Tokovisie: an identity of many

Abraham Meeuwsen: In 2020, you were one of the three city illustrators of Rotterdam. How did you experience that process? What did you take from that work period towards your professional practice now? How do you look back on it?

Price Roos: When I was appointed as one of the city artists of Rotterdam, with the assignment theme 'People make the city', that was very much up my alley. But shortly afterwards the pandemic broke out and the theme was changed to: 'The city in lockdown'. My application for the assignment at the time was about making portraits, so in the beginning it was a bit of a switch. In the end, it has brought me a lot to broaden my portraiture of people to really observing the street and the neighborhood. For example, the district of Rotterdam-Zuid where I live myself, which I have extensively recorded and drawn.

A.M: So, in addition to making portraits, you have started to focus more on capturing environment and context?

PR: Certainly, the assignment as a city artist also largely resulted in form and material research. It was the first period in which I worked a lot with oil pastel and I grew enormously in that by further refining certain techniques. Eventually I really immersed myself completely in the assignment and went out on the street every day. Producing and producing again. I really felt like a kind of visual journalist. What I actually always did to a greater or lesser extent, I now had complete freedom to do—in addition to broadening techniques. The special thing about that was in particular the position I could take within the district by reflecting it in all its power in my work.

A.M: Is there a specific work from this period that stands out for you?

PR: My personal “highlight” during this work period was the Black Lives Matter demonstration here in Rotterdam on the Erasmus Bridge. I tried to capture this moment in all its intensity, power, pain and versatility as best as possible. This resulted in a very outspoken and activist work.

A.M: You are very outspoken about what is happening in politics and society, both inside and outside of your work. How do you relate to this?

PR: In my work I deal with social issues. Issues that are close to my heart and that I am strongly influenced by in my daily life and therefore also committed to. I see it as my duty as a visual journalist to speak out sharply for Black Lives Matter and against racism and discrimination. Together with a group of Rotterdam artists and researchers, I am also the collective Deconstructing.nl launched to map out, combat and put on the agenda of (art) institutions racism and discrimination in Rotterdam through research.

Furthermore, I also find it very important to guide artists and art students of color in their development and I value being among other artists and working together. Last summer, for example, I was part of the mentoring program for the summer school 'All You Can Art' in collaboration with Kunsthal Rotterdam and Instituto Buena Bista (IBB) from Curacao. I did a residency program for the Rotterdam Urban Arts Center (an initiative of House of Urban Arts and SKAR) and last semester I was an external examiner of the Cultural Diversity program at the Willem de Kooning Academy.

A.M: In your work, the non-traditional Dutch person is central. This dominant perspective is not just a theme but a lived experience. How do you approach this?

PR: I have been living in Rotterdam for just over two years now and, in addition to working part-time in the shop, I focus on creating autonomous work and speaking out as an activist about social issues in order to make the non-traditional Dutch narrative more visible for and by everyone.

Both during my studies in visual arts and while working in my family's shop, I became fascinated by the stories of loved ones and by brief encounters with passers-by, in the shop, on the street and in other places. People's personal stories are the inspiration for my portraits. In telling and listening, a connection is created that I translate into words and images, but also into installations. At the same time, I am also very open about my personal history and the highs and lows of my life. Listening to the other in the intimate setting of their own home, nothing remains hidden behind a facade.

A.M: What does your manufacturing process typically look like?

PR: In my creative process, in addition to the conversation, I am always busy with form and material research. What happens, for example, when portraits on paper, cardboard or canvas overlap and become a larger-scale work? Or when I replace the painted portrait with words and recite them to an unknown audience? In my works I do not only want to show the results in painted images, but also project the interpretation of that story onto my own background. I want to be transparent and point out to others the richness and invisibility that I experience myself when seeing and speaking with people in my immediate environment. About the careful connections that I make about origins, in the search for identities that we share with each other.

A.M: What personal development have you gone through in this regard?

PR: Over the years I have increasingly varied in the form of portraits. Two years ago I started a search for Dutch people with a migration background and visited them at home. I used audio recordings to record these visits and when I got home I repeatedly replayed the conversations to really listen to the other person. For my exhibition “I live less in Vietnam than in the Netherlands – I live in the Netherlands more than in Vietnam, story of A vinh Tran, a chinese woman who fled Vietnam in the 1970s” (MAMA, Rotterdam 2020), I made a wooden boat construction in which several small and large rice bags were collected from my father's kitchen. Next to that installation there was a text about the experiences of A vinh Tran, combined with a collective reading of that text. In addition, sharing recipes from my family with the audience was also central.

