© Elisabeth Ida from the series 'Hijabers'

Tell us about your approach to photography/how it all started. What are your memories of your first shots? How did your interest in photography come about?

Elisabeth Ida (EI): I already did photography before I came to Belgium, but not intentionally to make art works. During the time I was studying Mechanical Engineering in Indonesia and specializing in metallurgy, I went out to photograph in local foundries - factories that produce metal castings. There was something very beautiful yet frightening, installation-like about these places with their big cupolas (containers were they melt metal); the colors of melting metals, its smell, and at the same time the very poor work safety where many labors hadn’t even shoes on. It very much intrigued me. When I went there to photograph during my internship, I became really interested in photography. Then I decided to move to Belgium and study art. I chose photography in KASK Ghent (Royal Academy of Fine Arts). In the first year we were trained to photograph according to the style of ‘le moment décisif’ but I was always late in capturing those moments. I found my joy when I was photographing things that were more static, like landscapes or interiors. Actually, I was already acquainted with photography earlier because my mother had a small photo studio at home. She made portraits, mostly for official use, like passport photos. I helped her in the darkroom since I was six but I didn’t get at all what photography was about back then. It was more something practical, not yet art.

In May 2015 your first book Inside Embassies was published by Art Paper Editions. Images of sterile, uninhabited meeting rooms, waiting areas and anonymous corridors show another side of diplomacy. How did the idea occur to start this project? Did it evolve in a way you expected?

EI: I started Inside Embassies in 2008-2009 as a final project to obtain a bachelor degree at the KASK in Ghent. When I was applying for the visa to Belgium, I went to the Belgian consulate in Jakarta; a small office with the king and queen’s picture on the wall. This was very interesting since it provoked me to imagine how an Indonesian consulate or embassy office looks like. Embassy offices are like countries in another country. They have their own authority and they like to show their identity in the host country. The issue of identity has always been important to me because of my roots and the fact that I am a migrant. To be honest I expected to see more luxurious places, regarding them as the place of a country’s representative. But what I saw were offices. They are really offices and sometimes look rather gauche. Professor Sven Biscop wrote a beautiful text about this work. This book is selected by KALEID as one of the best books by European based artists this year.

© Elisabeth Ida fro mthe series 'Inside Embassies'

Can you tell us a bit more about Home (2010), your final project for your master degree at KASK?

EI: I started to photograph interiors because I was attracted to static things and I also liked how people choose the things that make of a house, a home. It is really about identity again, in a way just like Inside Embassies because these are also interiors that I was shooting. I started Home by challenging myself to make a series without having to go too far. It became an anthropological look on our modern life. I strive to make anti-exotic images rather than to photograph all the novelty of exotic places and people. With Home I wanted to look more carefully and find a way to respect the stuff or things in my surroundings and the people who inhabit the spaces. We choose stuff to make our house a home, but at a certain point we are not aware of that stuff anymore because we are too much used to them. The English anthropologist Daniel Miller called it the humility of things. It became very much interesting to photograph the traces or results of actions instead of the actions themselves. The owners of the houses I photographed were people I knew quite well. They would accept me as a guest and in a way their home could have been my home too. I recently read a really interesting book by the Belgian philosopher Patricia De Martelaere. She said that a home is a place where you can get bored in and see the banality of things, while when you’re not at home everything is interesting and you’re very alert about things – like during traveling; here we can find the link with Miller’s ideas. We also can’t really imagine it being the other way around, like a situation without a home where you don’t belong to any place or any person; think about the homeless and most recent refugees. I think home, more than a notion of place, is about people and feelings.

© Elisabeth Ida from the series 'Home'

You once stated that photography as a medium can be used to promote more equality between cultures. In Hijabers (2014), beautiful Arabic and Indonesian women with colorful head scarfs pose in front of the camera. Who are these women? What inspired you to photograph them?

EI: Photography, as so many other mediums, is a tool that you can use in accordance to your mission in life or what you aim to do. I’m not sure if it is a kind of ethical or political responsibility that I believe we, or let’s say I, have to fulfill as a human being, namely, to care about our fellow humans. Photography can be used to denigrate people or a culture, to present things and people as exotic in terms of “us” and “them”, by showing “otherness”. I am truly against it and therefore I strive to make anti-exotic images.

