All tagged connection

Interview with Sedekah Benih – Urban Ecology and Community-based Art Activism

Sedekah Benih is a collaborative and urban environmental practice initiated by an urban farming activist, Dian Nurdiana (Mang Dian), and artist Vincent Rumahloine in 2020 in one of the dense urban neighborhoods in Cibogo, Bandung, West Java. It aims to share and exchange knowledge of urban farming more widely and build a community of “tiis leungen” (Sundanese for “cold arms”), a term comparable to the English “green thumbs”. Drawn from a localized Arabic word and concept of صدقة (sadaqah), which means “righteousness” and refers to the giving of charity, Sedekah Benih aims to share seeds of everyday staple plants that can be grown in dense community spaces and used for local and domestic needs. It encourage collaborators to share the seeds of plants they received with others from their communities, growing connected communities.

Deconstructing Essentialism: Translocality as a Conceptual Tool in the Study of Eclectic Material Cultures

This think-piece on the theoretical potential of ‘translocality’ helps counter the colonial legacy of cultural essentialism in the analyses and representation of eclectic material cultures. Based on reflections on ‘transculturality’ and the case study of the images of Vajrapani in Gandharan art, the author concludes that translocality, which respects the agencies of local cultures and the complexity of cultural exchanges, is a more productive, heuristic concept in analyzing and representing diverse material cultures.