The Unseen Hands (2022)

12 August 2022

Behind the clothes we wear daily are invisible hands, silent figures who work behind the boisterous export-import textile trade. These hands have names, stories, and biographies that are not singular, arrows forged by decades of spinning, weaving/knitting, dyeing, rolling, stretching, cutting, sewing, and packaging. 

This performance worked with Aan Aminah, the woman chairman of the Militant Labor Union, and former textile workers who experienced criminalisation and physical violence from the company. 

"The Unseen Hands" wants to show the role of textile manufacturers' production behind the machinery noise, who makes our fabrics and clothes, and how their living conditions are under our clothes. 

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The Unseen Hands is a documentary theatre work that shows narrative and performative dimensions of the life experience of Aan Aminah, a victim of layoffs at a textile factory in Bandung. Before expanding into documentary theatre works, the initial idea of ​​The Unseen Hands grew from Widi Asari's work, namely "In Good We Trash" (Open Lab Theater Garage), which he worked on together with Aan Aminah, Meti Hermayanti, Dyandra Aprilian (ex/textile and fashion worker at Bandung). Then, from "In Good We Trash," the story of the textile workers' life experiences found an expansion of the medium and its audience in the "Exercising Compassion" project involving Widi Asari and Riyadhus Shalihin and two artists from Colombia and South Africa at the 2022 State of Fashion Biennale "Ways of Caring" Arnhem, The Netherlands. When @artjog.id offered @_bpaf to fill in a performance in the Weekly Performance program, we immediately consulted and invited Widi Asari and Mrs Aan Aminah to take this opportunity as one of the following expansion agendas by offering a form of documentary theatre.