Family to Nation - Jakarta International Photo Festival

The spirit of development was a widely introduced and propagated persona during the New Order era, infiltrating civilians' domestic and private space. This was massively recorded in the Indonesian family archive since the family was the actor and the target of the development itself.

This vernacular practice of recording—photographs, documents, and others—holds layers of potentiality to enrich our historical narratives. The domestic space and medium is a possible verge which obscures control and propaganda within the domain of intimacy.

Family to Nation utilizes the domestic archive of Indonesian families as an effort of activating the peripheral narrative of our nation. This curatorial work simulates the possible space to access these personal documentations to re-present this ‘unimportant’ artefacts and provide opportunity for today’s generation to the re-experience and re-think about the (historical) narrative made, collected, and gathered by ordinary civilian in their intimate space.

Arif Furqan, 2022

This project is the selected proposal of the JIPfest 2021 Curatorial Workshop in collaboration with Goethe-Institute Indonesien with Boaz M Levin and The Secret Agents as mentors.