ALI(E/A)NSI Conversations: Asarela Orchidia Dewi

What do you remember about entering the campus with both hope and fear, and how did filmmaking change your experience there?

I remember many mornings when I entered the campus feeling both hope and fear and I don’t think hope is ever 100% hope, you know, it’s almost always, you know, comes with a little bit of uncertainty.

Yeah, or a little bit of fear. Just like my first day at the university, I was so excited because studying in Germany had been my dream, right, for a long time. But at the same time, I was also asking myself, like, will I survive with my limited German skill? Will I make friends? Will I fit in? You know, will I do good, you know? But the morning I remember I had the most fear was when I had to give a solo presentation in German.

Like on paper, I actually have a C2 certificate of German language, but presenting my own research was something completely different. You know, you are standing in front of audience, which is mostly native speaker. And usually I always rehearse and make a script of what I want to say, how I want to say it.

For the presentation, I prepare it like a couple of days before and rehearse it. But at that time, the university schedule was so busy and on the weekend, I had to work part-time. So there’s no time to make a script or to rehearse my presentation.

I just come like, you know, with my PowerPoint presentation. And yeah, it didn’t go well because I felt incredibly anxious. But looking back, I don’t think it is my project that failed.

But it is my confidence that really like, you know, going down. Oh, but yeah, things change, especially in the third semester when I discovered filmmaking. They offered a film course for beginner and I attended it.

And it felt like I had finally found a language that suits me. You know, I study communication design there and then learning film and moving image. It’s like an eye-opening for me and I was really excited.

And yes, the morning when I had to present my graduation project, which is a short film that I shot in Indonesia, inspired by my own experience. Yeah, the morning I woke, you know, that’s actually the last morning I go there as a student. I walked there with my, you know, bringing the report and presentation of my film.

I felt really excited and I felt really hopeful that people gonna like this film and people will understand me and my story. And yeah, they did. They really liked the project stories.

And I received the highest possible grade, which is 1.0. And in German, it is the highest score. Yes. And it made me realize that, yeah, I actually did belong there and I can, you know, I can be understood by others with the language.

I am comfortable with.

For a long time, returning to Indonesia did not feel like an option. How did having “no Plan B” shape your life in Germany and your search for belonging?

So for a long time, returning back to Indonesia didn’t feel like an option. I didn’t really feel safe, you know, as a queer person going back there. And also, I didn’t have safety net or like family.

So I felt that I had to make my life in Germany work. And because of this no plan B, I approach everything in survival mode. You know, unfortunately, I studied really hard, working part time, you know, many sleepless nights, never going on vacation.

Yeah. Constantly push myself because I felt that if I failed, I might have to leave Germany, which means I will kind of lose my existence. That’s what I thought.

And even after graduating, I found it still difficult to slow down because I was always worried about supporting myself, about keeping my visa. I think that’s the biggest worry, even until now, but a lot less right now. And yes, finding a place for myself, you know, try to belong was also a long process.

In the beginning of living in Germany and in the university as well, I thought I had to surround myself mostly with German friends to become part of the society, you know, to always speak in German, you know. But actually, it also made me feel quite lonely. And it felt quite unnatural to, you know, pressure yourself to just hang out with certain people.

And yeah, that changed when I started connecting with other diasporic communities. And one of the openings is actually Soy Division, where I can, you know, meet many people, diaspora, at the time mainly Indonesian, who are also into, you know, music, art, and also really open. But also other diasporic communities.

Because even though our stories are different, there are experiences we immediately recognize in each other, that sense of, you know, understanding each other, that sense of community, actually continue to shape my life, and also my artistic practice.

Why does this work need to exist as a three-channel installation rather than as a linear documentary?

Yeah, I don’t think this work could exist as a linear documentary, because I’m not trying to tell one story, but I’m trying to create a dialogue between different moments in time and different perspective.

The starting point is my own experience as a student entering this building every morning. And when I learned about its history, I realized that many other people had walked through the same gates, you know, be inside the same building in the past, like factory workers, forced laborers, gas workers, and later on, like me, students. And the three channels allow these different perspectives to exist, you know, at the same time.

One channel for historical archive, another for my personal memories. And the third, I would like to use to show the fragmented text and narration that is almost as the voice of the building itself. Yeah, so I don’t, I’m not trying to explain everything, but with this work, I think I try to invite the audience to just see these different layers, you know, and maybe they can, you know, find a connection between them.

How do you create connections between these different histories without suggesting that the experiences are equivalent?

Yes, that is something that I’ve thought about a lot while, you know, thinking about this project.

I’m not saying that these experiences are the same and I don’t want to flatten their differences. I’m not connecting people because they suffered in the same way. And I’m connecting them because, first of all, they share the same architecture, which is this building that is now a campus, that was a factory before.

You know, while history gave each of them, you know, a very different position, you know, within it. And what interests me is how this building, the same building, has witnessed different generations arriving under different circumstances, you know, different political, different social conditions, also, you know, coming from different backgrounds. So the installation doesn’t merge these different histories into one story.

I just try to place them beside each other and allowing the visitors to notice both the similarities and the differences also. And I hope it creates a space for reflection rather than for comparison.

Has placing this work within ALI(E/A)NSI changed your understanding of your student archive?

Yes, definitely. When I was a student, we learned already about the history of the campus. But at the time, it was simply historical information.

I didn’t really see myself as part of that history, you know. But then working on rehearsing becoming this project as part of Alinasi exhibition kind of changed that. It made me reflect not only on the building’s history itself, but also on my own journey.

It is sort of, I realized that this personal archives of mine, you know, that I had always thought of as private memories, is actually also a document of, you know, a particular moment in the history of this building. Yeah, so this project helped me understand that my memories are connected to a much larger history. And it’s not because my experience is the same as those who came before me, but because we all became part of the, you know, ongoing story of this building.