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Dreams Beyond Precious Ruins
Awarded The ‘Graphic communication design as...” Award

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History is not truth. Stories are not lies.

This project is for Indonesian women to address the absence of women in the canonised history of their country. Archival materials are collected from various institutions and treated as prompts to co-create a speculative history of what might have transpired beyond the archive. These multimedia narrative entries circulate through serial publishing. This project invites the reader to question the production of canonised historical narratives.

Girls Talk

An ongoing project building on the enquiry of why ordinary women of Indonesia (and turns out, most of the world) are so scarcely documented in conventional museum archives. This project utilizes participatory design, inviting women to archive their wisdom and lived experience. This project relies heavily on visual languages that are mostly seen as kitschy and girly, like collaging and doodling.

In the beginning...

This project explores the lineage and evolution of Indonesian women's portrayal over 100 years. Taking inspiration from vandalism in the urban fabric that could be peeled back to reveal the history of the city, the same photo of an Indonesian woman was defaced 100 times. Each layer is meant to portray each year that passed between the photo being taken and this project’s starting year. What comes out of it, surprisingly, is not 100 different portrayals of Indonesian women. Rather, it shows the gaps in Indonesian women’s history that hinder this project from depicting 100 years of advancement.

This project then progressed into an investigation of Indonesian women as an identity. It explored the idea through scans, with the idea that as identities evolve, it erases the previous identity to the point that there is no “original” or “copies”. Instead, it embraces the idea of copies as originals.

Productivity and Labor
(in collaboration with Cecilia Lin and Stella Jang)

Starting with conversations about what is considered productive in a capitalistic setting, this project explores the idea of fitting into a capitalistic mould through tactile posters and materials.

Jo March’s Monologue

This project intends to translate the emotions conveyed by Saoirse Ronan’s performance of Jo March in the movie Little Women, directed by Greta Gerwig (2019). The monologue has an interesting contrast between the intensity of the emotions and the actual volume of her voice as she spoke. It held a lot of weight, yet was delivered with a soft voice. I wanted to capture that feeling in a publication filled with only text. Using typography to convey these feelings of intensity. The format of a long concertina is used to invoke a sense of overwhelm within the reader, having the publication spill, and being unable to hold it, just like how Jo March was unable to hold all of these feelings in.

© CARGO TEST 2027

Myra Salsabila Alwi

Graphic Designer