Talk Description
In 2014, artists Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett embarked on their ten-year (now still ongoing) project, the Ring of Fire; travelling across the unstable, earthquake-and-volcano-prone Pacific Ring of Fire to explore shared experiences through art. This paper brings Tita and Irwan’s project into dialogue with similar, contemporaneous art-ideas explored elsewhere on the archipelago between 2014-2021: including jalur teripang (trepang tracks) in Makassar, and the Wallace Line in Eastern Indonesia. Taken together, this paper argues that these ‘routes’ and highways are part of a wave of projects that take a distinctly post-regional perspective. Terminology for the ‘post-regional’, here, is understood as neither wholly regional (daerah) nor regionalist (Southeast Asian) in focus. Instead, it has sought to imagine fluid between-spaces that relate inter-island contexts to an international sphere; generating a new series of relations through climate, geography, and culture.