A series of seven, thousand high poster stacks laid out on the floor of the Jakarta History Museum for visitors to view, take home and disperse. This work was part of the exhibition “-2m: Voices From (Below) The Sea, held at the Jakarta History Museum in May – June 2019.

Jakarta has been extended out to sea many times. Fishermen bring sacks of mussels from the ocean and women and teenage girls make middens. The biggest ones by far are in Cilincing, heaped up against the new sea wall.

Jakarta has been extended out to sea many times. Fishing communities have made the land their houses are built on with the persistent everyday labour of retrieving mussels from the sea and shelling them. Salvage work, an accumulative land claim, the sedimented sociality of human labour. A midden is a monument, but it’s also a happening.

These proposals are for you, visitor, to take home as a trace of this sociality and as a series of actions you might want to help realise in the future. Help dissolve this artwork into the soup that is Jakarta by taking these posters into your domestic space, your neighbourhood space. There they may linger as propositions for new bonds between the sea and the land, the north and the south, and a new recognition of the harsh labour that keeps Jakarta’s head above water.