Ingatan Kain Mama (re-presented version)

Curator: Arami Kasih

Today, she reinterprets cloth through childhood memories, her mother’s teachings, and collective narratives of culture, city, and caregiving practices. Over the past two years, Widi has been developing Ingatan Kain Mama (Mother’s Cloth Memory), a residency project in collaboration with Komunitas Kahe and Mama Lin, a weaver from Watublapi, Maumere. She traced motifs from the childhood memories of boys recalling the domestic knowledge taught by their mothers, which unfolded into personal and collective stories of locality and caregiving. Her findings include cloth as a remedy for longing and illness; the weaver’s body as a vessel of embodied knowledge; ikat motifs as inscriptions of historical events; and the tension between traditional weaving and the demands of the market. The project has been presented as installation, archive, documentary film, music remix, performance lecture, and symposium, all in collaboration with Komunitas Kahe.

In Yogyakarta, during her following residency, Ingatan Kain Mama reflected Widi’s own childhood memories. A kapuk/silk-cotton tree at Vredeburg Fort evoked recollections of her mother stepping into the role of breadwinner after her father’s shoemaking business collapsed during the 1998 monetary crisis. As the youngest of seven siblings, Widi often accompanied her mother making kapok mattresses from house to house as a means of survival. The scent of cloth and kapok (silk-cotton) tree, branches, songs, swings, laundry lines, as well as photographic archives all become articulations of a deeply personal—yet also critical—sensibility of nurturing and caregiving by Widi Asari, a mother, fashion designer, and third-generation seamstress from Bandung.

This work was created in collaboration with:

Komunitas Kahe, Mama Lin (ikat weaver from Watublapi), Oma Jul and Oma Vaermina (oral sources for the song Jata Kapa), Carlin Karmadina (researcher and writer), Oma Opa Darel (oral source), Kartika Solapung (production manager), Bernard Lazar (photographer and filmmaker), Dixxxie (audio artist), Eka Putra Nggalu (producer and dramaturg), Aldo Fernandez, Silvy Chipy, Uncle East, Jen Racun Liar, Dodot, Marianus Nuwa / Gee (collaborator in motif-making).