Mencitra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map

kurator/curators

Rebecca Kezia adalah kurator dan manajer program seni yang berkarya di bidang teater dan seni pertunjukan lintas disiplin. Ia merupakan lulusan Fakultas Ilmu Pengetahuan Budaya, Universitas Indonesia, dan aktif terlibat dalam proses kuratorial, produksi, serta pengembangan program di ekosistem seni pertunjukan kontemporer Jakarta.

Rebecca Kezia is a curator and arts program manager working across theatre and interdisciplinary performance. She graduated from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Indonesia and has been actively involved in curatorial processes, production, and program development within Jakarta’s contemporary performing arts ecosystem.

Fathun Karib adalah dosen, peneliti, sekaligus vokalis yang praktiknya melintasi kajian sosiologi, ekonomi politik, dan sejarah lingkungan di Asia Tenggara. Saat ini ia menjabat sebagai Postdoctoral Fellow dalam Global Indo-Pacific Project, sebuah kolaborasi antara National University of Singapore dan German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) di Tokyo. Fathun meraih gelar M.A. dalam Kajian Asia Tenggara dari Universität Passau, serta gelar M.A. dan Ph.D. dalam bidang Sosiologi dari Binghamton University. Di luar dunia akademik, ia juga merupakan vokalis band hardcore punk bawah tanah Cryptical Death.

Fathun Karib is a lecturer, researcher, and vocalist whose work spans sociology, political economy, and environmental history in Southeast Asia. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Indo-Pacific Project, a collaboration between the National University of Singapore and the German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ) in Tokyo. Karib holds an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies from Universität Passau, as well as an M.A. and Ph.D. in Sociology from Binghamton University. Beyond academia, he is also the vocalist of the underground hardcore punk band Cryptical Death

(Men)Citra Niskala

Pandangan Kuratorial

(Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map

Dunia tengah merana dalam kepedihan. Kita menyaksikan — dan mungkin turut merasakan — gejalanya dalam gesekan geopolitik di Indonesia, kawasan Asia Tenggara, hingga ke belahan dunia yang lain. Untuk menyebut sedikit dari daftar panjang wabah yang menjangkit: perampasan ruang hidup, baik yang terjadi di banyak daerah di Indonesia hingga genosida di Palestina, kekerasan atas perempuan dan kelompok rentan lainnya, kriminalisasi warga, kerusakan lingkungan dan ancaman kepunahan, kebangkitan neo-kolonialisme, hingga bayang-bayang Perang Dunia III yang semakin nyata.

Bahwa wabah ini telah menjelma satu sistem yang dibiarkan menjadi kewajaran, bahkan lebih jauh, sebagai informasi yang mengendap jadi pengetahuan. Seolah, lanskap yang boleh kita tatap hanyalah yang beku oleh pragmatisme dan otoritarianisme. Kita kehilangan hak untuk menata masa depan, bahkan untuk membayangkannya saja menjadi kemewahan yang terasa egois. Demikianlah kegelisahan ini makin pekat dirasakan dalam kerja-kerja kesenian, khususnya teater, yang betapapun gigih para pelaku di dalamnya, ada jarak yang makin dalam ditorehkan antara kesenian dan masyarakatnya.

Kami percaya, kesenian bisa menawarkan ukuran yang lain untuk memaknai hal-hal di sekitar kita tanpa segera terjerat pada penyeragaman selera, hasrat, daya dalam kuasa algoritma yang menempatkan kita pada kotak-kotak identitas yang sempit. Maka gagasan Bumantara yang diajukan Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana (STA) lebih dari lima puluh tahun lalu menjadi relevan tak hanya sebagai lensa platform-making kesenian dalam Djakarta International Theater Platform (DITP), tetapi juga untuk membongkar modus kerja seni dalam relasinya dengan realitas hari ini.

