The Walking Zine

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Hi, How are ya? I hope everything is okay at your end.

I have a mission which I want to invite you to join in. I’m currently working with Daniel Maier-Reimer who has been incorporating walking in long distance as part of his practice.

In his recent project, he had walked from Auckland to Christchurch, New Zealand. Then he had invited me to create a work based on this walk. In my respond to his walks, I’m inviting my friends to send me letters based on the idea that I’m going to re-enact Daniel’s walks. My walk is more of a “mind” walk rather than physical walk. I want to reflect on walking as a rupture in the heavily accelerated society like ours today. In between the desire to be faster and efficient, how walking can create a site for slow reflection on our relation with the ground, our bodies, and speed, for example.

I want to invite you to write me a letter which somehow function as suggestion on walking, a farewell to a friend who will start her journey, and can be a reflection on your personal relation with streets and movement. After I have all the contributions, I will put them in a zine which will be distributed during the exhibition of Politics of Sharing at ifa Gallery, in Berlin, Germany.

What do you think?

Warm regards from Berlin, Dina

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Dear Syafiatudina, Re: Auckland-Christchurch walk The distance between Auckland and Christchurch is roughly 1,077km. The distance between Jakarta and Surabaya is 742 km.

Medan to Palembang is 1,268. Your proposed walking trip reminds me of some of the pilgrimages people make in Japan. For example, the Shikoku pilgrimage is a distance of 1,200km. In the past, people made the trip on foot, but, now it is permitted to do the pilgrimage by car or other kind of vehicle. But, you are proposing to walk. My impression is that you don’t do much walking. Or, rather: I know you don’t do any exercise and care little for exercise. I know you have other interests: curating, visual arts, theory, reading, writing, books. From our conversation, when you first briefly mentioned your project, I have understood that you came to me regarding physical preparation. That is, you feel that you need to ‘get fit’ or ‘get in shape’. And, that you will do the preparation for the walk while in Berlin during the month of May 2016. I have never done a hike/walk of some 1,000 km, but, I think it is clearly possible over a period of a month. Of course, stronger and more diligent walkers could do it in a shorter time, but my understanding is that this journey is part art, part very long walk.

So, you have one month to prepare. My thoughts are roughly as follows. During May, do not take the U-Bahn, S-Bahn or the bus on 4-5 days of the week. Berlin is a very dispersed and scattered city.

By avoiding taking public transport (or using a bicycle) you will get a better sense of distance. (I remember from my time of living in Jakarta how quickly I lost a sense of distance because I was taking an ojek everywhere. I would take a motorbike to go somewhere as close as 1km away; partly because the footpaths were not good and partly because the ojek drivers were amusing and often a source of witty observations about the city.) I know that in Yogya you use your motorcycle to go everywhere. Walking in Berlin will give you another perspective on the city. So, currently I am guessing that you would walk little more than 2-5km per day. The first step for you is to walk 10km per day everyday. You mentioned that the place where you are staying is a bit far from IFA. Well, you should walk to

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IFA rather than take the U/S Bahn/Bus. Your schedule could be: 10km per day in the first week. Second week of May: 15km per day. Third week week: 17km per day. Fourth week: 20km on five days. The first and second weeks will be no problem. During the third and fourth, however, I recommend that you get up early and knock-off around 10km before 9-10am. This means that you’ve got the rest of the day to do another 10km. The schedule doesn’t oblige you to do all of your walking in one go, it is mean to be a total of distances. For the schedule to be effective, it is obligatory for you to track exactly the distances you walk. Of course, there are numerous apps you can use to do this. For the Auckland-Christchurch walk, I am imagining that you will be walking on average, around 30km per day. This is easily done: 20km in the morning and another 10km in the afternoon. Over the journey, you will be come a lot fitter and stronger: you will train into the task. So, I am not thinking you have to be in perfect shape before your departure. You just have to be comfortable with the idea and practice of walking. Along the way you will probably become fitter and lose weight – but I understand that this is not part of your main reasons for planning to do such a long walk.

