In the beginning of March, Yogyakarta set a state of emergency. Practically, there was not much we could do outside the house. At that time, my collective, Gegerboyo, was finishing a project titled “International Mural by Mail” which was one of the projects from a gallery in Portland, Oregon, United States of America. When we were working on that mural, we stayed at Kedai Kebun Forum for three days.There were two papers that were big enough, it was about 5 m x 2.5 m. One of them had been drawn by a Portland artist that we responded afterwards. On the other hand, the other paper was started by Gegerboyo and would be responded to by the Portland artist. Unfortunately, the project had to be stopped as the situation got worse. We are still waiting for the update about this project.
By considering this situation, Gegerboyo got an idea to create an artwork which responded to the situation in the society. We used Whatsapp and email to share news, collected data and pictures. We planned to make ketoprak* in a Gif format.
In the last June, Gegerboyo started to do physical meetings actively, made a regular schedule every Tuesday, gathered and chilled together but still considered the covid-19 protocols, from that moment we started to draw together. We chose this method in order to uplift our sense of drawing (together) which was suddenly stopped because of this situation. Each of us got a sheet of paper. After we drew, we passed the paper to each other. It was the usual method that Gegerboyo had, we gave a response to each other, it went like a “ketoprak” performance where the actors responded to each other.
*Ketoprak is a type of art performance which presents a group of characters who speak in a local language. Sometimes, in a dialog they talk about a satire for the government, women issue, environment, etc.
CEMETI 