Upaya membaca ini tidak meletakkan pemikiran STA sebagai artefak sejarah yang beku atau sekadar jadi alat identifikasi kawasan. Gagasannya adalah sebuah landasan yang memantik sebuah proses kemenjadian yang terus berlangsung: sebuah proses palimpsestik. Membentuk imajinasi Bumantara di abad 20 dan kesadaran dunia baru hari ini di abad 21. Kuratorial Djakarta International Theater Platform tahun ini merespons gagasan STA yang belum usai dengan menawarkan pokok pikiran “Mencitra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map” melalui pendekatan “Antara sebagai Metode”.

Di sana ada celah untuk keluar dari pemetaan identitas warisan kolonial yang terus menghantui serta menantang kita untuk tidak sepenuhnya tunduk pada garis kemajuan tunggal yang ditentukan oleh sains dan data semata. Hari ini, ia menuntut perangkat baru; sebuah strategi untuk menawar peta lama dengan kesadaran bahwa kita tidak pernah benar-benar seimbang dalam relasi antara negara, sains, dan teknologi.

Istilah (Men)citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map — sebuah permainan kata — merujuk pada dua hal sekaligus. Pertama, sebagai kata kerja, Mencitra Niskala/Unseen The Map, ia menunjuk pada upaya untuk menangguhkan cara pandang kartografis yang sudah mapan dengan tidak serta-merta mengidentifikasi, mengkategorikan, atau menetapkan makna. Kedua, sebagai kata benda, Citra Niskala/Unseen Map, ia merujuk pada peta yang tidak terlihat, luput disadari, tetapi sebenarnya merekam memori ketubuhan dalam banyak perlintasan.

Jika peta konvensional dan logika algoritma cenderung mereduksi keragaman menjadi unifikasi yang prematur, posisi “Antara” menawarkan jarak pandang dalam mengerjakan superimposisi ini. “Antara” dipahami sebagai kerangka untuk membaca kewilayahan dan pengalaman tidak sebagai entitas yang stabil, tetapi sebagai hasil relasi yang terus berlangsung melampaui posisi pasif di tengah dua kutub — seperti Barat dan Timur atau Tradisi dan Modernitas. Bergerak dari edisi lalu, kewilayahan dalam posisi “Antara” memungkinkan kita melihat kelompok lain, daerah yang lain, dalam posisi geografis ke-antara-an, di luar dari kawasan Asia Tenggara. Memosisikan DITP dalam ke-antara-an adalah menyadari platform sebagai sebuah interval aktif, intermediasi, dan ruang yang terus bergerak. Metode ini memungkinkan kita menyerap, mengolah, dan mentransformasikan unsur-unsur dari berbagai entitas yang melingkupinya tanpa terjebak pada salah satu ujung ekstrem.

Dalam kerangka inilah, ekosistem teater — dengan segenap pengetahuan, pengalaman, dan potensinya — didudukkan sebagai kartograf baru. Ia tak lagi sekadar objek yang didisiplinkan oleh teknologi atau pasar, melainkan situs pengetahuan yang mampu menerjemahkan waktu dan ruang secara berbeda dari simulasi akal. Melalui teater, upaya untuk mencitra niskala muncul sebagai lapisan-lapisan keberadaan: mulai dari tubuh internal yang menjembatani ide dan rasa, hingga tubuh material yang berelasi dengan alam dan artefak. Teater dalam penghayatan kuratorial DITP tidak berdiri hanya sebagai relasi pencipta dan materialnya; ia adalah sebuah simpul dalam jaringan kosmologis yang lebih luas. Dengan turut membayangkan posisi teater sebagai salah satu titik koordinat di antara entitas-entitas lain, membawa kita pada bentuk pengetahuan yang tidak hanya berpusat pada kedaulatan manusia, tetapi juga pada relasi interdependensi dalam kosmologinya. Ia menangkap dan memahami bahwa wilayah bukan hanya dibentuk oleh batas administratif, tapi senantiasa berpaut dengan sirkulasi energi, asimilasi bentuk, dan migrasi. Kami tengah menempatkan tubuh teater sebagai interface antara yang sekala (terukur) dan niskala (metafisik), sebagai penghuni yang sadar, yang bergerak di antara berbagai spektrum kehidupan dan cara meng-ada yang lain.