Get yourself a couple of good walking shoes: one light ‘proper’ walking/hiking shoes. Also get a nice pair of comfortable running shoes which you can wear while having a break. For New Zealand, get yourself a proper water and windproof jacket; thermal underwear, a proper beanie, gloves, Explorer (very thick) socks. A mountaineering shop will be able to help you out with the basics.

I understand that you are not exactly hiking along paths in the forests, but that you will be following the main roads and walking along asphalt roads. This largely means that you are pretty unlikely to get lost. I also presume that you won’t be camping and that you’ll be staying at hotels, motels, hostels or peoples’ homes along the way. The company of others in the evening will provide much solace and comfort in the evenings. It might be lonely on the road. This is something that a friend of mine, Eric v.B. mentioned after having done the San Camino pilgrimage. Walking – like longdistance running – can be a lonely business. But this is one of its virtues. Walking is also linked to meditation; walking facilitates

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thinking, reflection, quietness. And in the evening you have the opportunity to talk with others; your socialising will be different as you, yourself will be going through a transformative process. *** I started running seriously in Yogyakarta in February 2013. The city is hostile to runners: motorcyclists cut you off, cars almost run over you; cyclists don’t care for you, pedestrians step into your path.

Moreover, the footpaths are riddled with holes nda cars, buses, trucks and motorcycles emit heavy pollution, and the temperature is above 30 from 7am until 4 or 5pm. This meant I ran before the sun was up. Mostly, I would run just after the dawn prayer, roughly at 4:45am. This was the only time that I could find relatively empty roads, some relative quiet. But it was also still a little dangerous: one could easily be run-down by passing careless motorcyclists.

Nonetheless, I always remember that Yogya was the place in which I resolved to become a proper runner. Since that time, a little over three years ago, I have run 3-6 times per week. On average I run five days a week and generally 60-70km per week. Yogya was also the place I trimmed myself down to get into a runner’s shape. I went from 65kg to 53-55kg in the space of a couple of months as a result of training everyday and consuming no more than 1,500calories per day. Although conditions on the road are difficult, there are are at least two stadiums where one can do one’s trackwork: at Mandala Krida Stadium (home to PSIM football club) and the track at Universitas Gadjah Mada. If one wants to one can train hard as a runner in Yogya: it is just not the ideal place for doing so.

Since moving to Leiden in October 2013, I have been a member of Leiden Atletiek. We like to consider ourselves as ‘athletes’, but we are amateurs at best, always struggling against our age and our bodies and our abilities. I admit to being one of the better runners in the group: but this is partly because I am one of the younger members and also I train more than many of the other runners.

Although I like to think I’m not at my peak, I am getting there. Over the three years of being in Leiden I have down three marathons: Amsterdam (3:15), Rotterdam (2:57) and Eindhoven (2:54). Each marathon represented different goals: the first, just to finish

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without suffering too much; the second, to get under three hours, and the third to get between 2:45-50. Eindhoven was clearly the most disappointing and I don’t feel represented the improvement I had made as a runner. Either side of the marathon in October 2015, I had got a personal best in my half-marathon (by three minutes, 1:21 down to 1:18) and a personal best in my 10km time (36:20 down to 35:54). Doing running relatively seriously can be so narcissitic, competitive and self-obsessed. Moreover, to improve, it takes up so much time: running five times a week for one hour at a time, at least. It is also expensive: shoes are around 130euros and one needs 2-3 different pairs. Registration for marathons are around 80euros. So much of running is about numbers: time, kilometers, calories. And then, when a race takes place, one can obsess about elevation, temperature, humidity, wind. Runners are always making excuses for poor performances – of course, I am no different. Although I have been lucky to have a handful of races in which I have been fully satisfied with my performances.

In Leiden, I run along bike paths and besides canals. I run past football fields, hocky pitches, public parks and private hobby gardens. I run along train lines, under and over roads, besides small lakes. I sometimes am charmed by birdsong, but never have I come across a public drinking fountain, which is sometimes needed in the rare case it is warm. It is easy to exit Leiden: it takes only 10-15 minutes before one is in semi-rural farmland. One sees cows and sheep and greenspace soon after departing from the city centre.