About Hijabers, I come from Indonesia, the country with the biggest Islamic population in the world. Nowadays the trend is to wear a Hijab. There are many Hijabers clubs. But don’t get it wrong because this is not only about religion. It is so much more about power and economic wealth. If you cannot afford it, then you will not be able to wear those scarfs and the whole outfit because they can be really expensive. It is not just worn as clothing. It can really be a status symbol. These clothes strengthen their identity of power. The Arabic women I photographed are working young women. It was near the Art Foundation where I did an internship, close to Dubai. I also photographed Indonesian women and they were mostly ‘wife of’, for example, wife of a mayor or wife of a business man. Again, it really is a show of economic power. But if you compare them to Arabic women, you will notice this difference. In Saudi Arabia women are not even allowed to drive a car or to work. They are very restricted in going out. But women in the United Arabic Emirates may work and may drive cars. In contrast, the Indonesian women I photographed don’t really work in terms of getting an income but they are very busy as ‘wife of’. They have a lot of activities going on and are called ‘sosialita’. It is also about identity again.

© Elisabeth Ida from the series 'Hijabers'

Joachim Naudts talked about your work, depicting you as trying to be a historian, political commentator and artist, all at the same time. Do you feel he is right?

EI: It was an enriching and very interesting collaboration with Joachim Naudts. He is very bright and concentrated. An organization called ‘Partisipasi Indonesia’ asked him to curate my work, which was exhibited in Jakarta in December last year. It was a group exhibition for the Human Rights Day and the organizers were mostly young people who work to promote and defend human rights and democracy by using art and culture. They collaborated with the Indonesian National Commission on Human Rights and were supported by some other organizations such as Movies That Matter, a big festival of Amnesty International in the Netherlands. In this exhibition I was invited to show my work about the Indonesian genocide that started in 1965. Joachim had curated an exhibition for the Fotomuseum in Antwerp about power and freedom, which showed his interest in political themes. We talked about my work and decided how to display it. He also wrote a text. In some moments I indeed felt a bit like an historian or a political commentator but it had to do with my research. I do a lot of research in making my series because I want to create art works that bear an intellectual responsibility. The 1965 genocide is very historical and so it did feel like I was being a semi- or pseudo-historian but I was aware of that. I said to Joachim that I did not try to be anything other than an artist. But it’s true that I did a serious research and discussed about it with many people, including historians, scholars, political analysts and journalists, other artists and of course the survivors of the tragedy as my first source. This work is a collaboration. Getting as much input as possible, I think, was very helpful in making this series, which I am still continuing to work on.

© Elisabeth Ida from the series 'Supervivere'

Photographic and film images were used by the Indonesian New Order regime after the 1965-6 mega pogrom to brainwash and reconstruct important pieces of history. Being a documentary photographer, how do you approach this?

EI: In this respect, there are two things we can talk about, namely, archives and new photographs. I use both. Apart from photographs, I also make videos. So far I’ve already made documentary photography series, video interviews and other video work, also an installation. I named the project (De/Re)Construction thanks to Joachim. Construction, deconstruction and reconstruction all play a significant role in the method in which I create, exhibit and frame the works I have made and am still making. I photographed and interviewed Indonesian exiles living in Western Europe. They are people who were sent out in the sixties to study or work abroad. They were usually assigned by the Indonesian government to partner of befriend other countries. Most went to China and the Soviet Union but East Germany and Cuba were also common destinations. Indonesia, at that time, had the biggest non-ruling communist party in the world. But they were crushed in 1965 and then communism and Marxism were banned up to today. There are many archive images but I don’t really use them as a role. I process them more as data and material. For example, the installation I made is based on a propaganda film, which my generation was obliged to watch once in a year from age 7 to 18. No wonder that these people uniformly consider communism as the most evil of all, and the slaughter of communists was “supposed to happen”.

© Elisabeth Ida from the series 'Supervivere'

The video interviews I made are very much based on photography. I never studied film or anything so I often shoot from a photographical point of view. Next to the portraits, I’ve also made images of interiors of the exiles’ houses. In a way this overlaps with my Home series.

What do you think about photography in the era of digital and social networking? How do you see the future of photography evolve?

