The title “KERABAT LAMA” illustrates our historical, shared cohabitation. This series will run for the next 6 months in the Muaragembong estuary, West Java, in collaboration with local partners.

For the first workshop, we will be joined on site by six elementary school students and their teacher to learn about Muara Bendera mangrove forest. The objective of this first workshop is to have a day of immersion to the forest and its inhabitants by way of playing, mimicking, drawing, and scale modelling the environments. The output to this workshop will be sets of drawings and photographs to be further developed into salt prints. This workshop will be assisted by Pak Sugeng (primatologist) and Pak Daman (forest ranger). By being on site, we will also test our first iteration of the solar still and water collection module. These activities will take place over two days (24 and 25 November 2023), with Friday for the preparation and Saturday for the workshop.

Labtek Apung

(roughly means: Floating Tech-Lab) was born from a workshop based on a field research action at Tanah Rendah, the riverbank of Ciliwung river, Jakarta, in 2017. It aimed to collect and document local knowledges at the riverbank as a base to reimagine the concept of “living with the river” amidst the scarcity of clean water sources. The non-neutral intervention emerged from an experiment, the reinterpretation of a raft into a floating tech-lab at Ciliwung river, involving children, adults, and other concerned citizens, creating a device open to reinvention. These are all done not only to voice the extremely poor river quality but also to make the river speak of its concerns in its own language. The laboratory is a place for demonstrating research-action & citizen-science.

The Floating Tech-Lab showcases a pilot of transdisciplinary collective ethnography. Labtek Apung is a collective whose members are an anthropologist, a chemist, an environmental engineer, a visual artist, and an architect.

Labtek Apung Members

Novita Anggraini is a chemist, specializing in environmental risk monitoring, chemical concerns, occupational safety and health, and environmental management system. She has solid experience in translating laboratory knowledge from expert language to the public domain. Now, she is responsible as an Integrated Management Representative in the Engineering Consultant company and taking a role of an environmental expert in the Jabodetabek Urban Transportation Policy Integration Project (JUTPI) Phase-3 in the Republic of Indonesia.

Kamil Muhammad is an architect working with residents who experience forced evictions, investigating architecture as a critical, emancipative, and long-term oriented collective endeavour. Kamil led the effort in the design of Kampung Susun Kunir, a prototype of public housing in Jakarta working directly with Jakarta’s Housing Agency. His practice was awarded LafargeHolcim Asia Pacific Award (2017), ASF-International Award (2017) and exhibited in What If? Lab Eindhoven (2018) and Museum for Climate Action Exhibition, Glasgow (2021). Kamil founded and currently direct pppooolll, an architecture practice based in Jakarta. He is also a co-founder of Architecture Sans Frontieres-Indonesia and East Timor-based Fatin Historico.

Endira F. Julianda is a visual artist, designer, and art producer who observes interrelational aspects of human lives; through spaces humans and non-humans occupy and the dynamics within the space. She has exhibited in Indonesia, Singapore, Philippines, Taiwan, and Germany. She co-found and acts as program director at arts and culture non-profit organisation Rakarsa Foundation.

Gusmiati is a WASH practitioner. She worked in international NGOs based in Indonesia as an engineer for emergency response in Central Sulawesi (2019-2020) and West Java (2022-2023). In that project, she facilitated the water and sanitation construction for affected inhabitants in disaster areas. Her disciplinary background is water and sanitation engineering and she was awardee of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, IHE Delft, and ITB program. She brings the knowledge from disaster mitigation and adaptation and combines it with everyday environmental infrastructures.

Indrawan Prabaharyaka is a researcher who has been working for urban and sanitation sector. He used to work as a researcher for UNESCO-IHE and international NGOs based in Indonesia and as a Program Coordinator for the National Task Force for Water and Sanitation (Pokja AMPL Nasional). He studied and worked in the field of Science and Technology Studies (TU Munich, 2015-2018) and now is working as postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of European Ethnology (HU Berlin, 2018-now).