We cannot talk about truth without talking about power. The master who holds the power dictates what is considered truthful by deciding what is precious enough to be archived and what among those archives are important enough to be shown. This is how the master built his house. This is how truth, or perhaps canon, was created.

Push against the wall, ask about what created each brick, and the gaps in between the makeup of those bricks will be apparent. Things that the archive just conveniently skips over or mentions in passing. We know about the reasons Timor Leste was so sure of separation, the hurt Indonesia inflicts upon its eastern regions, what was done to the Chinese Indonesian women in 1998, we know of those hidden truths. But some things exist in between the canon and the fiction. Things pushed into the margins but not out of the pages. One of them is stories about women.

We know of remarkable women. Heroines, if we want to use the master’s term. But we know, logically, that there are thousands of other stories of women. Of everyday, ordinary women, who tend to the garden and go to the markets. Women who vaguely exist in the archives as gaps within the canon. Not enough to be archived but not threatening the master enough for them to be erased.

So, we take the fragments, the vague signs of existence. Ephemeral evidence of women. We took these slivers of truth and let them run wild, extrapolating them into wild facts that couldn’t possibly be proven as non-canon.

Dreams Beyond Precious Ruins took what little fragments the master said as precious and built entire dreams of what could have been. Inside, you will find stories conveyed through different forms of media, from poetry to 3D renderings. Stories of feeling caged, of camaraderie between girls, of nurture.

Stories of resistance, in different ways that resistance could exist.

We cannot deny that we are still living in the master’s house. But we know now that the master’s house has built-in gaps. Dreams Beyond Precious Ruins acknowledges those gaps, and it is a chatter about all the possible things that could fit inside those gaps.