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Nuraini Juliastuti’s studio space functions as an expansion of her writing desk. It offers small teasers of her script in the making, from its characters and environments, to the political and cultural contexts these have arisen from. Entitled Stories of Wounds and Wonder, the script will be released as an illustrated publication as part of If I Can’t Dance Edition IX Finale in the Fall/Winter 2023. Inspired by Juliastuti’s research into indigenous life technologies and cosmologies in Indonesia, the script narrates trans-species practices of survival across the Indonesian archipelago. Readers of different ages will encounter endangered monkeys, fugitive rats, street dogs, and, among humans, women who wove around the mountains as a form of eco-political resistance. (SSG)

Listen to an introductory interview with Nuraini Juliastuti here.

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Caption: Nuraini Juliastuti, from the ongoing series #domesticnotes, 2023.

ID: A nicely composed snack on a white plate lies on wooden table. The snack consists of a slice of toastie bread with butter and chocolate sprinkles, surrounded by mandarin wedges individually and carefully placed all around its contours.

Domestic Notes is a publishing project developed by Nuraini Juliastuti, unfolding both through printed matter and social media. Domestic Notes uses domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, organisation of makeshift support system, trivial matters, and gestures that are often overpowered by the usual productivity and stability formula.

1: Characters development

2: Weaving as an infrastructure for protection

3: Fieldnotes from the stones

4: Things that matter

Curatorial note

For Edition IX, If I Can’t Dance has invited art researcher, writer and pedagogue Nuraini Justaliuti to articulate further the role of storytelling as an archival technology within the practices of what she calls the ‘commons museum’. The ‘commons museum’ is a multiyear, multimodal research project that draws from Justaliuti’s long term engagement with radical pedagogy, vernacular archiving and community-based techniques of life. As a kind of operational concept, it is structured upon the practices of Indonesian activist communities that are committed to recuperate suppressed Indigenous knowledge across agriculture, language, storytelling, and crafts.

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