Sedulur Watu ꦱꦺꦢꦸꦭꦸꦂꦮꦠꦸ: Omah Budoyo Gallery, Jogjakarta

"I knock at the stoneʼs front door. Itʼs only me, let me come in.ˮ [1]

Stones have long occupied a significant place within human belief systems, cultural practices, and historical imagination. Across traditions, they have been associated with endurance, stability, continuity, and memory. Formed through geological processes that unfold across vast temporal scales, stone persists beyond individual lifetimes and frequently serves as a marker of territory, ritual practice, commemoration, and collective history. In Javanese culture, stone occupies a particularly significant position as both material and cosmological presence. Beyond its physical properties, certain stones are understood to possess tuah, a form of spiritual potency acquired through ancestral association. Within Kejawen traditions, stones may function as objects of contemplation that reflect vast understandings of the relationship between human and non-human worlds.

Sedulur Watu derives from the Javanese words sedulur (relation, siblinghood, kinship) and watu (stone). Within the context of this exhibition, kinship extends beyond interpersonal relations. It encompasses the connections between people, materials, landscapes, and systems of belief that persist across generations. Like stone itself, such relationships are formed through processes of accumulation across time.

Such understandings of stone have increasingly found resonance within contemporary materialist discourse. Archaeologist Bjørnar Olsen argues that material objects should not be understood only as vessels of human essence but as entities that actively participate in the formation of social worlds.[2] Similarly, anthropologist Tim Ingold proposes that materials are continuously shaped through their interactions with environmental and human forces.[3] These perspectives challenge conventional distinctions between object and subject, nature and culture, suggesting instead that matter possesses its own histories, temporalities, and forms of agency.

Long before these discussions emerged within contemporary theory, French poet and essayist Francis Ponge approached stone through a remarkably similar lens. In Le Galet (The Pebble), first published in Le Parti Pris des Choses, Ponge resists treating the pebble as a symbol or metaphor, instead attending to its material existence as the product of geological transformation.[4] The pebble appears as the condensed residue of countless disruptions. In doing so, Ponge shifts attention away from what a stone represents toward the forces and durations ingrained within it. His writing anticipates later materialist approaches that understand objects less as discrete things than as agglomerations of relations and events.

For the past three years, Marten Bayuaji's research has focused on the relationship between humans and volcanoes, particularly the cultural histories that emerge around Mount Merapi. The works presented in Sedulur Watu draw from three temple sites that encircle Mount Merapi—Losari, Morangan, and Kimpulan—all of which were buried, displaced, or transformed by volcanic activity. Constructed between the ninth and tenth centuries CE, these temples formed part of a wider network of Hindu-Buddhist religious infrastructure distributed across the fertile volcanic landscapes of Central Java.[5] Archaeological studies of Candi Kimpulan suggest that the site belonged to a network of Shaivite sanctuaries established along the southern slopes of Merapi, reflecting the close bond between sacred architecture, agrarian settlement, and volcanic geography during the period.[6]

Archaeological and geological research demonstrates that temple construction occurred concurrently with periods of volcanic activity. Rather than existing in opposition to the volcano, settlements around Merapi developed through an ongoing negotiation with a landscape capable of both sustaining and disrupting human life. The fertile soils produced by volcanic processes supported dense populations and agricultural production, while recurrent eruptions, lahars, and ashfall repeatedly altered the surrounding environment.

As volcanologist Christopher G. Newhall and his colleagues have argued, the archaeological record of Central Java reveals long-term cycles of settlement, destruction, abandonment, and return.[7] Sites such as Losari, Morangan, and Kimpulan were eventually buried beneath volcanic deposits, their original functions interrupted as the landscape around them was transformed. Yet the disappearance of these structures did not signify the disappearance of the societies that built them. Recent studies of Candi Morangan further emphasise the continued social significance of archaeological sites within local communities, demonstrating that the cultural life of a monument often extends beyond its original historical function.[8]

Bayuaji's works emerge from this intersection of archaeology, material history, and environmental change. Drawings of fragmented temple structures and installations incorporating stone sourced from the three temple sites foreground the shifting identities of these materials across time. Once components of sacred architecture, the stones later became geological debris, archaeological discoveries, heritage objects, and eventually contemporary artworks. Their shifting identities recall what anthropologist Igor Kopytoff describes as the "cultural biography" of things, in which objects acquire new meanings and functions as they move through different historical and social contexts.[9]

This process is reiterated in works that employ mortar made from incense ash. Historically, temples functioned as sites through which rituals, offerings, and devotional acts were directed toward the sacred landscape. Incense, similarly, serves as a material intermediary within acts of prayer. Reduced to ash, it remains as a residue of repeated gestures and accumulated intentions.

