The Pidada Intimacy: exercising Multispecies Cinema inside the Mangrove Forest 

How can we communicate our shared experiences of hardship?  What will get us closer to understanding each other? 

Almost everything that has been in the history of cinema is recollections and recordings of human's point of view. However, the act of expressing is not exclusive to human beings. This project undertakes the journey of unlearning recording processes to capture voices of the unseen and differently expressive: non-humans. 

In Muaragembong's pidada (mangrove) forest, an estuary in Jakarta's suburbs, humans and non-human primates share the hardship of a slow disaster. Increased salinity from aqua farms, further deforestation, and coastal abrasion have forced non-human primates, including the typically timid langurs, to descend from the forest in search of fresh water and approach humans. Through an experiment in generating a multispecies cinema, we invite nonhumans as our co-creators: as the director, the sound designer, the narrator, the camera person, or even the editor. By taking the notion of cinema as memory in the multispecies context, this project aims to expand our understanding towards sensing and recording as an attempt to reveal the representation of multispecies injustice. 

This project is led by Labtek Apung, a transdisciplinary research collective based in Bandung and Jakarta, Indonesia.  Members: Indrawan Prabaharyaka (anthropologist), Novita Anggraini (chemical analyst), Gusmiati  (WASH engineer), Endira F. Julianda (artist/art producer), and Kamil Muhammad (architect). It is carried out in collaboration with Rakarsa Foundation and Aspinall Foundation (in conversation).