Riar Rizaldi
Tellurian Drama
May 5th, 1923. The Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of a new radio station in West Java. It was called Radio Malabar. In March 2020, the local Indonesian government plans to reactivate the station as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tellurian Drama imagines what would have happened in between: the vital role of mountains in history; colonial ruins as an apparatus for geoengineering technology; and the invisible power of indigenous ancestral. Narrated based on the forgotten text written by a prominent pseudo-anthropologist Drs. Munarwan, Tellurian Drama problematizes the notion of decolonization, geocentric technology, and historicity of communication. Mount Malabar in West Java, Indonesia, shows us a spectrum of human-nature relationships: the Dutch colonial government saw the mountain as a suitable spot for an antenna for radio transmission; for indigenous communities, the mountain itself is a partner for spiritual communication. In Riar Rizaldi’s eclectic essay film, archival history collides with personal narratives on the history of technology, nature and colonisation. A shaman’s breath-taking zither performance brings us a moment of clarity.
Tellurian Drama manages to find a particular cinematic device to bring together interdependent processes, histories and subjectivities. While searching and speculating about the actual and possible knowledge and insights that a visit to the remnants of the station Radio Malabar in West Java could transmit to us – as past, present and future researchers, inhabitants, activists, tourists, or even storytellers – the film brings us elsewhere in the end.
Riar Rizaldi is an Indonesian born, Hong Kong based artist, filmmaker and researcher. His artistic practice focuses on world-views and the possibility of theoretical fiction. He is interested in the complexity of belief systems, with particular focus on his home of Indonesia. Using speculative science-fiction, he examines the consequences of advanced technology and modern science on the social, political, and cultural life of human and nonhuman in Southeast Asia, especially in the Indonesian archipelago. Rizaldi explores these issues through the notion of world-building, colliding fiction and observation, and experimenting with audiovisual language and form.