Upaya mendudukkan kembali posisi dan kedaulatan tubuh dalam pendekatan “Antara” ini bukan sekadar pelarian estetis, tetapi justru memperlihatkan bahwa kesenian tak pernah menjadi ruang netral yang kedap. Ia selalu bertaut dan tak henti merespons kegentingan realitas sosial-politik kita — secara global — yang tengah nanar menatap masa depannya; wabah neo-kolonialisme, komodifikasi ruang hidup, industri ekspansif, hingga pemaksaan batas teritorial yang menghancurkan kekerabatan antarspesies.

Maka, setiap karya, diskusi, dan pertemuan dalam platform ini tidak hanya hadir sebagai tontonan saja, refleksi mikro dari kehidupan, komentar sosial yang berdiri di pinggir, atau representasi dari identitas kawasan, melainkan sebagai laboratorium “pengolahan” (cultivating) yang tangguh melawan. Dalam kerangka ini, kami mengakui bahwa setiap pemetaan selalu bersifat parsial dan terletak dalam kondisi historis tertentu. Dan justru melalui kesadaran akan keterbatasan inilah, kuratorial ini melihat kemungkinan bagi seni pertunjukan untuk berfungsi sebagai pelebaran produksi pengetahuan — bukan dengan menggantikan peta yang ada, tetapi dengan memperlihatkan bagaimana peta itu bekerja, dan bagaimana ia dapat dibaca secara berbeda melalui setiap bentuk, gagasan, dan pertautan.

Alih-alih berupaya menjadikan seni sebagai jawaban, kuratorial ini tengah mengajukan pertanyaan dalam upaya palimpsestik pemetaan kawasan, yaitu: Bagaimana mediasi dipertunjukkan? Apa relasi yang terbentuk di antara penonton-penyaji? Ketakpastian ini mendorong pertemuan kita melalui DITP 2026 untuk melampaui fungsi utilitarian seni dengan membayangkan cakrawala baru yang mungkin luput dari tatapan mata yang terlanjur hegemonik, membuka aliran imajinasi yang tersendat, menawarkan pengalaman ketubuhan yang lain untuk mengizinkan kita menyusun kembali peta-peta yang tak terlihat itu menjadi sebuah lanskap baru, terbebas dari wabah yang tengah menjangkit.

Curatorial Overview

(Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map

Ours is a time of profound grief. We witness it — and many of us live through it — in the geopolitical frictions unfolding across Indonesia, the region, and beyond. The list has become painfully familiar: the dispossession of lands and ways of living, from many parts of Indonesia to the genocide in Palestine; violence against women and other vulnerable communities; the criminalization of citizens; ecological devastation and the accelerating threat of extinction; the resurgence of neo-colonial ambitions; and the growing shadow of another world war.

These no longer appear as isolated crises. They have settled into the conditions of everyday life. Repeated often enough, they become information; over time, information leaves a residue that hardens into what we come to accept as knowledge. It begins to feel as though the only landscape left before us is one frozen by pragmatism and authoritarianism. We are gradually losing not only the power to shape the future, but even the right to imagine it. To imagine otherwise has become a luxury that can seem almost self-indulgent.

This unease is deeply felt within the arts, particularly in theatre. Theatre continues to endure through the persistence of those who make it, yet persistence alone cannot bridge the widening distance between artistic practice and the society it seeks to inhabit. As our ways of seeing are increasingly organized by algorithms, accelerated information, and the demand for immediate certainty, the space for ambiguity, doubt, and collective imagination grows ever narrower.

And yet it is precisely here that theatre matters. We believe theatre can offer another measure for understanding the world around us. It allows us to remain with complexity before it is reduced into fixed meanings. It reminds us that not everything must be immediately identified, classified, or resolved. Against systems that increasingly sort us into narrow identities, standardize desire, and flatten differences into predictable patterns, theatre insists that experience always exceeds the maps drawn around it.