The scenery is not spectacular, but it is typically Dutch with all the polders, canals, windmills and bicycles passing by. Running is easy in the Netherlands: there are many competitions (of wide ranging distance and quality), there are many running clubs, there are many specialist running shops. The weather is frequently unpleasant and from November to March the days are short, grey and cold. But the weather is the only real challenge to enjoyable running. The challenges in Yogyakarta or Jakarta are more intense: the threat to one’s physical safety, the lack of ‘running space’, on top of the high humidity and temperature. I have not run for sustained periods in Melbourne, Victoria or Australia in general, but, my feeling is that long-distance running will be more enjoyable there, given the greater variety in landscape.

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*** So, the most important advice for you, is that you shift your main mode of transport from the S/U Bahn to that of walking. Walk while keeping your i-phone in your pocket or bag. Do not listen to music while walking. Enjoy the slowness. Of course, I am not so idealistic to think that you will follow my instructions to the letter. But, you have time to yourself and you have time to walk. Even though this is preparation for a walk through the countryside and mountains of New Zealand, it can also be an opportunity for seeing Berlin in a new light. Read Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project; read his essay on the city of Marseille, which I think is in One Way Street.

Read de Certeau’s essay, “Walking in the City”. Read some of Iain Borden’s work – perhaps: Skateboarding, Space and the City. Make notes on the public parks you see; the playgrounds; the small football courts; the outdoor gyms; the skateparks. I know you are an intellectual, so, I’m sure you will write. Perhaps you could write something like: “Walking in Berlin: Textures, Silences and Play”. As for Auckland-Christchurch, that is up to you.

I look forward to seeing the results of your project.

Andy

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Hello Dina, before you embark on what seem to be the an arduous and extensive journey on foot from auckland to christchurch, 1,077km and approximation of 207 hours if you walk non-stop as according to google maps, i would (attempt to) share with you the wonders of walking. dina, the only reason i am writing to you is that both you and i know how much you hate walking. i can almost feel your dread all the way here on the lion island. the irony of it is that i hate writing, probably as much as you hate walking and i hope somewhere in this attempt of a letter, we can convince each other to give walking//writing a chance. i have never asked you dina why you hate walking but i can only assume that it is such a physical act that involves all your sensorial effectiveness; to figure out where you are going and where you are, to remember how did you get here and how will you get back, to be conscious of the unfamiliar surroundings and be able to, in a short span of time, make it familiar and comfortable, to be aware of any forms of danger that might exist without being explicit with the unsettling sense that you are not in control of the environments you’ve placed yourself in through the act of walking. you are constantly alert and it can be taxing after awhile. your body will start to ache and your feet will begin to tire and your mind begins to drift slightly. however, there are the joys of walking and for me its not really about the distance covered or the hours that it takes to cover it, its not so much of getting from one point to another either. surprisingly, it took me awhile to understand my constant desire to walk in singapore (and subsequently in other cities) and i began my own journey by trying to trace the origins of my preferred method of moving around. dina, i guess we walk firstly due to proximity, if its close enough why not? i remember the first memories of this conscious act of walking as a sense of independence (walking to the provision shop two blocks away, walking to school on my own, walking to other parts of the neighbourhood to visit friends during Aidilfitri), the sense of accomplishment and pride would swell up inside after long hours of negotiation and finally reaching a consensus, the distance becomes longer each time, a measure of trust between my parents and I. subsequently, walking was an option i took at that time reluctantly as a struggling student, because I had to save on living expenses.

