Ratri Notosudirdjo

performance , installatie , Experimenteel , Diaspora , cross-over , Community

My name is Ratri Notosudirdjo and I was born in Jakarta and brought up in many places, my family moving in constant migrative motion. I am based in Rotterdam where my work as a multi-media performance artist and researcher was first initiated in 2020. A lot of my upbringing, the complexity of memory and negotiating of multiple positions over time and space, inspires my research into the experience of fragmentation, building a sense of self, and the tension between historical narratives and bodily tensions. I explore this through material storytelling approaches and am constantly searching for a language to dissolve bigger histories through personal tales. Currently I am exploring new foundations for my practice, using mediums such as shadowplay, video, textile to deepen personal inquiries about memory, remembering, migration, labour, belonging alongside an examination of social structures that are shaped over time and territory. As I am forming the crucial basis of my counter-imagination to “history as it’s told”, I revisit intimate story fragments, evolving through slow processes such as workshops, interviews and conversations with people who resonate with these inquiries or contribute with their stories. These works often express themselves through surrealism–fantasy–loric interpretations.

**nessy 2022 // busking** - The story of nessy begins at a collapse of time and place. This creature, once myth, is suddenly transported to the streets of Rotterdam, embodied by four performers connected within a single, expansive costume. As part of my first solo exhibition, 'along, along' in 2022 (a play on words: alang-alang – a grass hatching technique), I experimented with the format of busking—a performative act I experienced abundantly as a child in Madison, Toronto, and Jakarta. Through the spontaneity of busking, I expanded on nessy's lore to adapt geopolitical and neocolonial dimensions, particularly the outsourcing of recycled and non-recycled waste from the Netherlands to Indonesia. nessy, a bird-like figure unlike Arjuna or any deity, embodies this history like a common seagull, entangled in a mess they can’t escape. The costume's net, crafted from a criminalized Manitoba fishing net, is laden with discarded items: slippers, tin cans, beads, plastic gold, condoms, Indomie, cigarette buds, and styrofoam letters. Four masks, made with wooden hoops, feature hand-embroidered images of a tree, a catfish, a wayang creature, and a dancing root. Performers: Viana Afoumou, Lili Ulrich, Magdalena Petrova, Illoy Drisdale.

**Shoulder to Shoulder 2022// Burnout Theatre** - “Shoulder to Shoulder” offers an intense expression and orchestral articulation of burnout through Butoh-inspired sound and movement. It emphasizes the extreme exhaustion resulting from the repetition of normalized work cycles. Focusing on the syndromic effects of rigid workspaces and unhalting labor, the performance seeks to unleash the necromantic spells cast by these conditions. In the live performance, movement and sound escalate dynamically through feedback and echo. The composition is scored using a unique mnemonic method, driven by the action of “running” to propel the ensemble. My role involves running to conduct and cue various actions, including readings, poetry, bodily sounds, and physical movement, characterized by continuous cycles of 'start and stopping, starting and stopping.' The dynamic ranges from 'the harder the louder' to 'the softer, the steadier.' Collaborators: Researcher/choreographer - Marta Wörner, Butoh artist/mentor - John Giskes, and Live mixing & sound-design - Costanza Calzavara.

**UUAHIB Series** - UUAHIB was a series of workshops conducted between 2020 to 2022 in various group contexts, building on the continued work of the first edition of the UUAHIB series in 2020 at MINT Residency. Named for a specific phonetic combination that emerged during the workshops, the UUAHIB research explores sound and meaning. These workshops aimed to investigate negotiations of meaning, reasoning, and the spontaneous utterances of 'worlds. In the first workshop, a large cotton/latex textile work with 126 bean plants and roots was examined by a group of musicians, visual artists and DJs. The proposed question was how to translate these textural and visual materials into sound, culminating as a vocal composition. For the second and third workshops, new groups—including activists, students, artists, and writers—participated, bringing the question of movement to the forefront.These works culminated as a busking-turned-intervention-turned parade performed live at a public playground in 2021. Then in 2022, the composition became a rehearsed and choreographed stage piece.

**Leeks 2024 // Material Research** - Wayang Kulit, translating to skin shadow or leather puppet from Bahasa Indonesia, is an ancient puppetry medium traditionally using water buffalo hide. Playing off this, I constructed new puppets using paper-making with skin or skin-like materials. My process blended market-sourced onion and leek skins with city-foraged grass and yarrow. This included yarrow gathered from a large patch in front of a Marconiplein strip mall, a site bulldozed for new apartment construction just after my collection. I investigated the strength of these bio-paper structures, sculpting a puppet that interprets its hybrid-vegetable form, primarily from the onion and leek.

**Chickenskin 2024// Material Research** - Wayang Kulit, translating to 'skin shadow' or 'leather puppet' from Bahasa Indonesia, is an ancient puppetry medium traditionally crafted from water buffalo hide. For this material research, I conceptually played off the 'skin' aspect of Wayang Kulit, exploring both paper-making and leathering to create new puppet forms. My leathering experiments primarily utilized chicken feet, often repurposed from making soup base. To develop a natural tanning agent, I foraged several buckets of acorns from the neighborhood around my studio at Gerdesiweg. This acorn mixture yielded a distinctive light brown finish on the chicken skin leather.

