The project started with trying to illustrate 100 years of Indonesian women’s self-fashioning through 100 physical layers on the same image, drawing over the same image with oil pastels and markers, so that each layer covered the last one. As this exercise was developing, it became clearer how difficult the task of finding recorded imagery of the ordinary Indonesian women through the years is, due to both the lack of archives and the inaccessible system the national archive is currently using. Even through a long and deep online research it was difficult to extract what was needed through what could be described as an online scavenger’s hunt; where my research was inconclusive, I tried instead secondary routes; looking at mainstream media and pop culture, at ads, movies and the like to interrogate whether an certain image of the Indonesian woman through specific ages was possible to find.

This action of gleaning traces, collecting ephemera as evidence, brought up a sliver of hope. Even when the government doesn’t want to explicitly show women within the National Archive of Indonesia and continuously attempts to erase women from the national curriculum, there are other channels (albeit scattered) where we can find how women have always existed and contributed to the early days of the country’s establishment. Indonesians are only granted a handful of astounding women gracing our history books, and if women had to be so remarkable to be regarded as precious enough to be archived, then what hope does the everyday women has?

This led to my first exercise of reaction. Since the government acts like it is so difficult to include ordinary women in the conventional archive and history, I invited ordinary women of today to cut up the archive. I organized a workshop for today’s women to find traces of women in Indonesian archival photos and create their own archive from them.

In doing this operation of collectively forming a different kind of history and a different archival method or platform, I believe a new community practice could arise. Though the workshop was only about creating a new archive through existing archival photos, the practice could be shaped into something more; it has the power to be a protest over how conventional archives are being practiced in the most patriarchal way. The reaction towards the archive becomes a way to question its legibility: what is important enough to be archived, and why is the history of women’s contributions not considered by many institutions a fundamental part of it?

At this point, reacting against the conventional archive felt cathartic, although it still leaves open the critical question on the first problem of how ordinary women are not documented, archived, and represented enough.

So, I developed methods for women to start gleaning from each other. Exercises are set to archive from women as a collective; prompts are being sent around, asking women to send in something they got from another woman, and what they want to show other women. I facilitated an operation of ordinary women archiving each other, rewriting the conventional top-down system of archival by giving way for a more grassroots system.

It became clear how this exclusive yet grass-rooted way of obtaining archival collections has a different intention from conventional museum archives, like V&A East Storehouse, for example, that seemingly has everything from anywhere, for anyone. This kind of fictitious inclusivity is not what this project intends to achieve. At this point, I do not intend to intervene with the existing archival institutions anymore. What good could come from forcing women’s history to have a bigger space in the belly of the beast? Wouldn’t it just drown in the sheer vastness of the conventional archive, since it didn’t have an equal footing at the start?

Perhaps what this project wants to achieve is having a safe corner in the patriarchal world. Women are used to sharing wisdom in a casual and informal setting. Wisdom we usually share in the kitchen or as we get ready together has weight, too. It should be archived and shared in a larger network.

As I start to better understand the position of my work in relation to patriarchal museological practices, the project begins to take the shape of a form of anti-archival platform; open-source, accessible, and safe are some of the key elements. Something any woman can access to tell a network of women about the informal yet important lessons they learned, both from the lived experience of a woman or as advice bestowed upon them by other women. It should be able to visually convey how vast the world of women is, and should make any woman who saw it realize that our usually weightless wisdom, when archived together, has quite the weight.

As I progressed in experimenting with possible platforms to let the work enter into conversation with my female audience, I realised how important it is for the process to have the full support and energy from the participants themselves. It is interesting to note how willing and easy it is to ask women to participate in this project. Even from the very start, the workshop, reacting to the lack of women in the archive, all the participants said that they enjoyed it. With every step this project takes, every time I sheepishly ask the women around me for a favor, to fill a booklet, to try a platform, play a game, all for this cause of pushing for a more inclusive archival practice, they are always enthusiastic and willing.

Which makes me question more: If women are so willing to share their wisdom and experience, why all this precious knowledge so scarcely documented, shared, and gathered?