If I had missed a bus, I would walk several bus stops, continuously turning my head to check if the bus was coming. If i missed it again, I would keep on walking, until by chance, the bus stop, myself and the

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bus synchronised ourselves to each other. the strange game I created gave a delusional sense of achievement and made the long distances I covered bearable. still at this stage it was functional; getting from point A to point B, always with a destination at the end. There were however several instances where I would go off-route and completely lose my bearings. I would keep on walking, getting lost in my own make-shift labyrinths, until I stumble across some form of familiarity. dina, you and I both know how convenient it is to get around here. getting lost in singapore does not trigger any sense of long-term overdrawn state of panic. anyone could easily check their location from their smartphones, walk over to a bus-stop and find out where the hell they are just by checking the direction boards or walking to the nearest train station or simply asking random pedestrians you would cross paths with. what started off as a necessity to help me ease on my transport costs slowly became habitual. walking was my solitary act of defiance with time. i could disappear for hours each night just walking through the streets, exploring places I’ve never come across before, a hindu temple under a bridge, an abandoned colonial house hidden up a hill, a bridge suspended above the highway where you can dangle your feet and watch cars driving past. sometimes a wrong turn could bring you to places that might not even exist anywhere else, as a consequences, I was always late for appointments, casually apologising to friends, attributing it to my bad sense of direction (which was a half-truth) and my failure to recognise my surroundings (which was something I probably did subconsciously). my closest friends gave me the nickname “ilang� (disappear or missing), a play on my own name. at which point did the act of walking stopped to serve just a functional purpose? i seriously do not know dina but the sense of dread i use to feel at the idea of walking disappeared somewhere between the third paragraph and the current paragraph of this letter. dina, when i walk, i feel that i am in control of myself but i have absolutely no control of my environments. i think there is no single word that describes this particular feeling. after years of walking alone, i met a boy who love to walk in the same manner that i do. we grew tired of watching movies or going for the blah-blah dinner/ lunch dates where we would talk over food and ended up going to the airport to watch the planes leave this tragic island-state, plotting our own future escapes. a decade later, i would end up marrying him, the same boy who would take out his dog-eared worn down street directory and with my eyes closed get me to point to a page that we end up spending an entire day walking to. sometimes we would repeat the walks that we seem to take pleasure in, the ones that are not necessarily marked in the street directory. one in particular was

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an abandoned MRT station in punggol. we would walk through the overgrown lalang, with no defined path to guide us, second-guessing the route until we caught sight of the train station and the abandoned road leading to it. we would sit right below the unused train tracks and sometimes when we are lucky, we would get chased by aggressive guard dogs from the construction sites. dina, this is how i disappear completely, by walking to a place that does not exist. dina, as i come to almost the end in my journey with you to understand why I find joy in walking, I think it is pertinent for both of us to know that it is not so much the act of walking but the act of getting lost. losing hours, losing myself, losing my way, losing track of where i am or how I might get home (wherever that may be) brings about a sense of ease that I could slip into comfortably, like a secret I can only whisper to you in hushed gibberish and although it will definitely bring a smile to your face, might not be something you could fully comprehend and something i obviously struggle to explain to you right now. over the years, i have been privileged to be able to walk in cities that are entirely un-walkable. the uneven grounds, missing routes and the barely there pavements shortcut through alleyways that lead into a different universe at every turn. at the end of each trip, i would write down all the things I would have missed if I had went by car/ motorbike/taxi instead. the list is pretty extensive dina. however i realised that I could never recall the exact spots in which I had experience all these moments. if you were to give me a map, i could not point out the exact location in which these accidental exchanges took place. dina, there is therefore a kind of magic when i choose to disappear through the act of walking. many many years ago, cartographers travel to map the world, to create lines and boundaries, to chart distances between places. before i wrote to you, i was thinking about how i can explain to you the ideas of un-mapping oneself from the rest of the world to discover something else? how do i tell you exactly how to miss a turn, forget a route and disappear ? the best way i guess is to take that walk and experience it for yourself. that would be a start wouldn’t it ? dina, in the length of time writing you this letter, I realised, in all honesty, no wondrous feelings to take away from the act of walking, but everything else that comes with the act itself is something precious and cannot be encapsulated in words.

ila

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Dear Din, I’m writing to wish you well as you set off exploring Daniel MeierReimer’s work via his walks. No doubt you will explore lots of new spaces and see lots of new things. I hope you have packed all the best snacks to keep you going.

Before you set off, I wanted to share a few stories or thoughts on walking with you –the kind of walking that is most concerned with moving through social space as opposed to traversing scenic terrain or counting kilometres or calories.

