TILAS WAKTU: PHENOMENOLOGIES OF BELONGING: 2026

Tilas Waktu -- "traces of time" emerged from a series of encounters with megalithic landscapes, beginning with repeated field visits to Gunung Padang in Karyamukti, West Java—whose chronology remains the subject of ongoing archaeological debate—and later extending to prehistoric stone sites in Portugal, including the Almendres Cromlech (ca. 6000–4000 BCE). Rather than pursuing archaeological certainty, the project investigates the phenomenological conditions through which ancient places are encountered and experienced.

Gunung Padang, in particular, continues to generate archaeological, geological, spiritual, and vernacular interpretations, resisting any singular explanation. Rather than attempting to reconcile these narratives, Tilas Waktu inhabits their productive ambiguity. The work embraces the condition of unknowing that emerges when archaeology, memory, myth, and speculation coexist, asking what it means to stand before a landscape that oscillates between mountain and monument, natural formation and human intervention, sacred place and archaeological site. It is precisely this indeterminacy that allows such landscapes to remain imaginatively, materially, and cosmologically alive.

Alexander Sebastianus' artistic practice operates at the intersection of ritual, material anthropology, speculative archaeology, phenomenology, and material ecology. Through processes of material reverence, archiving, deconstruction, and reconstruction, his work investigates how human existence becomes sedimented within objects, landscapes, and geological matter. Drawing upon phenomenological approaches to landscape and contemporary material thought, his practice understands matter not as passive substance but as an active participant in the continual formation of memory, place, and belonging.

Tilas Waktu presents a constellation of megalithic stone-like sculptures composed from bodily residues, ancestral textiles, inherited garments, archival photographs, displaced soils, volcanic matter, cremated domestic furnishings, and organic remnants. Resembling fossils, monoliths, ritual stones, and archaeological artifacts, these forms are accumulations of lived existence compressed into matter. Interwoven throughout the installation are hand-spun photographic cords made from archival images and personal memories. Entangled between the megalithic forms, these strands function as material witnesses, binding fragmented histories, ancestral traces, and acts of remembrance into an evolving field of relations. Rather than documenting memory, the cords ritualize it, transforming personal archives into living material continually negotiated between past and present.

In Javanese, tilas refers not only to a trace or remnant, but to an existential afterimage whose presence lingers after disappearance. The work proposes time not as abstraction but as material sediment. Memory, grief, lineage, intimacy, and labor become lithic bodies—speculative megaliths formed from human residue and material inheritance. The photographic cords extend this proposition, situating memory not as fixed record but as something woven, carried, and continually transmitted across generations.

The project is grounded in a phenomenological understanding of landscape, where place is not conceived as a passive backdrop but as something continually constituted through bodily movement, perception, memory, and encounter. Following Christopher Tilley's A Phenomenology of Landscape (1994), megaliths are understood not as isolated archaeological objects but as relational presences whose significance emerges through pathways, topography, atmosphere, and lived experience. Equally, Tim Ingold's The Perception of the Environment (2000) informs the work's understanding of dwelling, proposing that landscapes are not simply occupied but continually brought into being through movement and participation. Materials are therefore approached not as static objects awaiting interpretation but as ongoing processes of weathering, sedimentation, transformation, and becoming. Stone, textile, soil, ash, and bodily residue retain their own trajectories while becoming entangled within new material formations. Resonating with Jane Bennett's Vibrant Matter(2010), these assemblages acknowledge the vitality of matter itself, suggesting that memory is not merely represented by materials but actively performed through them.

A continuously shifting cycle of light traverses the installation, tracing the movement of the sun across the gallery. As illumination gradually changes, the sculptures emerge and recede through shadow, recalling the ways megalithic landscapes are experienced through duration, seasonality, and celestial orientation. Rather than presenting fixed objects, the installation situates the viewer within an unfolding field of geological, ancestral, and cosmological time. Light becomes a material expression of temporality, allowing landscape to be perceived as an event rather than a static scene. Like many prehistoric megalithic sites whose meanings are inseparable from the rhythms of earth and sky, the installation proposes that perception itself is conditioned by the continual movement of time.

Situated between shrine, archive, excavation, monument, and speculative ruin, Tilas Waktu proposes what may be understood as a lithic phenomenology of belonging. Here, belonging is not understood as social identity or territorial attachment but as a material relationship continually negotiated between bodies, memory, landscape, and geological time. Through the interplay of anthropogenic megaliths, woven archives, and shifting light, the installation dissolves distinctions between archaeology and fiction, geology and memory, ritual and museology. Rather than asking what a megalith once meant, Tilas Waktu asks how stone continues to remember, how landscape continues to shape perception, and how human existence, through time, gradually becomes part of the earth itself.