Heritage Corner

I visited TEFAF 2019 yesterday in Maastricht. TEFAF stands for the European Fine Art Fair. I was speechless to see such high quality and rarely art works from all over the world. It was so fascinating to think of capability of humankind to create beautiful stuff beyond believe. A lot of details to observe and a lot of stories behind to find out. TEFAF was a spiritual journey for me.  In one of the exhibition corners, my eyes catched a very interesting information. The Art Loss Register (ALR) . It is a database about half million art objects that are stolen, missing and looted, as well as those subject to title disputes, freezing orders and financial liens, and within permanent collections. The database also includes details of works that have been reported with authenticity issues by police and foremost experts (resource: ALR brochure). This organization (or company) was founded in 1990 in England. Their service basically are three things: Register, Search and Recover. W...

Yesterday I attended a seminar of Studio Shared Heritage, a cooperation between ITB (Bandung Institute of Technology)  and TU Delft. It is a three years program to provide opportunities for students to exercise about shared heritage projects in both Indonesia and Netherlands. They have just finished the first batch with a case study of the Art Deco City of Bandung in Indonesia. Yesterday, the students presented the ideas covering various subjects from adaptive reuse to climate issues. I think their ideas are amusing since these young scholars are not burden with realistic problems of bureaucracy and typical challenges for heritage projects in Indonesia.  Some of them have brilliant ideas to transform densed kampung behind Braga Street into vertical kampung with bamboo materials. Other student will transform colonial buildings into housing of the kampung people to solve density problems. The student didn't understand why the kampung is so densed while many colonial ...

The theme of Heritage Day 18 April this year is Rural Heritage. I couldn't agree more with this theme since I have seen myself how heritage can play an important role in rural economic social cultural development in Temanggung. Spedagi with its Pasar Papringan in Temanggung so far is the best practice that has been surviving indepedently without subsidies. Outsiders are simply taking roles as triggers but the main actors are local people. I think it is one of the few cases in Indonesia and in the world in general.  Close to home is a suburb area along the Gein River where I often bike or walk. The farm Anna Haen is transformed into restaurant and accommodation facilities because the farm doesn't provide adequate income anymore. It also offers cooking workshops, boat trips and promotes local farm products. I observed from the beginning several years ago when the restaurant only opened at weekends for breakfast and lunch. Now, they are open every single day until 20.00....