Alengka’s Garden

Indieguerillas consists of Miko and Santi, a dynamic husband and wife tag team, who operate the label as a design firm/consultancy as well as an artistic collaboration. It’s not entirely true, though, to consider what they do as purely collaborative because an element of combat is central to their creative process, reflecting a practice that pays homages to two different cultural streams – one that is as contemporary as street art and as old as the wayang.

Taking their cue from the game theory behind various graffiti assaults, where teams of graffiti-artists compete against one another in a display of skill and creativity, we see Santi and Miko battle out in their attempt at creating a coterie of cartoon characters. The process often begins with one artist drawing an angular stroke with the responding partner trying to counter the move by responding with a conflicting pen-work which might then challenge the former to think of new ways to create a resolution to this figure. Hence, the resulting creation embodies the tensions of a creative process characterised by competition more than collaboration.

Many of the characters that are part of Indieguerilla’s cartoon are based on traditional wayang personas – from the Javanese clown to Rawana. Their references to the tradition often express wayang’s paradoxical principle of opposing yet complementing duality that is inherent to the structure of the wayang’s play between forces of light and darkness, good and evil. These tensions are often sustained in many video and print works by Indieguerillas that are visually inspired by a nintendo aesthetic. Often the characters are also adorned with contemporary apparatus from nunchakus to DJ turntables. These layers of visual cue and process come together to argue for a contemporary cosmology that encapsulates the complicated values of our times, and at the same time, spell out their artistic ethos – competition as an exercise of creativity and expression.

Banyan Tree, a video project by the Indieguerillas, uses the motif of the banyan tree in their mapping agenda to explore the sophisticated make up of Javanese society on the whole. Traditionally, the banyan tree serves as a meeting point in a Javanese village where peddlers came to hawk their wares, villagers gathered to catch up with local gossips, and important local meetings were held. In the video, the tree symbolises a social system, branching out to contain these commonplace everyday experience.

The video is almost naive in its simplicity, yet the strength of the work lies in its clever use of animation, to depict and bring to life a complex tableaux of a community that is humorous, farcical, playful, tragic, and poignant, all the same.

(SS)