The first story is about a walk I actually watched on YouTube.

You should look it up – Google Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

Together they walk and talk about the body, the social model of disability and the importance of social visibility to create social space. Sunaura goes for walks most days. Walking for Sunaura does not involve her feet, she has a physical impairment that requires her to use an electric wheelchair. Walking for Sunaura is not just about going places but also about visibility on the street. For Sunaura after learning about the social model, her disability comes in the form of the disabling affects of the projection of societal norms. I really like this idea of social visibility, the more social transactions engaging people outside normalising standards, the less power we give to these imposed standards. It’s very logical and quite tidy, especially because the interview takes place in San Francisco, which is known to be one of the most accessible cities on the planet.

So how do you enter social space if the streets aren’t accessible to your body or your embodiment of normativity?

This leads me to my second story. Just yesterday I met up with my friend Sri, a social worker here in Yogyakarta, Central Java who is paraplegic. Sri had a motorbike accident when she was 23 years old and for 10 years she didn’t leave her house, she was scared and depressed. I guess we could say she felt like she had lost her social space. She received a visit from a fellow paraplegic man riding a motorbike modified to house his wheelchair. From that one visit, she could see access and she could see freedom so she set out on a path to acquire a motorbike just like his. This motorbike is what ushered her into her new social space. The irony of finding freedom on a modified motorbike following her paralysis after a motorbike accident is not lost on Sri. Every year Sri tours Indonesia on an epic motorbike ride, her first ride was from Jakarta to Bali, some 1,200km on her modified

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wheelchair motorbike. Along the way, she goes to the homes of people who haven’t left their house since loosing their ability to walk, through paralysis or illness. The epicness of Sri’s motorbike journeys is a political action in claiming space, recruiting visibility and accumulating access to social space. The accumulation of kilometres on Sri’s motorbike must be at least equal to, if not more than, the number of people who had never before seen a paraplegic person riding a motorbike. I like to imagine those numbers multiplying further into social space by the square meter, a truly social space where we don’t even register a concept of normative embodiment.

I see a connection in Sunaura and Sri’s journeys. They are both political movements through social space. Sunaura and Sri both disrupt, enhance and re-distribute social space in their journeys.

Next, I thought you and I could take a mental walk like one of Sunaura and Judith’s but in Yogyakarta. Is it possible to respectfully perform this social space or lack there of when we introduce a wheelchair, a symbol of non-normative embodiment? We should look out for physical access or lack there of, that might speak for visibility, or lack there of and tell us about how exclusive public social space really can be.

Lets do as we often do, walk to Maga to buy ice cream. I’ll meet you at KUNCI, I’ll take the wheelchair and you can be Judith Butler.

There are no ramps at KUNCI yet, maybe we can find something to act as a temporary ramp, if not I’ll need you and a friend to lift me down both the front door and the front step. It’s the end of the rainy season so the front yard is very soft and full of fine silt.

I’m slow and squeeky but you help me along, my maiden voyage, walking in a wheelchair. I want to get the gate. It’s an important gesture both to myself, and everyone watching. Open the gate, tilt the chair back and we are outside, on the street, on Gang Melati.

It’s bumpy but fine, the physical bumps are more bearable than the social ones but walking this road is important to claim social space, to throw normalcy to the wind. At the end of Gang Melati we move onto Jalan Ngadinegaran. There is no footpath so we walk on the side of the road. The road is smooth, perhaps one of the smoothest around this area. We turn left onto Jalan Panjaitan.

It’s a terrifyingly busy street and the footpath is patched over by street vendors so we walk on the road and the parking attendants from each shop wave their lights around, cautioning people to make space for us. We aren’t getting to much talking, we are focusing on the walking and the social space we need to negotiate. We arrive

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at Maga. My amateur arms are tired so you push me up into the shop. I’m surprised how smooth entering the shop is, until I can’t fit through the checkout lane. There is not enough space for me.

