Curated by Farah Wardani
A. Sebastianus Hartanto (b. 1995) works at the intersection of experiential ethnography, sacralizing craft, and neo-material phenomenology. Through embodied fieldwork, ritualized acts of making, and attentive engagement with matter, his practice considers materials as active participants in processes of memory, transformation, and becoming.
Rooted in a lineage of makers and storytellers—his great-grandmother was a batik maker, his grandmother a professor of literature, and his mother a batik merchant—Sebastianus understands craft not solely as technical production, but as a mode of inscription, transmission, and philosophical inquiry. Similar to how batik tulis literally denotes a “written batik,” he approaches craft as a form of writing: an embodied means of thinking with materials through repetitive gestures, inherited knowledge, and ritualized acts of making. This understanding informed Mbaka Satitik: Ritualization of From(2024), developed during his residency at John Hardy Gallery, Bali, in which archival photographs were individually covered with wax as an act of recalling, remembering, and re-sacralizing the material traces of one's becoming.
Sebastianus' inquiry into belonging evolved through DARI (2023), where he proposed the notion of “Particles of From”—a philosophy that considers memories, inheritances, belongings, and material residues as particulate entities that sediment, assemble, and coalesce into relational bodies. Drawing from familial notions of pusaka as both heirloom and cosmological inheritance, he approaches archives not as repositories of preservation, but as anthologies of origins and a non-linear genealogy of belonging, where inherited traces remain active within processes of continuity and transformation.
Over recent years, personal pilgrimages to volcanic landscapes, temple complexes, sacred sites, and megalithic formations have expanded this inquiry toward lithic phenomenologies. Encounters with Gunung Padang in West Java and Cromlech Almendres in Portugal prompted Sebastianus to investigate the experiential and ontological capacities of stone: how matter retains duration and situates human existence within ongoing geological processes. Situated between speculative archaeology, geological inquiry, and philosophical reflection, these investigations ask how humans might understand themselves not merely as observers of geological time, but as participants within its continual formation.
For ARS LONGA: GENERATIO, Sebastianus presents Tilas Waktu: Lithic Phenomenologies of Belonging as a speculative megalithic site composed of anthropogenic lithic formations. Belongings—including garments, books, furniture, and cultural remnants—are cremated, compressed, and transformed into lithic bodies, while selected personal, artistic, familial, and historical archives are printed onto fabric strips and knotted around stones. These entanglements acknowledge the continuity of life around matter that appears geologically fixed, reactivating stone as a vessel through which relationships, inheritances, and material afterlives persist. The installation proposes lithification as both a material process and an existential condition, speculating on how belongings may one day sediment into future geologies. What if bodies, inheritances, and everyday belongings are not exempt from geological processes, but are themselves future sediments awaiting lithification?