In the latest episode of Regional Assembly's Conversations with the Assembly Selena de Carvalho and Arie Syarifuddin join forces in a soul-moving conversation about the potential of big and long and radical creative acts seeding from very humble grounds—from lutruwita to Jatiwangi!

Selena de Carvalho (PhD) is an inter-disciplinary artist, designer, maker and risk taker of settler, refugee and migrant heritage based in lutruwrita/Tasmania- ‘Australia’. Selena purposefully connects creativity in a (post) activist context amplifying the ecological imagination through practicing relational ethos. Selena views her creative work as a cultural response – ability. Throughout this practice she seeks out materials and environments that have weathered various forms of frontline disturbance, with-nessing, witnessing and interpreting global warming and its local affects.

Arie Syarifuddin (1985, Indonesia) is also known as Alghorie. Affiliated as an artist, curator, cultural producer, designer, and director of artist in residency department to the artist initiative; Jatiwangi Art Factory in the village of Jatiwangi in West Java, which is Indonesia’s biggest roof-tile manufacturing centre. Established in 2005, Jatiwangi art Factory (JaF) is a community that embraces contemporary arts and cultural practices as parts of the local life discourse in a rural area. Redesigning; hacking; giving values and dignity to the ordinary things; negotiation between fiction, dreams, reality, everyday life; and the intersection of historical reading is the most inclination of Arie’s works.

Arie Syarifuddin: Jatiwangi itself is like the industrial area of clay roof tiles for 600 years, nothing for the young people to stay there. If there was not the Jatiwangi Art Factory I could go to the big city to look for many possibilities, but since then, I have the ability to stay in my place and play.

Selena De Carvalho: I had another look through the website at the one history of the Jatawangi Art Factory is really interesting. From that humble beginning of let’s host music and have ten families as our family partners to know very deeply, to now having many many villages that are also in that constellation. When you talk about having an art space and it allowing you to stay where you live and have a creative outlet, career, network, global network, local network, there’s something beautiful in that place based way of making and being and living. That’s super exciting for me to hear about.