Jakarta, Unity in Contradiction: “My Indonesia” Photo Series (10)

Petamburan. JAKARTA – 29 July 2014

It was hard to think how to end the series of photographs on Indonesia.

We went around Java, from Yogyakarta to Madura, with funny and tragic stories.

I have visited many kampungs in other provinces, and there would be more stories to tell. 

But the last image I wanted to talk about is Jakarta, my adopted city.

Jakarta is certainly the city of which I have more photographs and stories, and it's impossible to choose one area that can represent it: everyone in Indonesia knows that my favorite places, which I care about, are Plumpang, Tanah Abang, Luar Batang, Pondok Pinang.

Maybe there will be other opportunities later.

I want to conclude with a photograph that has become, in a certain sense, iconic, and which – not surprisingly – is in the two central pages of my book “Kampungku Indonesia”.

A few years ago, it was also shown to me a photo that appeared on an information site in Jakarta that imitated my photograph in an annoying way, I remember that I got very angry.

This photograph of mine was taken in Petamburan, way back in 2014.

 

Petamburan is not a kampung, but it is considered an urban slum. I've already written and talked about it a lot, and you know how I think. For me, the kampung (“village”) before being a physical place, consisting of buildings, is a mental state, an attitude, which is transferable in large cities as in remote villages in the provinces of all Indonesia.

And, in these suburban areas, the vast majority of people who live there come from far away, they are migrants in the same nation. Jakarta welcomes millions of Indonesians who leave their homes, their kampungs, to come and seek their fortune in the capital: 30 million inhabitants, of whom 11,000 are homeless (in 2016). And Jakarta is literally sinking, in thirty years, the forecasts say, it will be completely covered by water, worse than Venice, too many people trample on the ground.

They have made laws to regulate the explosion of these large slums, many have already been razed to the ground.

They are often located on the banks of rivers and floods torment them and destroy homes. For this reason, historical kampungs such as Kampung Duri or Kampung Pulo no longer exist.

The problem is that the millions of people who live there can certainly not go to live in the luxurious apartments in the center or in the condominiums with rental costs above the tenor of their lives. So they move, migrate to the same city: there are entire neighborhoods under road bridges, some even below street level, worse than rats, like in Teluk Gong or Kolong Tol Jelembar.

 

Going inside the slum under the level of the ground. Kolong Tol Jelembar. JAKARTA – 11 July 2016

Others create new slums, like cancer cells that don't want to be removed.

Illuminate was for me an essay written in 2007 by Gumilar Somantri, “Migration Within Cities”, whose analysis of the Jakarta phenomenon completely reflects my point of view. He writes:

“We would like to propose the view of Jakarta as being one gigantic urban kampung. […] Consequently, a process of systematic kampung demolition has been going on in Jakarta for many years, particularly in the central part of the city. The modernization of Jakarta led to an accelerating process  of land acquisition by private and state-owned companies. As a result, many kampung dwellers, who make up the majority of the urban labor force, have had to move to other, yet more undeveloped, downtown areas or out to the fringes of the city (involuntary migration).”

What he calls intra-city migration.

And the mocking thing is that to build the splendid skyscrapers and shopping centers, workers are needed who do not stop working for 24 hours. And where do they live with their families? Obviously close to the areas to be built, and therefore a new urban slum is created. 

Dark shadows of glittering buildings.

 

I believe that this contradiction will never be resolved. Those who visit Jakarta the first time cannot fail to notice it: it can be a shock.

From my point of view, it is the most fascinating aspect of this city which makes me love it deeply. Because once again it teaches us that we cannot live only on light and gold, but existence is always also shadow and mud. They are indissoluble.

I am completing my heart and soul close to these people: if they were not there, Jakarta would not exist; there would be no shopping malls and skyscrapers to show to tourists.

Certainly they deserve better treatment.

They are not dust to be hidden under the carpet when the good guests arrive.

I have always convince that the right solution is to make life better in these slums, to equip them with sewers, larger rooms, internal hospitals, and not to raze them to the ground and force their inhabitants to wander like outcasts in search of other holes to live in .

But I'm not a politician.

I am a photographer.

My role is to see, think with my head and show.

 

Petamburan. JAKARTA – 29 July 2014

It was my first time in Petamburan. I remember walking along the main road, the one that runs alongside the Cideng River, when I saw these two children at the top of a wooden ladder, among piles of rubbish, looking over the wall.

I took that photograph without them noticing, then went to see what caught their interest.

I climbed the ladder and saw other children playing, regardless of the garbage. Some of them, by our side, practiced with trained pigeons, one of the favorite pastimes in Indonesia: they freed them in flight in the sky and then with a whistle they called them back.

The pigeon did not go back to one of these children, I remember, and he was very angry, he said, because he had paid for it. The Indonesia logo “Bhinneka Tunggal Ika”, United in Diversity, was affixed to a wooden birdhouse.

It seems very ironic and mocking, right in that place, between the heaps of rubbish and the houses overflowing with people from the kampung. In fact, when I returned there four years later it was gone. This is one of the last photographs in which it is still present.

 

Petamburan. JAKARTA – 29 July 2014

I said how over the years this photo has become iconic and commented during my workshops and the talks I made in universities, in the following years.

It seems to me a perfect metaphor for understanding Jakarta, in its contradictions and irony.

It is poignant and angers how these children look at skyscrapers across the river, in the garbage. The meaning is very simple: in life everything depends on which part of the river you are born. It's not a fault, but a destiny.

That is Jakarta, let's not fool ourselves.

I tried to organize, thanks to my friends and the neighborhood manager, a drawing competition with prizes for those children, with gifts for them, to make them spend a happy morning. It must have been more than fifty, almost a hundred arrived.

But what I keep of that day, more than the laughter and drawings of the children, is the melancholy gaze of the mothers, as if they knew that it was only a moment, a flash of joy lost in the continuum of difficult days, all the same.

People's sadness is often amplified by wanting to do good. 

Drawing contest for children. Petamburan. JAKARTA – 24 August 2014

In 2018 a television channel, NET TV, contacted me to interview me and recreate that photograph, for their program “NET 16”.

The place had changed slightly and it took me a while to find the same place. The huts on the other side of the river had already been pulled down.

The garbage was still the same as before.

 

NET TV make program about my photo. Petamburan. JAKARTA – 6 January 2018

It is said that Petamburan will also be relocated, razed to the ground and perhaps a shopping center or apartments will rise in its place.

But even if you change the outer container, the content always remains the same.

And anyway all those people, those children, will have to look for another place to live.

And it will always be, without a doubt, on the wrong bank of the river.

Dedicated to Jakarta, to its children, and to all the pigeons that do not return to their cages.

 

Crew of NET TV with people and children of the slum.  Petamburan. JAKARTA – 6 January 2018

“I had another bad dream today
a small bird was waiting for its mother
in its rustling nest
it was eaten by a cow”
(Wiji Thukul)

Petamburan. JAKARTA – 24 August 2014

 

Gumilar R. Somantri: “Migration Within Cities – A Study of Socio-economic Processes, Intra-city Migration, and Grass-roots Politics in Jakarta” (Lembaga Penerbit Fakultas Ekonomi UI, 2007)
Wiji Thukul: “The Grassroot Songs – Poems” (Kompas Gramedia, 2015) 

Yayasan Kebun Anggur Spreads The Light in The Dark Side of Indonesia

READ ALSO:

• What Your Eyes See... 
• Orang Asli

Italian version