EI: Have you got any idea how many photos being uploaded on Facebook these days? 200.000 images per minute! Now we’re only talking about Facebook but we shouldn’t forget about all other social media channels such as Instagram, Flickr or Twitter. I think of it as a phenomenon of capitalism where things are mass produced as it promotes mass consumer culture. Even though we cannot ignore the downside of it all, including the effects for the environment because of the production of photographic gadgets and its waste for example, I do want to approach it in a positive way because it also implies a democratization of photography. People find a way to express themselves instantly. It’s a simple fact that we do live in a capitalistic era with its excessiveness of everything. The technological advances are used to merely gain more profit. They make mass production for the mass, which is mostly of lower quality. But then they also make exclusive products for people who want to distinguish themselves from the mass. In both cases the capitalist gets the profit. You may see it much less in Belgium but in countries like Indonesia a smartphone has become a must. It is common to see younger people, even older ones, with two or three smartphones on them. Sometimes also kids. Imagine how many pictures that are taken today of almost every possible thing. We were talking about quantity but people tend to forget quality. Nowadays people think they can photograph or that they can become a photographer because they think they make nice profile pictures. But then again there are always images of quality, images that are thoroughly thought about and a result of serious practices. Thank God we still have art. This is how art distinguishes itself from this mess

© Elisabeth Ida from the series 'Home'

Do you have any preferences in terms of cameras and format?

EI: Not really, no. I’ve worked with various types of cameras and formats. Right now I’m working on a project that involves video compilation, which is also part of (De/Re)Construction. They are very short interviews with Indonesian youngsters wherein I pose one open question, namely: What crosses your mind when you hear the word ‘communist’? In Indonesia communism is still forbidden; it has been since the tragedy that happened in 1965-66. The New Order regime and its successors use violence to maintain their power. Power that was gained by slaughtering millions of people. Up to today, communism is repressively propagated as the most evil of all by high rank officials, military generals and those in power. But I’m interested in hearing from the youngsters themselves. For this video compilation that I am working on right now, I use a smartphone. For me a camera is a tool. In this case it is a matter of choosing which type of camera suits best for my project. Of course there are also photographers who stick with one type of camera, but I like the freedom to choose different formats.

© Elisabeth Ida, (De/Re)Construction

Is there any contemporary artist, photographer or writer, even if young and emerging, who influenced you in some way?

EI: A lot of them are difficult to mention directly because I am influenced by so many things that I see or hear. And they aren’t necessarily artists. Within photography, I am much more into documentary, hence big names such as Bernd and Hilla Becher, Thomas Struth, Walker Evans and Gary Winogrand are absolutely interesting, but there are really many more. Closer to home, my mentors Dirk Braeckman and Jan Kempenaers have been a great support and inspiration, and another best Belgian photographer is definitely Geert Goiris. I also love Walter Swennen’s works, which I got to know from Hans Theys. One of the most brilliant and highly intelligent artists with an amazing dedication to human rights is Joshua Oppenheimer. You can read his article in The Guardian about why today’s global warming has roots in Indonesia’s genocidal past; such an eye-opener that shows that the Indonesia’s ’65 genocide is never only about Indonesia or Indonesians, it has such a tremendous global impact which most people aren’t well aware or informed of.

What are the projects that you are working on now and do you have any plans for the future?

EI: I’m continuing (De/Re)Construction by experimenting with different media and the next plan is to publish a book. Actually, it was to be published in December ’15 along with the exhibition in Jakarta, Rekoleksi Memori, which took the form of a temporary museum. Joachim curated my work there. We were going to publish a photo book that included historical materials, texts and letters from exiles, but then decided to postpone it because I wanted to take more pictures. There are still other Indonesian exiles who I want to visit and photograph. I already photographed ten people since. There are still quite a number of them in Western Europe. It is not that they are with too few but they are often very old and most of them do not want to be exposed. They are still afraid of the Indonesian government and the military. The exhibition had probably five thousands of visitors in only five days and it was very well covered in the Indonesian media and abroad like the BBC. Now other exiles can look at my photographs and get an idea of what I am trying to do. They are more open when I meet them. Some said that they also wanted to be photographed. Thus, the plan is to photograph more exiles, along with those who already returned to Indonesia. I also want to further explore the effects of brainwash on the Indonesian youngsters. It is going to be a longer project than first planned and more people will get involved in it.

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LINKS
Elisabeth Ida 
Belgium