rematriasi is a seminar programme on recovering lost knowledge, languages, tongues, nature-cultures, and other passages of the ancestral, in de/colonial realities of Indonesia and the Netherlands. The seminar program part of a new collaboration between the art academies in Yogyakarta and Amsterdam, to grow our understanding of our shared histories and entangled ecosystems. What knowledge systems, languages, and culture are under erasure due to the neo/colonial project? We trace their effects as they culminate in environmental catastrophe today.

In the first seminar, the founders of Gabber Modus Operandi (GMO) are presenting their practice in a context of popular culture in Indonesia, techno dance scene around the globe, and their post-apocalyptic aesthetics in the presence of today’s sixth age of extinction. The first event is a possible musical meditations, prayer and blessing, in a programme for recovery.

In their music GMO blends extreme genres such as gabber, footwork, grindcore, and noise with unique Indonesian music styles such as jathilan (a trance dance where an animal spirit possesses the body), dangdut koplo (a subgenre of a popular Indonesian music style), and funkot (reminiscent of both European happy hardcore and dangdut). Students in Amsterdam are invited to their 12-hour dance performance on 23 February 2024 at Paradiso as part of TRANCE of the Sonic Acts biennale.
GMO, themselves former students at ISI Yogya, are present online (29th of February) from Bali to share the different ways in which cultures of listening show up in their transdisciplinary practice.

Sign up for the program through rematriasi@sandberg.nl and include:

• If you also want to join the live visit to Gabber Modus Operandi as part of TRANCE in Paradiso on the 23rd of February, of the Sonic Acts biennale. (We have a limited number of free tickets available).
• If you want to join lecture of rematriasi #1 Thursday the 29th of February (13.00 - 15.30). The first edition of rematriasi will be followed with drinks and snacks by Sankrit Kulmanochawong.

rematriasi is hosted and curated by environmental activists and performance artists Arahmaiani, Iwan Wijono, professor Martinus Dwi Marianto, and CPR. In the calendar year 2024 there will be 4 online seminars as part of a growing knowledge platform and exchange program, geared to recover the shared heritage between the different art academies with their socio-historical contexts Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) Yogyakarta and Gerrit Rietveld Academie / Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam. The aim is to grow our collective understanding of entangled and also conflicting pre- and neo/colonial epistemologies today.
Live interpretation is available from and to Bahasa Indonesia and English. If you need to have any specific needs or questions concerning interpretation please don’t hesitate to write your question to rematriasi@sandberg.nl.

TRANCE is a 12-hour-long performance by contemporary artist Tianzhuo Chen that lies between a rock concert, an underground rave, an immersive theatre production, and an otherworldly cinematic experiment.

Taking place at a former church, now pop-podium Paradiso, TRANCE is a synthesis of Chen’s work from the past decade. Throughout the piece, Chen includes a sprawling ensemble cast of international musicians and performers such as ¥ØU$UK€ ¥UK1MAT$U, Dis Fig, KIM KHAN, Ylva Falk, Kasimyn and Ican Harem (Gabber Modus Operandi).

Featuring Chen’s vibrant, spooky, tentacular, and lavish animations, the multidisciplinary performance incorporates live music, dance, installation, DJ sets, and audiovisual components, including an enormous sculpture of a micro-animal called a tardigrade suspended from the Paradiso ceiling. Underneath the stained glass window, the floor will be covered in a layer of real grass, tropical plants, and water features, metaphorising the church into a living, breathing organism. Offering a remarkable return to the inner workings of the body, time and space, the stage becomes a symbiotic entity that allows an ecstatic assemblage to take place.

Over the course of six chapters, a web of narrations evolves; cultural codes are chewed up and then spat out again. Flowing through the stretched reality of TRANCE, critical beings with (or without) their identities reach psychedelic, transcendental states, experiencing a meticulous slowness that moves at the speed of light. These trembling bodies are prolonged, expanded, electrified, meditated, deformed, rendered, and then reactivated by the prehistoric memories stored in their biological cells, coming once again into the multiplicity.

TRANCE is part of Sonic Acts Biënnale 2024: The Spell of the Sensuous.