Everyone is affected, everyone can feel the impact, everyone is stuttering in the face of the pandemic. In March 2020 the Indonesian government announced the first positive case of Covid 19 in the country. Following the recommendations of the World Health Organization to stay at home, maintain physical distancing, wearing face masks when going out, and wash our hands with soap frequently are the active efforts to prevent the spread of the Covid 19 virus. We are forced to adapt and survive this new situation.
The local government then obliges business actors to follow health protocols such as providing a place to wash their hands in front of their business premises, while also requiring sellers and buyers to wear masks and maintain a safe distance of at least 1 meter. Provision of a place to wash hands in front of the house is not new, there is a local wisdom called Padasan in ancient Javanese society, which is to provide water containers such as clay barrels in front of their houses, with the aim that the home owner or visiting people can wash their hands and feet them before entering the indoor area. After time, this habit is slowly disappearing and abandoned by modern society, before it then finally reappeared in response to this pandemic.
How then can an artist react to this situation? At the end of April 2020, I then started documenting the makeshift hand washing places that were held independently by the community around the place where I live. I collect the documentation based on one location or one road, then I combine it and compile it into a monument which I call a “sanitation monument”. The act of creating or rearranging these tracks is my attempt as an artist to mark and document the major event of today, an event that demands the need to change all of our habits for the day to come.
Series Of Photograph, Digital Print on Paper, 2020