Something I find very important is observing and finding invisible, everyday beauty on the street, in which the story and the person are central. These people symbolize my father and mother. My silent parents who came to the Netherlands from Bogor, Indonesia in the seventies. Due to a kind of uncertainty on my part, the closedness and the silence within my family towards us children, I only know fragments of the deeper history of my parents. It has made me combative to listen to the stories of others and to do justice to them. With this, my work is at the same time a self-portrait of me and my family.

A.M: What projects are you currently working on?

PR: Recently I have been more explicit in exploring my own Indonesian background and learning about the complex history of Indonesia, the Moluccas and West Papua. In almost all my works it is also about identity, memory and (re)cognition. Up until now I have always delved into the individual stories that each person brings with them and in that I saw differences, but I also clearly observed similarities in which people come together and share an identity. Namely: we all came to the Netherlands—or are the daughters and sons of migrants—and we speak Dutch.

A.M: Can you elaborate further on this research in relation to the themes of identity, memory and (re)cognition?

PR: I grew up in the 80s in my parents' shop in Alkmaar, called toko Djaya Makmur. A small eatery where you could smell the scents of shrimp paste, lemon leaves and curry from far away in the street. This is the place where, as a child, I ran upstairs with my brother, between the display cases full of Indonesian dishes and through the kitchen, to play, draw and do homework. I have always known that my parents always worked hard, from early in the morning until late at night. In the meantime, my parents have had three shops and also sold them on to other Indonesian families. It is like a legacy that is passed on. At the moment, their current toko Gembira has grown from an Indonesian eatery to a gigantic space in Almere, where, in addition to an Indonesian kitchen, there is also a supermarket with products from Central and Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, North and Central Africa and North and South America.

I started working in the shop when I was 15, a few days a week and I still enjoy working there. It is a family business where I learned everything, am close to family and where I get a lot of inspiration for my art practice. But more importantly, the shop conveys a vision that I am looking for in my own work. As the daughter of Indonesian migrants, there is always an expectation to take over the shop one day. All my cousins ​​also grew up in a shop and have now taken over their parents' business. The same applies, now that my parents are approaching retirement, to my brother in the case of my parents' shop. For years I myself have thought: "Shouldn't I help take it over?" The shop symbolizes the Indonesian heritage of the family, but also the diaspora of migrants all over the world. A place where people can go to share stories, meet others and for the smell and taste of the fatherland or motherland. It is therefore my vision to draw the consciousness and the idea of ​​a shop to myself and to give it shape within my art practice.

A.M: How do we see this reflected in your work?

PR: In my work I see something I call social realism. On the one hand I am fascinated by the view of the ordinary person within everyday reality, but on the other hand I consciously look for stories of more invisible Dutch people with a migration background, to then share these with a broad audience. I do this with the conviction that there is still so much to tell about the shared identity of the Netherlands and that which people do not know because it is not seen. For me there is an enormous need in the fact to tell precisely these stories.

In the coming period I want to focus my attention largely on both my own identity and working methods and on researching the Indonesian diaspora in the Netherlands. Based on a collaborative project, for which I received an R&D contribution from CBK, I want to make the history of batik art clear by weaving it with the Indonesian language and identity, based on stories of migrants from the Indonesian archipelago and related heritage material.

A.M: Can you tell us more about this collaborative project?

PR: The project 'Batik X Liliawati' focuses on translating the batik manual 'Seni kerajinan: Batik Indonesia', a standard work written in Bahasa Indonesia in the 80s, by means of a community of two hundred Bahasa Indonesia speaking amateur translators. This community consists of migrants of all ages who live in different regions in the Netherlands and come from various islands and regions in Indonesia. The translators each translate a number of pages of the batik manual into Dutch. In addition, they also answer questions about their knowledge of batik and about their own origins by means of a questionnaire.

In collaboration with artist and batik researcher Sabine Bolk and writer and historian Yulia Pattopang, I focus on researching, collecting, processing and digitizing the results. In the first phase, the translations will be processed into a digital platform where it can be freely viewed by everyone. In the second phase of the project, we will then give this further shape and purpose.

A.M: What specifically makes this batik manual so special?

