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Makassar International Writers’ Festival 2012
Project Proposal to ANA by Rumata’ Artspace

1. Aims / Objective / Goals of project

Makassar International Writers Festival (MIWF) as the first and only international literary festival in Eastern Indonesia aims to promote the city of Makassar, in South Sulawesi Province as an important hub in arts, culture and literature in Asia and the World. It also aims to promote writers’ exchange and network as well as to celebrate the achievements in literature with local people. MIWF is organized by Rumata’ Artspace, the first independent cultural facility which facilitates various cultural program in the city of Makassar. It promotes cooperation between local artists with other arts/cultural communities/organizations in the World.

2. Brief description of project

MIWF is designed as a-5 day festival with six main activities: readings, writers exchange program, community event, talks and workshop, book launch. The director and the curators of MIWF have decided this year’s theme: Visiting the Memories. It aims to explore the intersections of literature, history and city architecture. MIWF is promoting further understanding between writers through translation projects with main focus to introduce local writers’ works to English-speaking writers and readers. This year we are focusing on Asian writers.

MIWF committee members have prepared the festival program since last year. A curatorial board was set up last year to select writers from overseas and to nominate 5 emerging writers from Eastern Indonesia to receive the Rumata’ Literary Fellowships and to invite established writers from across Indonesia to participate in talks, readings, workshop, community literature programs and writers exchange. The committee has approached the participating writers in Australia, Hong Kong, England, Singapore, Malaysia, US and sending proposals to the writers’ affiliated institutions to sponsor the participating writers. In nominating 5 emerging writers, the curators selected their works from local and national publications (newspapers and literary journals).

The festival will be held from June 13 until June 17, 2012

5. Projected output of project (is it a workshop, a discussion, a showing, etc.?)

Workshops:
- Writing as a minority with Uthaya Sankar (Tamil/Malaysian Writer)
- Sing Your Poetry! A collaboration between song writers/music
Arrangers/poets in a breakthrough project where music and poetry collide.
- How to Write A Travelogue with Fauzan Mukrim (Indonesia)

Talks:
- Writers’ Multiple Identities with Xu Xi (Hong Kong)
- How to manage a literary journal with Kent MacCarter (US)
- The Wisdom of Whores, A Testimony on HIV/AIDS With Elizabeth Pisani (England)
- Don’t Judge A Book by Its Movie with Riri Riza, Khrisna Pabichara, Salman Aristo, Ahmad Tohari, Ahmad Fuadi (Indonesia)

Readings:
Visiting the Memories: Reading for the Past
All participating writers will share their memories and reading their works in English and Indonesian language. The reading sessions will be held in old houses in Makassar. A local historian will be introducing the history of the city.

Community Event Makassar Litweetrature!
A breakthrough program to promote literature through social media TWITTER, will be held every night on the main stage. All participating writers and local communities will join various literary quiz and games, poetry slams and twitter competition to create poetry and flash fiction using 140 character of twitter account. Makassar Litweetrature is designed as an entertaining literature event that could reach as many as 100,000 followers through the festival accumulated twitter account holders.

Writers Exchange Program/Writers’ Tour
Makassar Writers will join all participating writers to visit a local Island and hold a reading session for local islanders.

Book Launch/Literary Project Launch:
- Borobudur - A collection of poem by Jennifer McKenzie
- Indonesian Digital Library - Lontar Foundation (A digital archive of Indonesian literature and writers database)
- MIWF for Kids
- Reading corners will be held everyday, hosted by Wendy Miller (Australia) and local teachers.

Our main target audience: writers, readers, literature enthusiasts from across Indonesia, high school and university students, local community members, children and their parents. We aim to spread the joy of literature and to grow local people’s interests in literature and books.

We have been organising pre-festival events since November last year and promoting the festival through media, radio talk shows and social media (facebook and twitter). We have visited schools and universities to introduce the festival programs and we recruited volunteers from universities to disseminate the information. We also send emails to writers networks in Indonesian and other countries.

When we launched the festival last year we aimed to build a new cultural identity for the city of Makassar with a-community-oriented programs. Our long-term target is to establish cooperation among arts/cultural communities through their contributions in our festival programs. Our signature program for the festival is the community program held on the festival main stage every night to provide a platform for local communities to participate in MIWF. Through community-based writing workshops and readings we enhance community participation in literary events.

Both artist are developing together new ways of representing moving images through the concept of no time, as a way to creating a space to critic the idea of land (cross border reclamation) in nation in a globalized contemporary culture. This is done through capture images at sea. There are a series of technical challenges for us to achieve this, namely because capturing moving images from the sea surface is a much unexplored viewpoint.