Real-Life Village of Artists in Java, Indonesia

AROUND
THE HOUSE

Sightseeing around my house in the town of Yogya on the island of Java
of the Republic of Indonesia, would give you some visual salad --
what is new and what is old, hundreds of years and an instant,
tradition and novelty, stagnant lair and flowing river,
real estate and real landslide, the natural and artificial,
the disposable and the eternal, and a hybrid of
too many things to be named in a blink.
Abridged: like.....me!

Around sixty years of peculiar republican existence [see History of Indonesia], the town has grown used to self-dubbed hermits, socially scornful recluse, and virtually every brand of artistic eccentricity. Nature endorses this tendency -- it is everywhere, so hideouts like this could get easily built [see 'The Province of Yogya'].

Artists & artisans

Art galleries, curators & more artists

But the so-called development cannot be but embraced, for whatever's sake; these past few years, hybrid houses have been taking over what used to be local homes. Most of such colorful newcomers are vacant -- owners prefer to live in Jakarta, the republic's capital, where the humdrum of moneymaking is [see 'Indonesia'].

This is a typical village road untouched by governmental meddling except for the slapdash asphaltization. Interprovincial roads lined by sturdy teak is everywhere on this island. One of them is two cigarettes away from my house (see how the Javanese give direction later).

See what kind of biz opens up along this street

Banana trees have been treated as if they are totally worthless since 1970's, even as the Javanese still depend on them quite much. Everything bananaese is used and virtually not a single shred is wasted. In Java, banana flowers are 'vegetables' (they're ingredients of several dishes), so is the innermost layer of banana tree's trunks. The leaves are food wrappers and salable as such.

Kiki, one of Riska Andriyanti's cats, in an unfinished house around her place. See the scary-looking bamboo tall bench? That's what Javanese construction workers work on all day without any such a thing as an insurance coverage for possible accidents. Riska, the 7 year-old neighbor, was infected early on by my and my little sister's cat-keeping habit [see 'Blue Rose Monday' and/or Asada Kanae's pages].

Captain Nemo, volunteering guardian of the neighborhood; he was sort of mad at me while this picture was taken -- but he stopped barking for a few secs, resuming it again after the flash died down. Genius dog! His house is there at the background, where he lives happily with Asada Kanae and Santo Banana, in a Japanese-Javanese artistic & private bilateral collaboration [see 'Soul Tattoos' and/or Asada Kanae's pages].

Pedicabs are the main public transport for those (I) who can't stand overcrowded buses. More or less 25 pedicab drivers live in my neighborhood. Despite the obviously hard work and low pay, most of them have somehow secured ownership of houses of their own, and so far 2 kids of those families have been university students, hoping for some different future from that of daddy's.

Riverbed is as well done as any spot in the long, unpredictable, generally migraining dry season's merciless sun. It just lays there undescribable until the first rain comes -- usually around the time orange leaves fall off the trees in the Ozarks [see 'Thru the Window'].

The road leading to my house -- though every road might be -- long, narrow, worn-out, it shows what every other suburban and country inroad has upon their faces. If you get lost, enquiry for direction would elicit the characteristic rural Javanese replies, such as "Baron beach? Take a U-turn here, then turn right until you reach a pair of cypresses, then turn left after a tobacco plantation, and from there it is one cigarette-smoking length of time to Baron beach."

A bamboo grove by the river in my neighborhood. Bamboo to the Javanese have been as significant as they are to the Japanese, and not just for architectural projects. The young sprout is harvested as vegetables, the leaves are used as food wrappers. And the Javanese sharpened bamboo sticks to fight against the Japanese and the Dutch in 1945 -- the Indonesian War for Independence.

At the right: Javanese can't live without chilli. They'll eat anything as long as there is some chilli sauce (pounded with salt and garlic) around.

Rice fields where some other chunk of my neighborhood is kept busy in. The exact same view can be gotten anywhere around Asia; but I can't leave this pic out because otherwise the portrait of the neighborhood wouldn't be complete. Right behind the back wall of my house is already a rice field. Besides, I know the names of the water-buffaloes that work hard day by day when these fields were plowed. For two thousand years this planet has never been very kind to farmers -- and when the repeated failure of communism, socialism, populism or of whichever name it is has been buried and forgotten, next thing you know the land has been a private property of a Jakartanese CEO. I know how hopelessly outdated this feeling is, but I wish we all be a little grateful for what we eat daily -- that there are people like my neighbors to work on what we either can't or not willing to do, under the scorching tropical sun and fiercely pouring rain, day in, day out, for almost financially nothing.

Some quirky items on sale in the traditional market. Dried corn skin is used as materials of Yogyanese handicrafts, but it has been serving another use since the year 1000 -- to roll traditional cigarettes in.

Plucked roses are daily merchandise and much more often seen here than whole roses -- which are something imported from the caucasian diehard habit of getting unseasonably romantic. Plucked roses are the thing we go to funerals and graves with, to be further plucked on the spot and the petals are then scattered on the ground. In the form like you see in the pic above, it is for some sort of ancestor-worship or offerings at home.

But there also exists some bounty nobody planted but nonetheless reaps, like papaya and guava. They are nearly worthless in Java; we consider them the lowest-ranked fruits, together with pineapples.

Javanese apple trees are grown in large orchards in East Java. In my part of Central Java, it is only some kind of a hobby to my neighbor who has 5 or 6 of these at his backyard. Javanese apples are harder, smaller, and greener than those grown in Washington, D.C. and New Zealand. Even when they ripen, the color is orange-green, never red, the flesh stay hard, and the taste sweet-sour. It's one of the fruits for the lower economic class of the denizen, and not sold in supermarkets, only marketed by mobile and roadside vendors.

Francesco Coco (the cat at my library window above) and a typical Javanese seafood restaurant near my house (at your right).

Such places are always built upon the ponds where the fish et.al. are kept. All tables are as low as Japanese tables are, and we also sit on pillows on mattresses made of woven natural fibres.

Harvest time, and a roadside vegetable vendor. Routine images here around my house. So is the flood of year-long and seasonal fruit -- like the overloaded mango tree in a neighbor's front yard:

and cassava (some sort of sweet potatoes) field that Fanta Gelo patronizes:

and some sort of sweet potato we call 'talas', exactly the same as the Japanese's 'satoimo'. The leaves are fed to cows and goats. The people take the roots, often sold already boiled. A very very cheap source of carbohydrate -- plus vitamin C as a bonus.

What does it like to live here?

In Japan, they grow a certain variety of chrysanthemums and eat the flowers. In Java we eat the leaves of the variety locally named 'kenikir'; the flowers are used in bouquets like normal.

Most of the construxion is made of bamboo. The guys who own this particular joint are in everlasting war against my guerrilla cats, as a matter of course.

Photographs © 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003 M. Amin Mukti, Andrianto, William Dunlop,
Cynthia Siregar, Bunga Jeruk, Nin
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