PR: 'Seni kerajinan batik Indonesia' contains 500 pages about the history and development of batik in Indonesia and delves deeper into the meaning of symbols and patterns from different regions and the historical connection with the Netherlands. The handbook is known in Indonesia as a must-have for every expert and lover of batik. As far as is known, there is no translation of this book available. Since I do not speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently, it will provide me, the team and the translators with a lot of surprising and interesting information and perspectives about the precise content of the batik handbook.

I see the digital platform as the archive and a meeting place for the translations of the batik handbook. With constant pop-ups at the relevant pages of each translator with more personal background information. The digital platform is also connected to the website Journeytobatik.org, set up by Sabine Bolk. This is an online platform specially developed around the history of batik and contemporary developments, which functions as a database for various projects, including this translation project.

A.M: What is your goal with this project?

PR: My initial goal is to get to know and (re)discover batik techniques better by using the translations of the batik manual and the stories of the translators. In this way we develop our own batik language and clothing style inspired by the journey from the motherland to the Netherlands.

The entire process will be a quest to find, lose, maintain and/or gain identity using language and heritage in the form of batik. It is also a quest to bring together migrants from the Indonesian archipelago who have settled in the Netherlands recently or long(er) ago. Finally, it is also a quest about (re)discovering and (re)valuing batik as an autonomous art form. Most methods, techniques and formulas are not only professional secrets, but also secrets of individual regions in Indonesia. Every region and family has its own formulas, symbols and patterns and therefore also its own batik language.

In this I am looking for answers to questions such as: can I, as an Indonesian artist, born and living in the Netherlands, also create my own batik language from the original Indonesian batik language? And what does the mother tongue mean to you when you no longer live in the mother country and no longer speak this language on a daily basis? In this way, we can also delve further into the background of the translators themselves on the basis of the answers and I want to visit a large number of them personally at home.

In addition, we want to organize public lectures and would very much like to invite speakers such as Amanda Pinatih (art historian and design curator Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), Sabine Bolk, Yulia Pattopang, Henry Timisela (director Moluccan Historical Museum) and Raki Ap (spokesperson Free West Papua Campaign) to talk about and share the different perspectives of Indonesian, Moluccan and West Papuan history. Together with Sabine Bolk, Myrthe Groot and Romée Mulder from Guava (a clothing label based on batik and sustainability) we want to give batik workshops to the translators and there will be lectures/meetings with presentations and discussions about what exactly is in the batik manual.

A.M: What are you looking for in your own work within this project?

PR: What I am looking for in my work is a narrative unity that gradually emerges without necessarily assuming one narrative, but rather the identity of many. Ultimately, I am mainly interested in research into identity in combination with the creation of applied works. Furthermore, I must explain that the history of the Indonesian archipelago and its inhabitants is very complicated. I realize how difficult it is to describe exactly what the correct name is for migrants from the Indonesian archipelago, while there are still states such as RMS (Republik Maluku Selatan/Republic of South Moluccas) and West Papua fighting for their independence from Indonesia. While at the same time people here also wear batik. I cannot describe the Moluccans and West Papuans as Indonesians, but in my research into story, origin and heritage I do actively search for the connection between those regions. Perhaps the joint translation of a book about the heritage of our mother tongue into the Dutch language is a moment to connect? But also a moment of self-determination and (re)cognition of one's own identity?

A.M: Are there any other projects you would like to mention?

PR: I am also currently researching and deepening literature and activism for long-term collaborative projects in 2022-2023. In addition, I have started creating a mini-library in my studio in Rotterdam-Zuid. Here, zines, children's books and graphic novels by illustrators and writers of color about people of color are brought together and exchanged. I have also started the first sketches of an interactive children's book about growing up as a bi-cultural child in my parents' shop. A story based on my own life in which memory and fantasy mingle in a world of adventures in the green of Bogor and the brown bricks of Alkmaar.

All these projects require a flexible position between maker and individual, between collector, researcher and collaborator, between origin and language. In this I want to learn more about how I can take people with me in my search and offer space to others. To support and doubt, importance and vulnerability. At the same time I also get a lot of pleasure from continuing to make individual portraits and stories in which I can experiment with materials and color. Furthermore I want to connect even more with activism and mentoring. Because I see it as my heritage to actively convey the feeling and history of the toko (and therefore the legacy of my family) in my professional practice.