Mapping Yogya from below : 4 interview with street artists

With ILP's Asiik City cross-cultural collaborations now in full swing, we thought we would share this project ILP artists and friends Julia Dehm and Teishan Ahearne (both hailing from Melbourne) did while visiting Yogyakarta earlier this year.

Interested in collaboratively ‘mapping’ alternate futures based on community control, Julia and Teishan wanted to investigate how street artists in Yogya created, navigate and understood their city through street art.

They explained the idea behind the project in a call-out to street artists, posted at Survive! Garage in Yogyakarta:

"Subcultural expression such as street art and community spaces are the unrecognised heart beat of cities like Yogya. Official or institutional maps of Yogya present a ‘top-down’ picture of the city, which ignores the lives of people living here, their passions, their artistic expressions, their interactions and the ways communities are formed. We are interested in ‘mapping’ Yogya from the ‘bottom-up’ or grassroots - mapping the artistic expressions and community interactions which give life to the city."

The project culminated in a zine 'Mapping Yogya From Below: 4 Interviews with Street Artists' and a photographic exhibition at Survive! Garage.

Of course, any attempt to definitively 'map' street art is doomed to fail, as Julia and Teishan noted

"These then are maps not seen from the godly view of a satellite, but from below – within and between our memories and social relations. The kind of maps that can only be made together and which will never be finished."