JANJI MATOGU – A design exploration into spaces of remembering and forgetting

JANJI MATOGU is a design project that explores the legacy of colonial heritage by looking at how personal and collective histories are connected. My investigation begins with the story of my great-great-grandfather, who was a Christian missionary in North Sumatra from 1894 to 1933. Departing from the archival family records and following the traces of my great-great-grandfather in time and place, the project is a design exploration into spaces of remembering and forgetting. It looks at the role of silence(s) and absence(s) in shaping archives and shared histories, and how these are linked to our political and cultural contexts. Are archives places of remembering or rather of forgetting? Does their content tell the truth or just one’s story? Whose story? What was left out? What is invisible, forgotten, obscured, or lost in amnesia?

In experimenting with different modes of storytelling, combining documentation and lived experiences, the project challenges conventional archival practices. It creates space for entangled histories to unfold, moving between past and present, between here and there, between the imaginary and the documentary. It asks:

What if memory, rather than being fixed in time, were understood as something that reverberates across time, making history a continuous and participatory process rather than a distant past?

Janji Matogu is a small village near Porsea on Sumatra. I was told that Janji translates to promise, and Matogu is similar to teguh or kuat and translates to strong – the land of the strong promise.

At the heart of this project’s work has been a field trip to Sumatra (Indonesia). I visited the land where my great-great-grandfather was active over a century ago in Janji Matogu (near Porsea) and Ambarita (on Samosir Island) in the Toba Batak region. I set out to learn about my family history, investigate the traces and impacts my great-great-grandfather left behind, and engage with the complexities of colonial entanglements through artistic, dialogical, and listening practices.

Whenever I asked the people in Janji Matogu about my great-great-grandfather, the story always began with a tree. I encountered different stories, different versions, and different truths. In one version, he planted mango trees where he first set foot upon his arrival, and these trees still stand today, serving as silent monuments to his presence, framing the church. In another version, the mango tree he planted had already been cut down. Yet another story speaks of him bringing seeds of the mindi tree. Today, in the Batak region, this tree is known as Hau Resse, named after my great-great-grandfather, Heinrich Reitze. The seeds of the mindi tree, carried by birds, have spread throughout the region, and now the tree can be found everywhere.

Field work, as part of my design process, served as a method to engage with history as a living, relational presence in a translocal context. This local and relational approach to design explores how a practice can grow from and respond to a specific place and its many layers of history.

In Janji Matogu, I found that history is often passed down through oral storytelling, reinterpreted and reshaped across generations. Listening to stories about my great-great-grandfather’s arrival, I came to see the past as both real and imagined, present and distant, tangible and abstract, documented and embodied.

I also found that history is not only transmitted through the stories but through the ways of walking, sitting, dressing, talking, singing, dancing, eating, connecting, and greeting.

It passed body to body over the years. In the same way, the history of a place is transmitted through the landscape, the soil, the plants, the buildings, the architecture, and the human-made objects.

My translocal exploration of colonial history and the archival logic allowed me to see not only what has been lost or deliberately erased, but also what can be gained by reactivating overlooked knowledge and hidden experiences. Traditionally, archives have been treated as fixed collections of documents and institutional records, often assumed to be neutral and objective (Stoler, 2009). This is problematic as many of the environmental and social issues we face today are rooted in societal structures shaped by unequal power dynamics, reinforced by the way history has been told and recorded. To support a culture of remembrance that challenges these patterns and invites new understandings of the world and its histories, we need to learn new ways of telling stories (Tsing, 2022).

Storytelling is a way of understanding and connecting with others. It helps us make sense of the world, shapes the stories we live by, and opens up space to imagine new possibilities. The outcome of this project is a design process that explores how we can learn to craft new and alternate stories that resist dominant narratives and knowledge systems.

By tracing silences in my family history and the impacts of my great-great-grandfather’s missionary activities, my design work offers a personal perspective on colonial entanglements and encourages reflection on the relational ethics of historical truth(s). Through this autoethnographic and place-based approach to design, I translate my lived experience into language, not as a neutral report, but as a crafted, audio-visual narrative that conveys forgotten memories, lived experiences, and emotional connection. The story is not only personal; it becomes a mirror that reflects cultural, historical, and systemic dimensions. It seeks to write a difference into public accounts by moving toward a more inclusive and expansive understanding of history, reaching beyond traditional archival practices.

This design practice carries an inherent tension between what is known (what is) and what is becoming (what if). In a transformative way, the project wants to contribute to a culture of remembrance that actively shapes the present and challenges thought patterns that persist today to prevent a repetition of historical power imbalances. Instead, it aims to inspire new ways and practices of historical engagement, moving towards restorative change.

Memory seems to echo through times, forming a living connection between the past and the present, the present and the future, the past and the future.

References

Stoler, A.L., 2009. Along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400835478

Tsing, A.L., Bazzul, J. (2022). A Feral Atlas for the Anthropocene: An Interview with Anna L. Tsing. In: Wallace, M.F.G., Bazzul, J., Higgins, M., Tolbert, S. (eds) Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene. Palgrave Studies in Education and the Environment. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79622-8_19