It is from this conviction that Djakarta International Theater Platform (DITP) returns to Bumantara — bumi antara (land in between) — an idea proposed by the Indonesian thinker Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana more than half a century ago. We do not return to Bumantara in search of an origin, nor simply to recover a historical imagination of Southeast Asia. What continues to compel us is its unfinished quality. Rather than treating it as a completed idea, we approach Bumantara as a point of departure — a proposition that allows new relations, encounters, and ways of imagining to continue unfolding. It reminds us that regions are never simply given. They are continually composed through the movements of people, ideas, languages, and ways of living.

It is precisely this unfinished quality that opens up the possibility of what we understand as a palimpsestic process. We are interested not in preserving Bumantara as it was first imagined, but in allowing it to be continually rewritten through the urgencies of the present. Like a palimpsest, new inscriptions do not erase what came before; they accumulate alongside earlier traces, allowing different histories, temporalities, and imaginations to remain visible at once. If Bumantara helped articulate one way of imagining the twentieth century, our concern is how it might continue to generate other possibilities for the twenty-first.

This year's curatorial proposition, (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map, begins from that unfinished conversation. Rather than extending Bumantara as a historical project, we ask what it might offer as an artistic practice today. Our response takes the form of what we call The In-Between as Method — not as a theory to be applied, but as a way of moving through the world. It begins from the recognition that relations are never complete, that meanings are always in the making, and that theatre remains one of the few places where we can rehearse other ways of perceiving, inhabiting, and imagining the worlds we share.

The curatorial proposition (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map emerges from this ongoing process of rewriting. It is more an invitation to rethink how worlds become perceptible, and how theatre might allow us to encounter realities that remain beyond the reach of inherited maps. The title deliberately resists a single reading.

On the one hand, (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map can be understood as an action. It asks us to suspend the cartographic impulse that so often governs the way we navigate the world — the urge to immediately identify, classify, and stabilize meaning. Theatre offers another possibility. Rather than confirming what we already know, it slows perception down. It allows ambiguity to remain present long enough for other relations, memories, and ways of sensing to emerge.

On the other hand, (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map also points toward a map that already exists, even if it rarely becomes visible. These are the cartographies carried by bodies: memories accumulated through migration, displacement, kinship, ritual, language, labour, and movement. They seldom coincide with administrative borders or geopolitical diagrams, yet they continue to orient how we inhabit places, recognise one another, and make meaning of the world. They are unseen not because they are absent, but because other maps have taught us where — and how — to look.

If conventional cartographies and algorithmic systems increasingly compress the world's complexity into premature forms of unity, The In-Between offers another orientation. It is not a neutral space suspended between two opposing poles, nor a compromise that reconciles differences. We understand The In-Between as an active practice of mediation — a way of inhabiting relations before they harden into fixed identities.

From this position, territories are no longer understood as stable entities waiting to be represented. They are continually composed through encounters that exceed the borders inherited from colonial histories or the singular narratives of progress that continue to privilege science, data, and technological rationality as the only legitimate ways of knowing the world.

This shift also asks us to rethink how regions themselves come into being. Building on the previous edition of DITP, The In-Between no longer belongs exclusively to Southeast Asia. Instead, it becomes a way of recognising other geographies that similarly inhabit unstable, overlapping, and continually negotiated positions. Region-making, in this sense, is not the drawing of boundaries but the ongoing work of relation.

The same proposition shapes how we understand Djakarta International Theater Platform itself. Rather than positioning DITP as a centre from which ideas radiate outward, we imagine it as an interval — an active space of mediation that is continually reshaped by the artists, practices, audiences, and contexts that pass through it. A platform is never simply a container for artistic production. It absorbs, processes, and transforms the diverse energies that converge within it, while allowing itself to be transformed in return.

It is within this horizon that theatre begins to occupy another position. Rather than remaining an object to be disciplined by technological systems, market logics, or institutional categories, theatre becomes a cartographer in its own right. Not because it produces more accurate representations of reality, but because it offers another way of translating time, space, and experience. Theatre maps differently. It attends to relations that often escape dominant systems of knowledge and makes perceptible forms of life that cannot be fully measured, quantified, or administered.

