
Stories of Wounds and Wonders: how to warm our hearts and keep our heads cool
Stories of Wounds and Wonder is a colorful Xeroxed publication comprising texts and a series of children’s stories by art researcher and pedagogue Nuraini Juliastuti. Recently the book, which was commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, was launched at Framer Framed during a day of workshops, music arrangements, a radio show and collective conversations
My typical Dutch wintery Saturday was warmed by the imagination sparked by an empowering experience. The second floor of the exhibition space of Framer Framed was taken over by a tight-knit community of artists, researchers, art students, and children who joined to launch artist and researcher Nuraini Juliastuti’s new publication The Stories of Wounds and Wonders (2024).
The publication marks the end of a two-year artistic research project commissioned by If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to be part of Your Revolution as part of Edition IX of the biennial programme, titled Bodies and Technologies (2022–23). Stemming from the research Juliastuti conducted on radical pedagogy and community building for her postdoctoral fellowship at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, the resulting book is a colorful Xeroxed publication comprising texts and notes on radical pedagogy and a series of children’s stories about several animal characters and their adventures. The underlining narrative of the stories is a woman-led world of struggles for freedom, collective kinship, and practices of care.
To launch the publication, curator Sara Giannini and member of the Indonesian art collective ruangrupa, Reza Afisina facilitated a whole day of events, starting from a children’s workshop, passing through music arrangements by Cempaka, a radio show and a collective conversation with fellow performers Mercedes Azpilicueta, Astrit Ismaili, and Ratu R. Saraswati, ending with a heartfelt conversation about anticolonial struggles with Palestinian artist and researcher Yazan Khalili. The afternoon was broadcast on Palestinian collective radio, Radio Alhara, and the launch was also accompanied by a small exhibition titled the Display Companion, exposing Juliastuti’s research in a mesmerizing Wunderkammer-styled installation of video, textiles, photos, and publications.


Together with Khalili and Juliastuti, I have been part of a five-year research project at the University of Amsterdam on art and institutionalism, titled IMAGINART*, analyzing different forms of art infrastructures and their embeddedness with post-socialist, neoliberal, and postcolonial states, such as those of Indonesia and Palestine. We have framed colonization from different points of view, and together, we have discussed how theory can foster a further reflection on knowledge production. Our understanding of postcolonial theory brings us to identify different strands of thought, such as Black Feminism or Edward Said’s critical theory. Confronting these strands also fostered a transcultural acknowledgment of how intellectual and artistic struggles united us in our hopes and desires for the future.
In particular, Juliastuti’s experience and her research cover a span of time that stretches from the Freedom Fighters during the ‘New Order’ Regime (1968 -1998) run by authoritarian leader Suharto in Post-Independent Indonesia to the rural landscapes of Post-Authoritarian Indonesia (1998-today). Her rationale behind the book was mentioned in her answer to one of Khalili’s questions during the final conversation of the day, when Juliastuti explained how, in Post-authoritarian Indonesia, it wasn’t clear when reformation ended. Still, it was clear that a particular form of democracy had killed an entire generation of intellectuals. Working with this burden entailed a necessary praxis that embodied the unknown and forged it into a new form of knowledge that could be passed on to future generations. Not knowing for Juliastuti is not a lack, but a challenge to the status quo. Following Black Feminist Audre Lorde’s writings, for Juliastuti to not know is to learn how to master the master’s tools (Lorde 2003).
Juliastuti’s research focused on the historical legacies and contemporary political ties among the informal artist and community-led practices in Indonesia. In the late 1990s, after the end of the ‘New Order’ Regime, as a member of the art collective KUNCI Study Forum & Collective, Juliastuti contributed to the many voices who challenged the status quo, taking into their hands the narrative and aiming to change the nature of Indonesian artistic and cultural production. Fellow artists, such as the directors of documenta fifteen, ruangrupa, and many others, looked to creating spaces for collaboration and collectivization that helped the Indonesian community recognize itself as empowered and capable of telling its own story about indigenous knowledge, traditional arts, artisanry, and culture, ‘overturning’ as Black Feminist SIyvia Wynter puts it, the sense of identity from ‘created human beings into human beings who create.’ (Wynter 2013, p 33) .