**Wayang Mimpi** - In 2024 I experimented with a story-making process, using personal interviews online & offline to collect story fragments from multiple peripheries and centers of the Indo-diaspora and Indonesians still living in the country. Through the collection of these stories, I was able to collect an archive of fragments, later translated to prose and a general archive. The procedure for the interview I created was titled “Teach me something you learned from someone else”. This method involved asking each to think about something small or large, convenient or complicated that can be facilitated in their homes. In reflection, the question sparked a proximity to memory and routine, something that is carried day to day and sometimes unquestioned. Through this process I learnt several dance moves, personally spice coffee, obscure history fragments and how to make sweet lemongrass chicken. This interview practice was a new method to later translate the smaller, unnoticeable things to stories and histories that overlap across geographies.

**Kartinizaal Reconstruction “betweens, tyrannies, histories” 2025 // Shadow puppets** - In the 1990s, a group of architects and artists built a construction of a mythological boardroom of the VOC, inspired from an etching by Simon Fokke (ca. 1768). This site was named the VOC-zaal created for the University of Amsterdam in the Bushuis/Oost building. After decades of debate, driven by the Faculty of Humanities, students, and alumni, a decision was made to reclaim the room and deconstruct the monolithic colonial reproduction that was created in the initial construction. The two characters commissioned for the new Kartinizaal I envisioned emerge from a space between past and present, compelling viewers to consider whose voices shape conversations about colonial histories and their enduring impact.

Kartinizaal Reconstruction “betweens, tyrannies, histories” 2025 // Textile piece — **Kartinizaal Reconstruction “betweens, tyrannies, histories” 2025 // Textile & Gunungan Installation** - In the 1990s, a group of architects and artists built a construction of a mythological boardroom of the VOC, inspired from an etching by Simon Fokke (ca. 1768). This site was named the VOC-zaal created for the University of Amsterdam in the Bushuis/Oost building. After decades of debate initiated by the faculty of Humanities, students and alumni, a decision was made to reclaim the room and unbuild the monolithic colonial that was created in the initial construction. Within this project I investigate the various imitation paintings hung on the walls, specifically the centerpiece entitled “The Castle of Batavia” (Andries Beekman, ca. 1661). The painting is renowned for expressing a colonial conscience, an imagery of Dutch naval officers, merchants, natives and slaves, depicted harmoniously existing together, the myth of the Batavian society. In a textile work in collaboration with Knitwear Lab Almere, the imagery materially dissolves the colonial fiction to reclaim the space of the painting, liquifying each character, and intervening and reinterpreting the landscape. The textile installation replaces the painting's original position on the mantel, reimagining the hall's landscape as a theatrical stage where fictions are actively employed for reclamation.

**Batik, Indigo Dye 2025 // Material Experiment** - This batik piece, created in Indonesia, utilizes traditional indigo dye and features a distinctive repetitive mark-making technique—four horizontal lines intersecting four vertical lines—passed down from my mother. While the technique traditionally aims for perfect proportion and alignment, my practice embraces the organic 'misalignment' that emerges, allowing the lines to flow into natural waves and movements. This intuitive process led to the spontaneous creation of imagery deeply connected to the surrounding landscape: the intricate layers of land and the patterns of leaves. The resulting composition, with its abstract, organic forms resembling topographic maps or geological strata, articulates a sense of interconnection and the subtle dialogues between inherited technique and personal, instinctual expression.

**Why is it always the dishes? 2025 // Storytelling** - A failing cleaning system forces four roommates into a house meeting in this whiney satirical play. The play explores the invisible aspects of labor while enacting the psychosocial dynamics of their shared life through shadow puppetry, sound, vocal dubbing, and video. This domestic microcosm serves as a framework, bringing the political back to the personal for a critical renewal of our understanding of the labor economy.

**Do beans need passports? 2025 // Storytelling** - Leading up to a flight to Lithuania on October 31st, 2024 I was in a rush to find out whether I could bring some beans in my cabin luggage. I had bought these beans from AH and germinated them five days before. In this research-oriented, documentary-style performance, we follow the story of finding the correct documentation papers and certificates that would enable a living, growing bean to travel from the Netherlands to Lithuania. Using the premise of this story, we employ a satirical ruse addressing the weight of racial-capital to confront the material limits of the exoticsized, racialised body. Enmixed with the live re-telling was handy-cam footage of each phase of the story from phone calls to the manufacturer, VALLE DEL SOL, to the smuggling of the bean through security.

