A. Sebastianus Hartanto’s (b. 1995) revisits the question of ‘from/dari ’ through
the lens of an ethnographer, craftsman, and writer, by recontextualizing objects and practices that recollect and embody the materiality of belongin
The inquiry to Dari began with questioning the phatic expression ‘How are you?’ as an uncommon greeting in Sebastianus’s mother tongue. Rather ‘Where have you arrived from?’ (sangkan) and ‘Where are you going?’ (paran) are questions that underpin much of Javanese culture, rooted in the philosophy of Sangkan Parang Dumadi, the belief in a continuous journey of seeking to question the beginnings and directions of being 1.
One of the first works from Dari, ’Kembali’ is a ritualization of rebirth, where the practitioner meditates through a fetal position recalling the question of from. During several of his practices, the notion of ’particles’ as a metaphor for the body arises; “the being is a particle consisting thousands of particles, that have migrated from rivers to lands of from. The being is gathered, transformed, and molds into a rock, a body consisting of thousands of froms.”2 Particles for Sebastianus consist of every memory, artifact, and image forming an ‘Anthology of Froms’ and ‘Akar Temurun’, thegenealogy of froms. In making sense or form of these origins, Sebastianus uses batik on archived photographs, where each point of memory is covered with wax in resistance to the black dye that stains it.
For Sebastianus the question of ‘from’ “revisits the awareness of our locality, origins, and becomings”2. It invites one to consider how one is located, not just geographically, but also within a social and even cosmological matrix. As the author, Fred B. Eiseman Jr. notes in his study of Balinese culture and spirituality, “a direction describes a vector not just in physical space but in cultural, religious and social ‘space’ as well.Dari is Sebastianus’s attempt to re-root himself, to uncover points of origin, while at the same time putting out new shoots of many ‘froms’ that lead to the ‘arrival’, here and now.