Dreams Beyond Precious Ruins is an invitation, first and foremost. An invitation to poke at our canon and question what and who built it. Pick apart the bricks of it and announce the gaps in it, porous and not at all the most rock solid when we put it under the microscope.

Or at least, look at it for longer than a second.

I have always wondered about what goes on in the lives of ordinary women when our country came to be. I find myself asking, “This couldn’t be all of it; where are the rest of them?” whenever the same archetype comes up. This gap is something I want us to acknowledge. When women are being pushed to the margins, nothing is placed in their absence. Not that they should make something up just to fill the void.

So, if there isn’t anything more than ephemera, not much other than precious ruins, I invited Indonesian women to dream of what could possibly fit in those gaps.

Are we lying? Not necessarily. Stories are not lies. We are telling each other stories in the media that we are comfortable with using. These stories won’t fill the gaps, but they would make the experience of staring into the void less lonely, now that we have the lively chatters around it.