D.A.E. Savitri Sastrawan

A Geographies module publication from the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths University of London.

Each text in this collection is an act of summoning, a calling forth and rendering visible the shadows that haunt society. In summoning spectres, we hope to encourage new and strange encounters with that which have remained hidden in dark shadows. We hope to show you tonight that primitive accumulation is not some forgotten singular crime – a one-off misdemeanour – but is ongoing all around us.

Part of "Dark Shadows: Spectres of Primitive Accumulation"
Introduction, Glossary + Acknowledgement included

In Bali, the emergence of a new god called ‘the god of US dollar’ has arguably become a haunting figure that has overwhelmed the relationship of the people to the existing deities and the land. Yet academics, historians, and anthropologists continue to read Bali as ‘the island of the gods’, and do not seem to have acknowledged this transition specifically. Instead it seems to have been visualised and developed by native artists. Visual culture in this example becomes the critical discourse that summons the socio-cultural implications of worshipping this alternative deity into the general social consciousness.

Appropriating Balinese painted characters and icons such as the one from the wayang (shadow puppets) stories, Balinese scenery paintings or installing a gigantic “Not For Sale” sign in the middle of the hectares of a rice field, represent a few of those critical discourses. Take for example the use of wayang, in the form of dolls and batik painting cloths as you can see in one of the projected images. The puppet in the middle represents the island of Bali which existed with the support of mother earth. The others strangling her are greedy individuals or corporations who seek to bundle up the island between them signifying raksasa-raksasa, meaning monsters, indicating the generator of ‘the god of US dollar’. In evoking these figurative forms there is an appropriation of the traditional wayang narration. Rather, than telling a usual religious Hindu moral story, here it narrates the on-going forms of primitive accumulation resulting from tourism investments that change, for instance, the functions of cultivated, inherited and sacred lands. The purpose of the artwork here is to create a cultural consciousness for these issues.

Now, appropriated further as cut out masks, one of the mother earth and one of the monster, this visual narration asks: who would you cut out that represents yourself? But this is not about masking ourselves to be any of these mythical characters; this is about unmasking them. Money has become the almighty in Bali; ‘tourism, economy, and addiction’ have been identified as the three main elements of this specific socio-cultural phenomena. Here, the spectre of primitive accumulation is not a ghost, but believed to be a ‘god’.