We eat our ice-cream then set off back to KUNCI. This is maybe a thirty minute round trip, but still, it’s long enough to show us that inaccessibility can be felt socially as well as physically. It makes us question public space and how easily people are pushed out of it, socially.

So when you undertake your mind walks, I wonder if you could do it from a birds eye view so as to map the social space you engage in, negotiate or are even rejected from. Maybe the physical act of walking is less about feet pounding the pavement but more about moving through and engaging in social space?

How do we make that space really public? Is it only by increasing the number of non-normative social engagements and waiting for normativity to disappear?

I really hope not.

Lets walk and talk when you get home.

Good luck Din Edwina

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Photo of Vera Mey and her father in Wellington, 1989, on top of some hill.

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Dear Dins, I have been thinking a lot about your proposition of walking and I keep returning to the painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (German: Der Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer) (1818) by Caspar David Friedrich. It is an image of a man with a walking stick standing atop of piled rocks. I interpret this as a cliff face. He has the world in front of and beneath him, obscured by fog but with mountains and other distinguishing landscape features peering up from this cloud. Underlying this cloud seems like a land ready to be surveyed or wandered as Freidrich’s title suggests from the perspective of height and God. Despite a context continents away, it reminds me of the northwestern most point in New Zealand called Cape Reinga where in a similar fashion, you can stand at a hilltop cliff at the top of country and see the points where the Tasman Sea meet the Pacific Ocean. The geographic location of this point serves as a perfect metaphor for this settler colony’s historic gaze. This is a very literal greeting of water forces – the Pacific is tranquil and beautiful and the Tasman rough and swirling, their points converge in a white foam looking like a parting of the sea except you cannot walk through this division.

The tradition of walking, or a localized form of it “tramping” (perhaps more colloquially known as “hiking”) is strong. Childhood school camping trips were filled long day walks often stretching over days in remote areas inflected by beautiful sceneries. The practical attitude of walking from place to place even in the urban environment is practical attitude to make up for the lack of a sound transportation system that critical mass requires to survive.

In an island nation, the notion of walking from coast to coast is conceivable and perhaps follows the early settler task of surveying the land from it’s edges, in order to settle it. Or to capitalize it.

People connect this rhythm of walking to a proximity of nature and being grounded. However, exceptionally, I never liked walking.

Moving to Southeast Asia I noticed the abrupt shift in approaching the notion of pacing the build or natural environment. Even in Singapore, a place marred by neoliberal urban planning and desire influenced heavily by the West is not an ideal place to walk no matter how hard we deny the environment. In the equatorial and tropical climate, walking is neither pleasant nor comfortable. Even by staying still outside you sweat, a lot. Even within an inner city

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suburb, snakes can be encountered along the pavement yet I’ve noticed whenever foreigners, particular white foreigners, visit Southeast Asia, there is a fixation on walking no matter how hot, how humid or how haze ridden the air is.

Why are white people obsessed with walking?

There is something I have indeed observed living in two settler colonies – one in the South Pacific at the edge of the world, also known as the antipodes and the other in the centre of the world, in the tropics. I cannot help but think back to Friedrich’s wanderer and the potential that walking or traversing has to offer someone of his disposition – male and privileged– the potential for exploration or ownership.

This is not to deny traditions of walking such as Hikoi in New Zealand – which is the Māori word for protest march made well known by Dame Whina Cooper who in 1975 at the noble age of 79 marched, along with 5000 others, the length of the north island of New Zealand, an incredible 829km long in a brave effort to protest indigenous land loss. Somewhat embarrassingly I know more about this than walking traditions where my parents are from – Cambodia and Indonesia.

Our relationship to walking in this regard is much more simple – we walked places in New Zealand because we were poor and for the longest time my mother couldn’t drive. My father worked long hours so a lot of what I remember is walking between bus stops, walking up hills, being blown over by Wellington’s gusto wind and running home to avoid hail storms in winter. Of course within this vein, there is an incredible relationship to knowing the city’s shortcuts, it’s routes that seem like are your own, and the happenstance of encounter. There is also the aspect which alerts you to how gendered the city is I experienced at a young age walking places with my mother, the flashing of nudity from strange men, the wolf whistles and staring and even on occasion being followed walking at “respectable” hours of the day like Sunday afternoon. In this respect there are strands of walking which seem inherently biased and dependent upon socio economic status – those who walk because they have to and those who can afford to walk without the obstacle of encounter. In the latter, this is perhaps more the designated routes of the nature or bush walk, the former, the urban drifting.

