Artist uses photography to trace Indonesian roots

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 11/26/2006 12:37 PM | Life

Kunang Helmi, Contributor, Paris

A faded formal daguerreotype portrait falls out of a small diary covered by marbled paper. Portrayed circa 1860 is a 16-year-old young woman in a Western robe but clearly with Asiatic features. A young boy is told that the woman, Maria-Theodora, was his Indonesian maternal great-great grandmother.

Born 1965 in Karlsruhe, Germany, artist and a professor at the La Villette Architectural School in Paris, Jakob Gautel was raised on stories about Maria-Theodora.

Gautel studied between 1985 and 1991 at the School of Fine Arts in Paris under the tutelage of Christian Boltanski, who uses photography to reconstruct historical events using installations. The family legend about the mysterious ancestor came back to haunt Gautel.

In Karlsruhe were the mementos brought back by Gautel's great-great-great grandfather, Dr. Carl Voigt, who worked in 1834 for the medical service of the Dutch colonial government in Palembang, South Sumatra. A piece of batik, batik stamps, a Chinese lacquered box, cups made of cloves, books and other artifacts are on display in Gautel's exhibition at the Zadkine Museum in Paris.

All the family knew was that Maria-Theodora had a Malay mother who was left behind in Batavia. Gautel decided to travel back in time to reconstruct her identity and her personal story, linked inextricably to his own.

Sponsored by the Association Francaise d'Action Artistique (AFAA) Gautel undertook his first trip to Indonesia in 1995.

""Strangely, I felt that I was coming home to make contact with an integral part of my being. Yet I also experienced a culture shock because Indonesian concepts of time, space and group behavior were so different from Germany and France,"" he said.

""I would observe all the different faces in the streets wondering if there were some possible relatives."" He felt Indonesia was a big melting pot of cultures and races, just like Europe.

Part of his project was to write a diary describing his quest in Indonesia and the current political situation there. This would be compared with the diary Maria-Theodora wrote about traveling from the Dutch East Indies to Europe.

Gautel consulted the National Archives in Jakarta, where his male European ancestor was registered. He discovered that Maria-Theodora's mother was probably a nyai (native mistress of a European male) from a Chinese family in Palembang. Djinio, which apparently means ""second-born"" in the Chinese dialect of Palembang, was born around 1810 and Maria-Theodora in 1845.

Gautel undertook further research at the Genealogical Archives in The Hague, the Netherlands.

Unusual was the fact that Carl Voigt legally recognized his children with Djinio and then lived with them in Batavia behind the present-day National Museum. Maria-Theodora was baptized in the Protestant Church near Konigsplein (Merdeka Square) in 1860. Then Voigt returned to Europe with his two daughters, leaving Djinio behind in what must have been a heart-wrenching decision.

Gautel himself returned to Indonesia in 1996 and 1997, during the period of repeated student demonstrations, with more clearly defined projects in mind. One remarkable project called Rendez-vous involved hundreds of young people wearing T-shirts with targets printed on the back taking part in a peaceful meeting at Blok M, South Jakarta. Nobody was apprehended because the Centre Culturel Francais (CCF) and the Goethe-Institut were officially behind the project.

Sponsored by the CCF Jakarta, which had provided the necessary H18 camera, Gautel began taking portraits of Indonesian and European women.

""Anti-portraits actually, because I was seeking an incarnation of Maria-Theodora. They were dressed in the same dress, in the same pose and same decor,"" he explained.

Back in Paris and in Karlsruhe, Gautel continued his portrait series until he had 120 shots, including the original of his mother, in this unusual quest to reconstitute an identity. These are all displayed in the Paris show curated by Noelle Chabert, director of the Zadkine Museum, and in the book published by Editions Au Figure in 2005, in which Gautel's diary and that of Maria-Theodora are poetically intertwined.

Gautel also made a video in Jakarta with Winda Gracias in the role of a modern-day Maria-Theodora. The film, Batavia, which was shown in Paris, is the portrait of a Southeast Asian metropolis where the actress is ignored by passersby as if she was really the ghost of Maria-Theodora come back to visit childhood scenes.

The Zadkine itself focuses on the issues of identity, immigration and exile. For example, the wife of Russian sculptor Ossip Zadkine, painter Valentine Prax, sacrificed her career for her husband's.

Thus Maria-Theodora's sacrifice in leaving behind her mother and country of birth is honored in this exhibition open until Valentine's Day, February 2007.

Even the museum garden was transformed by Gautel with the help of bamboo, banana trees and other exotic plants, with two miniature rice paddies. This garden mirrors the idea of a harmonious mixture of different cultural influences that permeate the work of Jakob Gautel.

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