The history of Losari demonstrates how a monument may pass through successive conditions. Once functioning as sacred space, the site later became a buried geological deposit, an archaeological excavation, and eventually a heritage monument. Such transformations reveal the shifting identities that Bayuaji traces through his own use of temple stone.[10] In Bayuaji's work, these remnants become a contemporary material through which questions of continuity, belief, and transmission are reconsidered.

His interest in material accumulation finds resonance within investigations into lithic existence. Drawing from anthropology, material culture studies, phenomenology, speculative archaeology, and Javanese cosmology, Sebastianus examines how human experience becomes sedimented within matter. Through processes of collecting, wrapping, weaving, binding, burning, archiving, and reconstruction, materials are approached as conglomeration of relationships, carriers of memories that exceed individual recollection.

Central to this inquiry is an interest in lithic artifacts, objects that occupy an ambiguous position between geological formation and cultural production. This ambiguity is particularly evident in a body of work consisting of stone-like forms bound in cord. Although they resemble lithic objects, these forms are not geological specimens. They are fabricated from composite assemblages of disparate materials including discarded kebaya textiles, fragments of furniture, books, hair, and other remnants of previous lives. Their construction raises a deceptively simple question: why might a fragment of broken concrete be described as a stone despite being entirely human-made? The question destabilises distinctions between natural and artificial matter. The resulting forms occupy a threshold between artifact and geology, revealing how categories such as nature and culture are themselves historically contingent constructions.

A second body of work extends these concerns through woven compositions incorporating images sourced from colonial archives and contemporary auction catalogues. Many depict archaeological artifacts associated with the Sriwijaya and Majapahit periods that now circulate through systems of documentation, collection, and commercial exchange.

Sebastianus appropriates and re-weaves these images into new material configurations, drawing attention to the afterlives of cultural objects beyond their original contexts. The gesture functions as a form of visual reclamation, returning archaeological imagery to new nexuses of cultural production. Rather than recovering the artifacts themselves, the works recover their images from archival and commercial systems that have historically classified, displaced, and commodified them. Rodney Harrison and John Schofield have argued that archaeology can be understood as a practice of engaging with material remains of the contemporary world, including photographs, archives, and digital records. The archive becomes a site of archaeological inquiry in its own right, while the auction photograph emerges as a contemporary artifact that preserves fragments of cultural memory through reproduction, circulation, and digital mediation.[11]

Underlying this body of work is Sebastianus' notion of "froms", a speculative proposition developed through his ongoing DARI series. "Froms" proposes that all entities emerge through multiple inheritances, encounters, and trajectories. Every object contains innumerable points of origin simultaneously. Geological formation merely constitutes one layer of a stone's existence. Likewise, a human life emerges through accumulations of contingencies. In this sense, the fabricated stones function as compressed archives of heterogeneous origins. Within a single form coexist traces of domestic histories, bodily presence, cultural transmission, and material transformation. Their significance lies not in what they are, but in the multiple "froms" they gather together.

Such concerns inform Sebastianus' engagement with what he describes as pseudo- anthropology. He approaches it as a speculative framework through which the present may be examined. This position resonates with recent archaeological scholarship that emphasises the agency and persistence of objects beyond their function as repositories of human intention.[12] Stones, photographs, fibres, textiles, ash, and found materials are approached as active participants within circuitry of meaning. They become witnesses to encounters, movements, and transformations that exceed individual lifetimes.

Underlying these investigations is the Javanese philosophical concept of Sangkan Paraning Dumadi, often understood as a meditation on the origin and destination of being. Within Sebastianus' practice, this inquiry concerns understanding how existence emerges through entanglements between people, objects, places, and pasts. The question "where do we come from?" therefore remains permanently open.

Archaeological research demonstrates that structures such as Losari, Morangan, and Kimpulan have remained present through cycles of burial, excavation, and rediscovery. Sebastianus extends this inquiry by asking what allows a monument to remain culturally alive. Offerings, inherited knowledge, and collective memory sustain the life of a monument long after its physical form has changed. Without these relationships, a temple risks becoming archaeology. Without community, it returns to stone.

A temple may be constructed from carved stone, but stone alone does not make it sacred.