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Then there’s the family history of walking in our family, also linked to circumstance when through the anecdotal I heard members of our family walked from Phnom Penh, Cambodia to the Thai border after the Khmer Rouge seized the capital in 1975. I can’t even begin to calculate how long or hard this distance must be. My friend who is also Khmer said that her mother often talked about the dead bodies in the trees along the walk, likely from the bombings.

As much as I romanticize the tradition of the flaneur, which to an extent the urban plan of modern Phnom Penh was modeled for, with long boulevards in the French tradition as the city was built by French trained Khmer architect and urban planner Vann Molyvann, now I’d rather uber.

Lots of love, Vera

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SHORT BIOGRAPHY Syafiatudina (or for short Dina) has interest on curatorial work as interplay between theory and practice, including thinking and doing. Related to this interest, her work explores the potential of artistic practices as part of knowledge inquiries, yet also contribute to social and political change. She’s currently working as researcher and curator at KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (www. kunci.or.id), in Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Andy Fuller researches sports and urban culture. He is the founder of Reading Sideways (readingsideways.net). He is the author of The Struggle for Soccer in Indonesia: Archives, Fandom and Urban Identity (Yogyakarta: Tan Kinira, 2014) and Playing Cities, Making Sport (Yogyakarta: Tan Kinira, 2014). He has published articles in Soccer and Society, Sport in Society and Inside Indonesia. ila researches on lost written / spoken languages of Singapore which stems from an inability to express herself fluently as a result of the whitewashing of histories. Her works are personal explorations based on mistranslations, miscommunications and the discovery of her own awkward self-expression. As a visual performance artist, she works primarily with overhead projectors to create organic narratives within performative structures. Her performances breaks spatial boundaries through explorations of shadows and light, creating imagined environments within collaborative processes.

Edwina Brennan is an arts producer and researcher based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Edwina’s research in Indonesia focuses on the history of disability in Java and how this history informs today’s social perception of and (lack of) social and vocational space for people with disabilities. She works on a project called Relax Your Bones, an experiment in creative vocational development with her sister Katrina.

Vera Mey is an independent curator in transit to London where she will undertake a PhD at SOAS, University of London focusing on Southeast Asian art history. She is currently co curating SEA Project (working title) at the Mori Art Museum and National Art Centre Tokyo for July 2017.

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The illustrations and photos inside this zine are works from Onyenho. Hayyi Qoyyumi or Onyenho is an artist who use illustration and photography as his medium. He is based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and currently working in KUNCI Cultural Studies Center as a researcher and librarian.

The cover of this zine is an image from Daniel Maier-Reimer.

Daniel Maier-Reimer, 2015 Auckland - Christchurch, 2014 Journey to Tbilisi, 2013 Apuan Alps, Tyrrhenian Sea to the Adriatic, Arno, 2012 Florence city boundary line, 2011 Southern Great Wall of China, Swabian Alps, Bialowieza, 2010 Pamirs, 2009 Iran, 2008 Iran, 2007 Dessau, Caucasus, 2006, Yarlung Tsangpo, Tajikistan, 2005 Caucasus, 2004 Yarlung Tsangpo, Great Wall of China, 2003 Hamburg state boundary, Moldova / Ukraine, 2002 Japan, 2001 Great Wall of China, Russia, 2000 Amur, Great Wall of China, 1998 Yellow River, 1997 Yarlung Tsangpo, 1996 Yangtze River, 1995 Iceland, Poland, 1994, Mackenzie River, 1993 Anterior Rhine, Colorado River, 1992 Bay of Biscay, Irish Sea, 1991 Scandinavia, 1990 Germany.

The designer of this zine is Aria Pradifta.

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