DI' ANTARA: 2025

Alexander Sebastianus’s installation unfolds as an assemblage where objects, images, and materials are dispersed across a matrix of stainless steel tiles. Each plate functions as a modular plane, a particle within a larger constellation. The grid becomes not a boundary but a field — a plateau, in Deleuze’s sense¹ — where fragments and traces enter into relation, folding into each other as partial perspectives.

Scattered across the floor and wall, the plates host both interventions and absences: holes punctured in symmetric arrangements, some filled with cords and tubes carrying the suggestion of blood, others left void as silent orifices. Organic and artificial materials intersect — a domesticated Musa acuminata² plant stems through one aperture, while a small gong from a gamelan ensemble is wired with long electrical cords, resembling roots emerging from its body. Tubes of blood entwine with these cords, conjuring circulatory systems that are both organic and technological. The gong emits a spectral soundscape of verbal dreams and ancestral memories — echoes that haunt present beings, reminders of inheritances that resist erasure.

Nearby, a resin-cast skeleton of Java Man³ surfaces within this constellation, referencing one of the earliest human ancestors discovered in Java. Suspended between science and myth, anthropology and nation-building, the fossil becomes a figure of uncertain belonging: Homo erectus or something else, ancestor or stranger. Its presence recalls both the colonial histories of anthropology and the unresolved question of who — or what — is claimed as origin.

On the wall, a chord of images hangs: archived photographs printed on cotton, cut into grids, and knotted into a long tangled line. Here the photograph is no longer a static index of the past but becomes, in Tim Ingold’s sense⁴, a lifeline — a trajectory, a thread of relation that knots memory into material form. This gesture transforms the archive into a living filament, stretching between past and present, human and nonhuman.

These assemblages resist being confined to identity or autobiography. Instead, they ask: how does belonging emerge through matter, relation, and repetition? How do pre-determined lineages — the sedimentations of colonization, industrialization, and the domestication of being — reverberate through the body, the object, and the field? Or in the words of an Indonesian philosophical inquiry⁵: “Apakah mendjadi Budi kita diantara hak-hakikat yang lahir dan yang dibentuk — antara tubuh dan budaya, darah dan benda?”

The installation is conceived as a ritual of gathering, a processual archaeology of fragments that never settle into a fixed whole. Objects here are not inert; they are particles in motion, nodes in a shifting ecology of time. Reading phenomenology of perception alongside neo-materialist thought, the work traces an in-between condition — di antara semua dan segalanya — between past and future, the actual and the concurrent, the intimate and the planetary.

As curator and theorist Jane Bennett has written, matter has its own “thing-power,” a vitality that resists reduction to human use or meaning⁶. In this installation, objects and substances insist on their own agency: the rock as monument, the banana leaf as ephemeral survival, the steel plate as technological residue, the gong as haunted resonance, the fossil as a fractured origin. Together, they form what might be called a “ritual of making sense” — a practice not of sculpting answers, but of sustaining questions.

In this sense, Di’antara — Sedimentary Relations does not aim to resolve belonging but to dwell within its paradoxes. It stages the act of hunting and gathering — hunting for questions, gathering what remains — as a contemporary sculptural practice. What emerges is a cartography of sediments: of bloodlines and plants, fossils and gongs, tattoos and stones, photographs and cords. An assemblage where the self is not a singular origin, but a network of relations in constant transition.

¹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). The term “plateau” designates a continuous, self-vibrating field of intensity, without beginning or end.

² Musa acuminata is the wild species from which the cultivated banana originates. As a plant domesticated across Southeast Asia, it indexes histories of agriculture, trade, and colonization. Its presence here underscores the tension between wildness and domestication of being.

³ Java Man (Pithecanthropus erectus, later classified as Homo erectus) was discovered by Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois in 1891 along the Solo River in Java. The fossil became central to debates on human evolution, while also entangled in colonial science and narratives of “origin.” See Dubois, Pithecanthropus erectus (Batavia: Landesdruckerei, 1894).

⁴ Tim Ingold, Lines: A Brief History (London: Routledge, 2007). Ingold describes “life lines” as threads of movement and relation, contrasting them with points or nodes of static identity.

⁵ The concept of budi in Indonesian thought refers to the integrative faculty that unites body, mind, and culture. See Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana, Values as Integrating Forces in Personality, Society and Culture (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1974).
⁶Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Bennett articulates “thing-power” as the vitality of matter independent of human use.