Destiny Exchange / Pertukaran Nasib. Encounter 1. Yogyakarta, Indonesia. 19 October 2009. Created by Agents of Proximity with Nuraini Juliastuti.

Begin. We begin with an offer ⎯ a gift, an enquiry, a gentle provocation. Quite simply, the invitation is this: An exchange. For one day, I will do the work which you would normally do, and what I would like you to do in this day is to be a tourist in your own city ⎯ to be me, but also not-me. There is, however, no coercion, and you are free to respond to the offer as you choose. 19 October, 2009: Encounter. Amy (27, average height, freckles, red hair, Tasmanian, good with people, not so good with pets or plants). Bu Jilah (50-something, Javanese, quite short, collector of motorcycles and cats). Amy becomes the pembantu, the housekeeper and cleaner at a Dutch school and Cemeti House, cleaning rooms, scrubbing toilets and washing sheets for foreign tourists, Dutch preschoolers and artists. Bu Jilah goes to Progo shopping mall.

1. (raw). Bu Jilah was given a camera to take with her on her day off. These are the photos she took. The first set of photos include her son, her daughter-in-law, her husband, neighbour, shop-keepers. The second set is from the Progo Shopping Mall in Yogyakarta. This was the first time she had been to a mall, and her first experience using a camera.

2. (raw). Nuraini Juliastuti (Nuning), an Indonesian artist and writer at the Kunci Cultural Studies Centre, interviewed Bu Jilah. Most of these fragments are from their conversation; others are notes or anecdotes from the encounter.

2.1 (raw). She spoke quickly in Javanese, with a casual tone, as if she was facing me, her old friend. “Hello Mbak Nuning”, she said. “Sorry for being a bit late. I went to the PLN office first to pay the electricity bill. Wait Mbak, I need to fasten the screws of my motorcycle’s front lamp.” With the screwdriver in her hands, she continued talking, “I have to handle virtually everything in my house, starting from regular house activities, paying bills, to trivial matters such as fixing the lamp of my motorcycle…I am easily feeling stressed out because of these small things…Last night, I talked to my son. Well he is not my real son, I adopted him, anyway I said to him to not speed at our kampung, because our neighbours like to talk and gossip about that you know…And I said to him to always think about me, the mother who is working really hard for the family”. 2.2 (raw). Bu Jilah told us she has a reputation for being a hard worker, that someone had even said she loved work more than eating. She explains the key to happiness is to love your work. At 52 years of age, she says she imagines she could live another 100 to 200 years more, happily working.

2.3 (raw). (a) As part of the exchange, Bu Jilah is given 200,000 rupiah to use on her day off. Her average monthly wage is 2 to 3 million rupiah (between 66,000 and 100,000 rupiah per day); (b) Lonely Planet suggests a mid-range budget for tourists in Indonesia of $40-$50 US a day (about 377,000 to 472,000 rupiah); (c) In Australia, the National Institute of Visual Artists recommends minimum artist fees for emerging studio artists working on short term projects of $31.70 (about 270,000 rupiah) an hour. 2.4 (raw). “I have worked since I was a little girl. As far as I remember, when I was still sitting at the junior high school, I started to earn my own money by selling many things … Then I worked for the lady working at the Post Office, cleaning up her house. She introduced me to a foreign lady called Tessa. So that was the beginning of me working for expatriates. Tessa started to introduce me to her fellows, and that is how I get the jobs, from word-to-mouth.”

2.5 (raw). “Is your husband working somewhere?” “No. He stays at home.” “He is not working?” “No. He is at home, taking care of our house.” “Is he sick or something?” “Oh no. I think it would be better for all of us if he stays at home, for otherwise there would be nobody taking care of our cats.” “Do you have many cats?” “Oh yes, there are around 10 cats at my house.” 2.6 (raw). “Do you save the money you earn?” “Absolutely, I own lots of jewellery, especially gold.” “So you do not have a bank account?” “No. I prefer to save my money in the form of jewellery and keep them all inside my own house.”

2.7 (raw). “Do you ever have a wish for using some of your savings to go on a holiday?” “Oh no, and what for? It would be better if I used the spare time to work and get more money.” “Or perhaps you want to spend the money to buy more electronic stuff?” “I do not have any particular desire for it. I already have a refrigerator. I have six motorcycles. And I always pay the instalments on time.” She pulled a small book containing the record of her instalment payments from her bag. “Look, never once have I exceeded the deadline of paying it. And because of it, the motorcycle dealer always grants my proposal to installing another motorcycle.” 2.8 (raw). “The neighbours used to express their negative gestures whenever seeing me wearing jewellery.” “Why would they do that?” “Because they thought I was wearing the fake ones! Until one day I showed them the letters of my jewelleries, then they started to understand…People are always like that you know…They just do not know how hard one has to work to get all that. I always come home very late at night. Also everyday, usually at 3AM in the morning, I wake up, to sincerely asking God for blessing me, my family, as well as this city.”

2.9 (raw). On Wednesday, Amy hears through Bu Jilah’s friend, Rachel, that Bu Jilah is intending to work on her day off, selling jewellery or taking bottles for recycling. Rachel is keen to see Bu Jilah do something nice for herself, and had urged her to go on a tour to Borobudur, the old Buddhist temple in Central Java. Bu Jilah replied that she had no interest in going on a tour to touristy sites. The next day, Amy asks Bu Jilah if she understands that she will receive 200,000 rupiah for the project and is allowed to take the day off if she wants. She explains her choice. She said she had never been to Borobudur or a shopping mall, and although they did interest her, she’d feel strange and uncomfortable going. She asks if is okay if she stays at home and does her errands instead. 2.10 (raw). In the end, Bu Jilah decides to take the day off after all, and spends most of it at Progo Shopping Mall. In the evening, she tells Boy, the interpreter, that she had found it tiring to be a tourist. She tells us how, at one point, she got lost in the shopping mall, trapped on a certain floor that only had escalators, contraptions she didn’t know how to use. Laughing, she said she’d felt “groggy”, having never spent a day with no purpose before.

3. (cooked).* And through it all we collect fragments of text, images, remembered words; and we lay them out in the order in which they were received. Can more than this be done? Already the picture is partial, inauthentic; a selective remembering of an encounter fixed in space and time. Art becomes the means of entry. “Artist” becomes the license to transgress; to act out, to act up; to create moments of exchange which would otherwise go unrealised. We surrender our claim to authorship in an act of egalitarian levelling — inviting Bu Jilah and others like her to participate as co-creators of the encounter — but in the retelling of the moment we wrest it back for ourselves. Is this comfortable? Nothing is representative of anything more than what it is. Bu Jilah does not like cats because she is Indonesian, or Javanese, or a member of the exploited global underclass. This is not an encounter between An Australian and An Indonesia, between North and South, White and Black. What pulls on us is its human-ness. Yet it is also an encounter between people who, for all their irreducibility to categories and abstract descriptors, carry the markings of structures bigger than themselves. And so the gap. * With respect to Claude Levi-Strauss

As part of the 2009 South Project Gathering held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Amy Spiers and Victoria Stead of Agents of Proximity joined forces with writer Nuraini Juliastuti from Kunci Cultural Studies Center to develop an art project exploring travel, tourism, leisure and the relationships of power and exchange which these things generate. In the lead up to the South Project Gathering The Agents swapped roles with Indonesians, in an "exchange of destiny" that attempted to subvert and invert the usual forms of interaction that occur between locals and tourists. agentsgosouth.blogspot.com.au kunci.or.id