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Ratri Notosudirdjo (1994) is an artist, storyteller, and performer. She creates stories about people from the past and the present, inspired by Wayang Kulit, i.e. traditional Indonesian shadow puppetry. Notosudirdjo’s stories are based on themes like diaspora, migration, transmigration, and Indoness, a term she coined to explore the relationship people of Indonesian descent have with their history, native soil, and ancestry. In her stories she merges past and present, observed from a wide variety of perspectives.
Prior to moving to Rotterdam in 2016, Notosudirdjo alternately lived in North America and Indonesia. For Wayang Mimpi (2024), which literally means ‘shadow puppetry of dreams’, she translated memories, experiences, and emotions. She collected these during interviews with family and friends from the Indonesian and Moluccan diaspora. All these stories are filed in her puppetry archive, which serves as the point of departure for her work.
At Prospects, Notosudirdjo is showing two works from her Wayang Mimpi series. In an almost surrealistic way, both stories discuss the connection people have with their ancestors. These narratives reach far beyond the Netherlands and Indonesia. In The Way We Journey Home, we follow two life-sized puppets, Leek and Chickenskin, who are traveling back home. And in The Stars That Stared, Notosudirdjo exclusively uses light effects to tell the story. Similar to traditional Wayang theatre, these performances consist of music, light, and puppets behind a screen.
Text: Esther Darley
Translated from Dutch by Marie Louise Schoondergang (The Art of Translation)