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This project is a collaborative project by Proyek Edisi, and is part of Jalar Rimpang, for the event "KUMPAR RIMPANG: Almanak Rimpang Nusantara 2022”, part of the Rhizomatic Archipelago Programme by The Prince Claus Fund, Cemeti - Institute for Art and Society.
Before talking about the project, we would like you to know about Proyek Edisi and Cemeti - Institute for Art and Society.
About PROYEK EDISI
PROYEK EDISI is a young artists' initiative based in Yogyakarta. This group focuses on the study and practice of performance art. Documentations of the process and outputs of the study are distributed through social media.
About CEMETI - INSTITUTE FOR ART AND SOCIETY
Cemeti - Institute for Art and Society (formerly "Cemeti Gallery", then "Cemeti Art House") is Indonesia’s oldest platform for contemporary art, founded in Yogyakarta in 1988 by artists Mella Jaarsma and Nindityo Adipurnomo. Cemeti offers a platform for artists and cultural practitioners to develop, present and practice their work in close collaboration with curators, researchers, activists, writers and performers, as well as local communities across Yogyakarta.
The programme takes shape through exhibitions, workshops, talks, assemblies, publications, long-term research threads and a three-month artist-in-residence programme (held twice annually). The subtitle "Institute for Art and Society" was added in 2017 by a new team to express the organisations commitment to socially and politically engaged artistic practices, exploring the possibility for a gallery to act as a site for civic action.
About "MENCARI KABAR"
"Mencari Kabar" ("Seeking the News") is a collaborative project by PROYEK EDISI in 2022. PROYEK EDISI's members who were mostly born in the 1990s, have hazy and vague memories of the New Order and the events that accompanied and marked the downfall of the regime. The “Monetary Crisis” is the only thing that they had experienced, which may even just be encountered without any comprehension.
Recognizing their limited knowledge on Reformasi 98 and its Monetary Crisis phenomenon, PROYEK EDISI attempts to complement their understanding by looking at the archive of mass media as their primary source, one of which was the Kedaulatan Rakyat newspaper which also operated during 1998 and coverage the issue regarding the monetary crisis in Yogyakarta.
The collected news archives are then responded to by reading out loud or reciting selected articles on the sites mentioned in the news. PROYEK EDISI's members interpret the discourse of the media by experimenting with form, choreography, utterance, and camera's angle capturing of events at the location during the declamation.
Video performance artworks of the reciting will be uploaded to the YouTube channel of PROYEK EDISI and distributed through other social media. Also, in collaboration with FantomPocong , one of the exponents of the Non-Blok Movement (an Indonesian crypto artist movement active on the Fantom Opera network), PROYEK EDISI will mint and distribute selected news articles from the Kedaulatan Rakyat's archive into the blockchain network (100% on-chain).
Official links
Proyek Edisi
Cemeti - Institute for Art and Society
About the Performance
PROYEK EDISI is going to mint archives of Kedaulatan Rakyat newspaper in the framework of the art project "Mencari Kabar" ("Seeking the News") on July 30, 2022 3:00 PM UTC+7.
In this minting process, seven members of the PROYEK EDISI (Azwar Ahmad, Eka Wahyuni, Ignatius Suluh, Maria Silalahi, Nisa Ramadani, Pinka Oktafia, and Wildan Iltizam) are going to meet via Discord on the Fantom Pocong's server. Each of them will do streaming and screen sharing, so everyone can see their minting activity. In addition, they will also carry out continuous typing in the chat column, writing down the contents of selected news articles from the Kedaulatan Rakyat's archive of the monetary crisis coverages in 1998.
Of course, this minting event looks nothing special in the eyes of crypto people who are already familiar with the world of NFT and Blockchain. However, the PROYEK EDISI tries to frame this specific event as an act of art, in the perspective of performance art.
Performance art, for PROYEK EDISI, can be a way to inform everyone about significant aspects of everyday life, as well as to highlight common things into something that has to do with important contemporary sociocultural phenomena. By positioning the token minting activity as an "art exhibition", we want to show the production process and the product of NFTs, as well as our interactions with blockchain, as part of the core concept that underlies the artwork as a whole. Moreover, we view that this activity has its own artistic and aesthetic side, and by going through all of them as a visual experience, spectacle and live action, it will provide a new interpretation of the cultural function of the performance art in the midst of current very radical situation of technological development.
Performance art is the art that makes action, and the events resulting from that action, as its subject matter. Meanwhile, the body of the performers as well as the body of the audience are the medium to realize the idea. We hope that, with the "Minting Performance" for the Kedaulatan Rakyat's archive of 1998s, we can connect with each other, and generate new ideas in the future in response to the existence of the blockchain.
Please join us! Feel free to watch and chat! Let your self collect one or more these reproduced articles. Do it if you love to appreciate what we put into this art project.
See you!
This minting performance is also in collaboration with #NonBlokMovement artists.
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