Through (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map, theatre is invited to work across multiple layers of existence. It begins with the internal body, where thought, memory, sensation, and imagination continually shape one another. At the same time, it extends toward the material body that is never autonomous but always entangled with landscapes, ecologies, objects, infrastructures, and other living beings. Between these different scales, theatre does not simply produce representations; it composes relationships.

Within DITP's curatorial proposition, theatre is therefore understood as more than a relationship between artists and artistic materials. It is one node within a larger cosmological network. To imagine theatre in this way is also to reconsider the position of the human. Rather than placing human experience at the centre of all meaning, theatre reminds us that existence is continually negotiated through relations of interdependence. Territories are shaped not only by administrative borders or political authority, but by the circulation of energies, the migration of bodies, the assimilation of forms, and the countless exchanges through which worlds come into being.

This is why we see theatre as an interface between sekala and niskala. Rather than opposing the visible and the invisible, sekala and niskala invite us to recognise that reality is always inhabited by multiple registers of existence. Sekala names what can be measured, recorded, and made visible. Niskala points toward what remains intangible: memory, affect, belief, cosmology, intuition, spiritual presence, and other forces that continue to shape lived experience despite resisting empirical verification. Theatre inhabits both simultaneously. It moves constantly between what can be seen and what can only be sensed, allowing each to illuminate the other.

To return to the body through The In-Between is therefore not an aesthetic withdrawal from political reality. On the contrary, it begins from the recognition that the body has never stood outside history. Every body bears the traces of migration, extraction, violence, care, kinship, labour, and survival. The political urgency of theatre emerges precisely here. It does not speak about pain and trauma, crisis and terror from a distance. It encounters these conditions through the ways they are sedimented within bodies, landscapes, and everyday life. Theatre becomes political not simply because of what it represents, but because of how it reorganises perception and allows other relations to become imaginable.

In this sense, (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map is not an attempt to escape reality. It is an invitation to perceive reality differently. By moving between sekala and niskala, between the measurable and the immeasurable, theatre rehearses other ways of inhabiting the world — ways that refuse to reduce existence to what can be mapped, calculated, or governed alone.

This understanding shapes how we imagine Djakarta International Theater Platform itself. Every performance, discussion, workshop, and encounter within DITP is conceived not simply as a presentation, a reflection of social reality, or a representation of regional identity. We see the platform as a place of pengolahan — a continual process of working through, cultivating, and transforming ideas, artistic practices, and ways of being together. It is a space where multiple layers of roles do not merely exchange finished works, but remain open to being changed by the encounter itself.

The superimpositions means recognising that every map is partial. Every act of mapping is shaped by particular historical conditions, ways of seeing, and structures of power. Rather than replacing one map with another, (Men)Citra Niskala / Unseen (the) Map asks how those maps came to be, whose realities they privilege, what they leave outside their frame, and how theatre might allow us to read them differently.

This is why we do not approach theatre as a space apart from the urgencies of the present. Nor do we ask it to simply illustrate political realities. Theatre matters because it continually rehearses another way of paying attention. It allows us to stay with uncertainty before rushing toward certainty, to encounter difference before reducing it to identity, and to recognise relations that often remain unnoticed within dominant ways of seeing.

Rather than offering art as an answer, this curatorial proposition chooses to remain with a set of questions:

How is mediation itself performed?

What kinds of relations emerge between performers and audiences?

What becomes possible when we resist the urge to immediately classify, define, or resolve what we encounter?

It is in this spirit that DITP 2026 gathers artists, audiences, researchers, and cultural workers from different contexts — not to arrive at a single map, but to draw alongside one another. Through performances, conversations, and shared practices, we hope to loosen imaginations that have become constrained by inherited certainties, to encounter other ways of inhabiting our bodies and our worlds, and to allow those unseen maps to gradually emerge. The landscapes we seek are not waiting to be discovered. They come into being through the ways we choose to meet, to listen, to negotiate, and to imagine together.