The radio show at the event followed along these lines, borrowing the animal’s tongue to tell different stories about different forms of struggle and emancipation. Interpreters of these voices were Azpilicueta, Ismaili, and Saraswati. In a joint conversation chaired by Giannini and Afisina, the performers explained how they felt empowered by the emotions and attitudes that were embedded in the text. These words, such as marginalization, tracing ancestors, migration, disconnection, occupation, fight against colonization, roots, weaving, protection, and the interconnection between animals, nature, and humans, when tied together, map empowering emotions voiced by the tongues of the animals.
During the radio show, I traveled into the world those words described. Called a Display companion, the Wunderkammer-like exhibition space upon entrance embraced you with a large table full of drawings, colored pens and paper, tubes of glue, and pairs of scissors randomly laid out. Juliastuti held a workshop for children earlier that day as part of the program. Children had the chance to build their storybooks, and many of their drawings had been left behind. The children had drawn animals, natural settings, and different kinds of objects the drawn characters seemed to be handling. It was a visual extension of the imaginary world of Stories of Wounds and Wonder, where mesmerizing animals cross natural landscapes in search of their next adventure. As I looked around, I felt immersed in a tactile sensation of kindness, represented by the many objects Juliastuti was inviting us to observe: textile production from rural communities, a documentary by the Gecko Project and Mongabay, titled Our Mothers Land (2020), following Febriana Firdaus in her investigation of women activists in rural communities. Looking up, one could glimpse at the original drawings of the book hanging from the ceiling. The series of printed photos brought you to where the characters were conceived and what inspired them: The Pegesegan School in Wintaos village in Yogyakarta, the trip to Lakoat Kujawas in Mollo, on Timor Island, a borrowed collection of Indonesian children’s books from Leiden University, a collection of categorized publications with books of children stories, theory, philosophy, and critical literature. In our digital world, the materiality of these objects becomes a precious opportunity that today’s society doesn’t often offer.

Finally, my attention was caught by a photocopier, reminding me of that D.I.Y., xeroxed world of fellow comrades I tend to forget about in the material abstraction of everyday life. This ready-to-use object further fostered the idea that rather than an exposition, this open archive of thoughts, research, and maps was an open invitation to use Juliastuti’s tools and tell your own story. The idea of taking home a complied photocopied version of a book – you had the chance to photocopy yourself – is also an act of kinship.
The space invited you to sit and enjoy the books by reading them in a small lounge in front of a beautiful window, looking out to the brownstone buildings of Amsterdam Oost. After I sat on one of the two armchairs and briefly read through children’s stories of Timor Island, I realized while looking out the window that the Dutch capital’s buzzing noises had suddenly stopped. The only tunes that resounded in my head were the ones played by Cempaka from her collection of 1960s beach songs by Indonesian pop songwriters that told us about faraway worlds, beaches, struggles for freedom, and social spaces filled with livelihood.
Citing Egyptian writer Haitham El-Wardany’s recent publication on Arabic fables, Ma la yumkin islahuh [What Cannot be Fixed] (2020), claims that when animals speak, humans listen, Khalili, in their final conversation, questioned Juliastuti about parenthood. By borrowing animals’ tongues, claims Khalili, the stories are painful acts of rebellion. Although voicing the animals with stories gives you the freedom to tell those stories without fear, you still fear that what is told could be used against you. As a parent and an academic, Juliastuti remarked how storytelling was not just about collecting stories, but it was about how the stories are told and written and, most importantly, who wrote those stories. She reminded us of how the communities she had worked with for her research project, The Commons Museum, taught themselves to write so they could preserve collective ownership of their future. Khalili formulated this act by calling it one of a cross-generational wisdom of knowledge that protects future generations from oblivion.
Although I could not help but challenge myself and question my own role in shaping future generations, I took an image home with me: Puteri, the rat who traveled across Indonesia collecting stories, tells Bello, the stray mixed breed of Balinese Kintamani and Timorese dog, that to protect himself, he needed to keep his heart warm and his head cold. The dullness of a typical Dutch wintery Saturday afternoon warmed our hearts under the Indonesian sun, keeping our heads cool.
*Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation of ASCA – Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam
The book Stories of Wounds and Wonders was launched on February 17 at Framer Framed
Lorde, Audre. 2003. ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader 25: 27.
Wynter, Sylvia. 2013. ‘Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is like to Be “Black”’. In National Identities and Socio-Political Changes in Latin America, 30–66. Routledge.
Aria Spinelli
is visiting scholar at ASCA, Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam