Back

Yogyakarta Community History Museum

Project Proposal to ANA by KUNCI Cultural Studies Center

Project Description
Museum Sejarah Komunitas Yogyakarta is designed to answer the calls to open knowledge circulation and promote wider community initiatives through sustainable access, participatory historical research and programmatic archiving. It aims to be a vehicle for the transportation of different local, intellectual and cultural resources in which different forms community engagements to their respective resources such histories, institutions, archives - can be encountered and regenerate each other.

This project is the first of its kind in the country. The name Yogyakarta used here refers to the geographical location of the museum whereas the scope of its work will not be bound to it. Instead it acts as a mutual support structure that works as a hub for the production and dissemination of knowledge on the different community histories across Indonesia. The emphasis of the community collaboration is on finding non-bureaucratic ways of working together, the sharing of imaginative thinking, and open-ended forms of circulation.

As a collective that has been one of the precursors in promoting the importance of constructing history from “below”, KUNCI Cultural Studies Center seek to leverage knowledge-institutionalization and circulation processes in local and regional processes into a sustainable model for co-productions. This will done through the establishment an avenue such as the “museum” that will enable long-term and continuous exchanges between different parts of societies in as a shared-attempt to making histories as empowerment of individuals and social groups, through the process of remembering and reinventing the past.

Towards the realization of idea, we propose two initial activities that are set as preparatory measures to endorse sustainability: (1) on the physical level is the backbone provision of avenue and archiving system, supported by a conceptual component (2) i.e. a strategic planning that involve experienced and trans-disciplinary practitioners from across the region that will share and launch some progressive ideas on community-history in the making.

Goals/ Results:
The main goal of the proposed project Yogyakarta Community History Museum is to advance democratization of history through community engagement as an instrument of change. The projected milestones to achieve this is by:

• Endorsing a sustainable structure for bottom-up initiatives and knowledge circulation in the discussion and direction of social changes.
• Building-up wider community-based practices in opening up new areas of inquiry, towards the transformation of both content and the purpose of history.
• Venturing into cross-fertilizations, shared concepts, critical discourses, and mutual connections in a diverse community context and the potential transformative ways to engage them.

• Building the backbone for running the Yogyakarta Community History Museum in both physical and conceptual aspects.
• Mapping a network of community history practitioners and methodologies in Southeast Asia
• everaging the possibilities for collaborative agenda in community-history making from across the region.

Methodology/ Implementation of project:
The proposed activities will be implemented in the following manner:

• Infrastructure and Archiving Provision:
  The museum activities, emphasized to represent everyday living and values, is to be done not only in the provided location but is designed to carry out flexible exhibition and public programs within specific community settings. The first three months of the provided timeframe is allocated for preparing strategic activities such as designing community outreach programs, setting-up supporting facilities and infrastructures, collecting circulating materials from existing networks, as well as developing relevant archiving system for the collection.
• Regional Open Meeting on Community History Archiving Initiatives:
  The foundational idea of this initiative is to open a socially available, publicly accessible knowledge for garnering community participation in social changes. To realize it, after the preliminary physical arrangements, we are going to hold an open meeting which involve stakeholders from different public expertise, ranging from historian, community activists, cultural practitioners and alike to gather and converse in an open meeting on Community History Archiving Initiatives”.
  In this public forum, participants (presenting and non-presenting ones) from across the region will be sitting together to discuss and shape up regional programmatic direction and approach in community-history making as a way to ensure effective engagement with community members as the targeted collaborators.

Project Time frame
- July -September 2012: Museum design and preparation, Workshop organization
- October 2012: Museum pre-launch exhibition, 2 days workshop holding
- November -December 2012: Post-workshop publication (bilingual English- Indonesian): the forum’s minutes of details, papers, programmatic manual for community history archiving.

Output
- An exhibition to mark the Yogyakarta Community History Museum pre-launching
- Workshop holding (in the form of open meeting) with regional stakeholders
- bilingual publication containing post-event information

Target audience
- Community-based artworkers
- Community historians
- Different community members
- General public

Dissemination Scheme
- Online working station (name tba)
- 500 printed copies of post-event publication
- Social media announcements

Impact
- The general public will be able to access knowledge produced by community-based initiatives on historical archives
- Open and collaborative platform supported by the museum will enable further exchange between artists, researchers and activists working within and across different communities.
- Non-beraucratic ways of knowledge circulations and co-production between the above mentioned actors will be channeled through.