling a real issue—considering the state of women’s rights and justice in my country, above all—with the workshop that I was not even sure of the outcome. Will there even be an outcome? Is the workshop itself the outcome? Is the dialogue between participants considered an outcome? Not having a graphic design artifact after going through the research this far felt cowardly. Am I even doing graphic design at this point?
From the first dialogue, I zoomed in immediately on that question, feeling particularly insecure about not having anything to show other than a video essay and a collage book; what can I create out of the workshop?
I am glad to be reoriented. We talked a lot about the feminization of labor, of how most of the traces of women that were pointed out are tied closely to domestic labor. It went into a conversation about how women do a lot of labor to hold a household together, providing an environment where men could flourish. The inherent nurturing nature of a woman’s presence in a household brought us to the language of womanhood. It is the quiet voice of a woman present in the perfectly ironed suits of the founding fathers, or the sewn signs present in protests.
What interests me from this dialogue is the suggestion of making this labor visible. Making the secret language of womanhood into something more easily noticeable.
My focus shifted at this point, no longer too worried about a physical outcome. I want to test out more ideas regarding this idea of making the quiet murmurs of women’s presence into something louder. It is quite a challenge, because most of the time, it wasn’t even murmurs; it was dead silence.
After all, I am already inviting my workshop participants to be aware of the lack of representation for women in the Indonesian archive. I am very aware of the uncomfortable moment of realization that there are not a lot of us in the archives. I wonder if this uncomfortable feeling is something worth archiving—the damning feeling of knowing that we are not part of official histories.
Putting a pin on that, I am still looking into collectiveness. With the recent political unrest in Indonesia, I have gotten involved more with a lot of civil movements. This made me realize that hope is one of the only things that grows when it is shared. I believe for my cause and for this project, moving as a collective is the only reasonable way forward. Moreover, because we are in this situation of being unrepresented because only a select few were in control of who and what should be archived in history. To resist the elite few, we must harness the power of many.
Within all my dialogues, I feel like we are moving towards a toolkit. A way to make this workshop more streamlined and able to be easily replicated in different situations, while still being inclusive and safe. Perhaps a way to do the same workshop, the process of realizing how underrepresented women are in the archive, and the act of taking back the agency of archiving ourselves by ourselves.