The Seventh Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

The work of young Indonesian artist collective Tromarama are characterised by a playful use of stop-motion animation and video featuring everyday objects. Formed in 2004 by Febie Babyrose, Herbert Hans Maruli and Ruddy Alexander Hatumena, while all were students at the Bandung Institute of Technology, the group chose the name ‘Tromarama’ as a tongue-in-cheek reference to the ‘traumatic’ experience they shared creating their first music video. Serigala Militia 2006 was made for the Indonesian band Serengai, using an intensive process in which the artists carved and animated over 400 woodblock prints. Tromarama have continued to seek unconventional ways of making videos. Everyday objects, such as buttons, beads and domestic appliances, are painstakingly animated by hand so they may assume a new life beyond their original purpose. Tromarama’s practice is indicative of a flourishing DIY aesthetic in Indonesia which has grown from the necessity to ‘make do’ with the materials and technology at hand. This tendency may be viewed in the context of Indonesia’s recent history, including the effects of the crippling late-1990s Asian financial crisis and Suharto’s fall from power. Grown-up anxieties experienced by the collective inspired Wattt?! 2010. Faced with an exorbitant electricity bill, Tromarama imagined the antics of their household appliances that warranted such excessive costs. We see lamps, torches and light bulbs sneaking through a house at night, congregating in the lounge room for a party. Lurking behind the childlike nostalgia of inanimate objects coming to life are more complex narratives which are explored in subsequent works by the group. Happy hour 2010 focuses on a more topical treatment of Indonesian current affairs. An Indonesian bank bailout scandal prompted the collective to reflect on the role of money in contemporary society — not merely as a symbol of economic exchange, but as a living entity endowed with personality and feelings. Collaborating with musician Panji Prasetyo, the artists animated the figures featured on Indonesian rupiah banknotes, turning each one into a lip-synching character. The artists then turned their attention to the banknotes themselves, and imagined how they might feel being at the centre of a scandal and crisis perpetrated by people. In this humorous vignette, the banknotes are given a reprieve, a ‘happy hour’: We believe that everything should have a second chance . . . the buttons and beads, the porcelain, the banknotes. We give them new lives. With the stop-motion technique of animation we breathe life into things. The meaning of the word ‘animation’ is, after all, to ‘bring something to life’. 1 EVERYONE IS EVERYBODY 2012, a work commissioned for APT7, responds to Indonesia’s recent economic growth, with the group exploring the effects of emerging affluence and a pronounced consumerist culture. Moving away from the playful nature of Happy hour , the artists probe how wealth shapes a person’s identity. Taking the form of a music video, again developed in collaboration with Panji Prasetyo, it features the material possessions of a successful young executive singing about their everyday experiences belonging to their owner — working, shopping, partying. Through their fighting, bullying and petty jealousies, they act out their own social structure and values. Fashionable shoes and bags, and even forgotten and dated items, become ciphers for how an individual represents and remakes themselves through their material possessions, which, the work suggests, is an ongoing process in a consumer society. Through the secret lives of these objects, some cherished, some discarded, the artists invite us to consider how objects reflect our identities, how our urge to belong to a certain social class or group can compel us, and perhaps how unstable that pursuit can become in a culture driven by material excess. Tromarama’s emergence as part of a thriving Indonesian contemporary art scene parallels the nation’s growing economic confidence. Their work can be read as a dialogue involving the traditions of manual crafts and the contemporary technologies of video art. Referencing their early understanding of art as ‘something you make with your hands’, 2 combined with the use of ‘low-tech’ tools such as stop-motion animation, Tromarama have opened up a space to blend high and low, personal and political, global and local. Collective responsibility for contemporary issues — the environment, the world financial system, freedom of expression — is articulated in these seemingly light-hearted works. Tromarama’s statement: ‘Our work is about the relationship between humans and their environment; the relationship between humans and about the human itself’ suggests a deep concern with the very nature of human connections — they are clearly not just ‘playing around’. 3 Fiona Neill 1 Araki Natsumi, ‘Tromarama interview’, in MAM Project 012: Tromarama [exhibition catalogue], Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2010, pp.52–4. 2 Natsumi, pp.52–4. 3 Cristina Sanchez Kozyreva, ‘The fellowship of the animators’, PIPELINE , no.30, 2012, pp.36–41. TROMARAMA The secret life of objects TROMARAMA Est. 2004 Indonesia EVERYONE IS EVERYBODY (stills) 2012 Single-channel stop-motion video animation as HD projection, 3:35 minutes, sound, colour / Commissioned for APT7 / Images courtesy: The artists 213