**holding each other– a grave of seeds, latching onto, something here and gone // Collective research** - Between 2024-2025, I participated in a collective research process at Textielmuseum (TM) in collaboration with Sandim Mendez, Ayo, the TM team guided by Rolando Vasquez. The Leidsche Katoenmaatschappij, a textile company, amassed an archive—famously known as the Driessen Collection—of plants, recipes, techniques, and textiles between 1890 and 1954, procured by Louie André Driessen. This information was employed not only to copy and sell in European textile markets but also to infiltrate markets in the Dutch East Indies, West and Central Africa, and Suriname, with significant exports occurring primarily before WWI. To this day, the circulation of these imitation wax-printed textiles persists, leaving indelible traces that continue to affect present and future generations. https://www.textielmuseum.nl/en/news/new-collection-pieces-trace-the-silences-of-history

**“holding each other– a grave of seeds, latching onto, something here and gone” // Textile work** - My exploration of the Driessen collection began with a close examination of the vibrational qualities of cloth. I focused on check patterns, inspired by the machine weaves—held in place by the stampeding beats of the needles (tcha-tcha-tcha-tcha-tcha-tcha)—and the somewhat elusive, changing movement of hand weaves. Both are rhythms. I followed the genealogy first from Madra (India) then to Poleng (Bali) and Tartan (Zulu, South Africa). The culmination of my research is expressed in machine knitted textiles in collaboration with Textielmuseum. These pieces are shaped as three large triangular bodies connected to each other by 6 meters of knitted arms. Each triangle not only physically supports the others but also holds a distinct story, their collective entanglement articulating a shared history and entwined present. The stories are borrowed from the places traced in my research: a story of a grave of seeds, a story of capture, and a story of internalized loss. These narratives are inspired by real events during early 20th-century Dutch colonial occupation. Photographed by Josefina Eikenaar

teeth n' wings

Datum: 15-07-2023

Locatie: IJzerblock Studios

Scriptwriter, researcher and sound designer for queer reality web series "teeth n' wings" created by director Lili Ullrich. Through using nonlinear storylines, magic realism and a Rotterdam based cast of performers, a tv show has been created to capture the contemporary lives of vampires and angels and their survival here on earth.

Stichting Destination Unknown, Phillips Factory

Datum: 01-07-2023 t/m 02-10-2023

Locatie: Phillips Factory, Bredeweg 10

The former Philips factory in Roermond has been made available by Matzinger Real Estate to serve as a workshop for artists during the months of July, August and September. During this working period, professionals from the field were invited to give workshops and to enter into dialogue with the participating artists. The work period is traditionally concluded with an exhibition weekend.

https://www.destinationunknown.nu/du2023/

Datum: 01-09-2022 t/m 23-09-2023

Locatie: Heemraadsingel

In samenwerking met: Flow Symposium

A public performance between two immigrants about privileges. Ratri Notosudirdjo & Carlos Salazar-Lermont combine forces to create an intervention that will create a virtual connection to Chicago and Rotterdam. This will be part of the Flow Symposium, a performance festival with symposiums and workshops for professional artists.

https://www.flowsymposium.org/

DED BRUNCH Series

Datum: 04-06-2022

A Pop-up food series where topics surrounding death are stimulated through the things we eat. The first edition started at IJzerblock curated and cooked with Runa Ong. There have been an accumulation of different meanings attributed to the term "dead" such as deadline, undead, dead or alive, deadass, dead set, dead name and the list grows. These brunches are organised to unpack our cultural humour and anxieties surrounding 'the dead' things in our lives. Upcoming pop-up in October!

Wunderplatz X Skills Worm

Datum: 01-06-2022 t/m 31-12-2022

3 presentation moments will be developed under the Wunderplatz X Skills residency at Worm (Facilitated by Henrietta Muller). These moments will be spread out through the year 2022 and will focus on themes of sound, the body and its geogaphy, interventions, performance and street busking.

Performance Database

Datum: 01-06-2022 t/m 29-12-2022

The database meant to be open to all bodies of people with all levels of experiences interested in performing. You sign up by simply sending your email address and every 3-4 weeks members will get an elegantly laid out newsletter updating them on upcoming performances, workshops and experiments that have vacancy. Some are paid gigs, some need volunteers and give opportunities to those who are not yet fully stepped into performance art but are interested.

Hamburger Community of Art

Datum: 01-03-2022 t/m 01-03-2023

Locatie: Roodkapje

A year-long research about narrative identity, focusing on narratives in relation to diaspora and migration, is inspired by the close realities of second and third-generation immigrants in her family, friends and co-workers. Looking internally and questioning notions of Indonesianness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mL63pBNBwK8

wet dreamzzz

Datum: 15-12-2021

wet dreamzZz is a performance collective influenced by magic realism, surrealism and immersivity. The collective consists of Ratri Notosudirdjo, Magdalena Petrova and Lili Ullrich. Through wet dreamzZz we explore queering archetypes, deconstructing perceptions of femininity and exploring identity through gentle, mythical creatures and psychic disturbances. These alter egos exist in a hypnagogic state and transcend through explorations of our traumas, visions, delusions and hallucinations.

https://www.instagram.com/wet_dr3amzzz/

Waterfalls & Sparring Scars

Datum: 01-07-2021 t/m 31-12-2022

Waterfalls & Sparring Scars is a year long workshop first created during the COVID-19 pandemic. The project mixes performance and workshop to intertwine the participant's experience of storytelling. In this space we center diasporic narratives and try to breakdown this word and expand it through methods of writing and visualization exercises. The aim is to re-present a map that is related by the close paradigms intimate migrant experiences.

Deze kunstenaar heeft nog geen toekenningen.