“They say
your life can be changed forever by death
I don’t know how much of that is true
when you have more than one life.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t forget.
I wonder though often times
whether a mosquito
remembers its life as a larvae, underwater,
before it grew its wings.”
Untold Movements – Act 1: Neitherland, Whitherland, Hitherland casts light on the geopolitical border as a space, imbued with a secret network of displaced lives. This 32-channel surround sound installation with soundabsorbing fabric, speakers and LED lights features original spoken word poetry via fifteen narrators in variegated languages – amongst others Indonesian, Vietnamese, English, Arabic – interpreting and superimposing each other. The piece, intimate and painstakingly composed, is based on Wulia’s experience of being within a border’s limbo during a trip into Europe in 2011, as well as her extended project (since 2005) with the exiled Indonesian author Sobron Aidit (1934-2007), whom she sees as key to understanding her familial background being on the losing side of the political turmoil of 1965 Indonesia.
The series continues with Untold Movements – Part 2: When I Doubt My Insanity (2017) and Untold Movements – Part 3: Luxembourg (2017). Following on Act 1, the original spoken-word poetry in Act 2: When I Doubt My Insanity grew out of two characters in “1001 Martian Homes”, Wulia’s solo project at the Indonesian Pavilion, 57th Venice Biennale. In a 2-channel geolocated sound installation, site-specific in Venice, Tedjabayu and Hersri Setiawan were amongst the political prisoners of Buru Island, Indonesia, indefinitely detained without trial during the Suharto government. During internment and in between tortures, Tedjabayu wrote down any general knowledge he could recall to retain his sanity, and Hersri covertly buried his notebooks under a banana tree as writing was banned. This work, placed in Campo del Ghetto Nuovo – the world’s first Jewish ghetto – needs to be activated by at least two people, one staying near the trunk of a tree, and the other(s) walking around it, ringing memories to live.
The latest in the series, Act 3: Luxembourg, is a 45-minute loop of synchronised 30-channel sound composition in 3 parts, peaking every 15 minutes. It sees the city as Sassen’s new frontier zone where people from different worlds meet. The compositions features an exiled Indonesian author, Sobron Aidit (1934–2007) in a structure inspired by Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) and Borges’s intriguing renderings of the great English author William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
Interweaving documentary sound bites on Sobron (from 2005 to 2007) with new recordings – including narrated excerpts from Borges’s and Shakespeare’s works – the piece poetically reimagines a fragment of Sobron’s exile in the city of Paris, where he was preoccupied with the yearning to return home. The Luxembourg train station is where Sobron marked time, as he went to work in the Indonesian restaurant* on Rue de Vaugirard, and to write his version of history in a nearby internet café. Luxembourg is also where Sobron eventually collapsed because of a fatal heart attack, while waiting.
In Wulia’s multilingual sound composition, Borges’s renditions of Shakespeare (especially Sonnet 123) are summoned up by Sobron’s whistling (a reference to Borges’s Shakespeare’s Memory). All takes place in Luxembourg as one of the hexagonal galleries in Borges’s La Biblioteca de Babel (1941, translated to French by Nestor Ibarra in 1951, and published in English 1962), a universe “congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind’s hope.” In this Library, people spend their lifetime journeying in quest of an impenetrable book until they die, their bodies dissolving in an infinite fall through unfathomable air.
