THE SOUND: The Kadedek
Over the years, I have tried to cultivate an expanded understanding of music and the realm of sound by contextualising it within a wider cultural framework that decentralises its very definition. The term has a cultural impact on how people perceive music as something alien and exclusive, rather than as a dynamic process that occurs throughout society. To give an example, I’d like to revisit the sound of hnnoh, a word used by the Kayan People of West Kalimantan.
Hnnoh means “sound produced by movement.” When I first asked the Kayan elders about it I remember that they gave an example of how a twig floating at the edge of a river produces hnnoh through the friction created by the flow of the water. Almost at that exact moment, a gust of wind blew into us and shook some big bamboos nearby. We smiled and silently enjoyed the serendipity of the moment, of how nature provided us with a live example of hnnoh. That experience brought me to learn more about the “interconnectedness” of sound and how it appears as a holistic phenomena in sonic ecologies, and of how sound can be understood as the entanglements of nature and its inhabitants, including us, as humans. We still preserve a distance to sound, between us and nature as if it were something outside of ourselves, but we need to understand that we humans are deeply embedded within the Earth’s ecosystem.
1 • Tania Murray Li and Pujo Semedi, Plantation Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).
2 • Dion Nataraja, “The composition of Nursalim Yadi Anugerah: Sounding Survival at the Brink of Climate Catastrophe” (unpublished manuscript, May 5, 2017), Microsoft World File.
I want to focus on the idea of hnnoh as “sound produced by movement” itself, which leads me to think about how the process of a movement in society produces its town sound, or alternatively, how the sound produces the movement itself. In a political context, sound becomes a tool for mobilising society. I always ask myself how we can revisit this idea through an act of activism (or even passivism), and from within an artistic framework. In my encounters with the Kebahan community, I was able to study their musical heritage and their interconnectedness with the medium.
THE FRICTION: Understanding the Friction
Abang Bunau is 60 years old and the only kadedek maker left in the Kebahan community in Engkurai village, West Kalimantan. Due to a lack of knowledge transferral in the community, as well as changes to the availability of resources, much knowledge of the kadedek, along with its musical heritage, was lost to the Kebahan community. Bunau faced difficulties when creating the kadedek instrument due to an ownership conflict regarding the forest which is also owned by members of the community. In recent years, a palm oil plantation company approached most of the landowners in the village, proposing to buy their land. This caused power imbalances within the village and led to a divided community, as some people were enticed by the promise of “prosperity” and agreed to sell their land. Out of this, Bunau had trouble acquiring and utilising resources and materials for the production of kadedek. The landowners demanded payment for the materials he took and accused him of monopolising Kebahan culture by commodifying it as an individual business. The lack of understanding regarding the management of natural resources and their use in cultural heritage has become a serious issue for the community, and has exacerbated environmental concerns.
One method for solving the conflict in the community could be by re-engaging with their penyelopat (meaning in-between) identity as a way to mediate and reconcile the conflicts between them and surrounding communities. This narrative can be reframed as an opportunity to reconcile socio-ecological conflict arising from natural resource management within the community. By utilising kadedek and recognising the important role of music in the community, a dialogue can be fostered between Kebahan community members.
As such, in the coming years, we are developing work by members of the Kebahan community in collaboration with “outsiders” (artists and activists) that focuses on community resilience by revisiting the idea of penyelopat as a tool for solving the socio-ecological conflict. Works range from reimaginations of the kadedek instrument, music, traditional chant, and sound installations.
THE MOVEMENT: Kadedek and Protecting the heritage
Many of the socio-ecological issues in the Kebahan community can be understood through an awareness of the cultural history of kadedek music and the intangible musical heritage. Kadedek music, along with other musical and cultural traditions, plays a vital role in promoting social harmony within the community. By acknowledging shared values and expressions, such as performance and oral traditions, Kebahan community members can open up a dialogue and practice peaceful conflict resolution. This heritage has the potential to address obstacles to sustainable development, including unrest, discrimination, and violence. By preserving and safeguarding such traditions, communities can come together around their shared history and values, fostering peace and security.
In gaining economic empowerment, kadedek can be a powerful tool for generating income and facilitating entrepreneurship. By supporting artisanal crafts education, production, and sales, as well as incorporating it into ecotourism development (although one should still be critical of this), kadedek can help to strengthen local economies sustainably. Not only does this provide communities with much-needed revenue, it also promotes the conservation of biodiversity. By leveraging the potential of kadedek and other living heritage traditions, we can create a more equitable and sustainable future for communities across the globe.
Furthermore, creating fair access to inclusive, high quality education about the musical cultural heritage of the Kebahan community transcends the conventional boundaries of the classroom. The passing of knowledge and wisdom from one generation to the next through day-to-day activities, ritual performances, and community participation, sustains an age-old tradition that constitutes the essence of intangible cultural heritage. This informal education system has been developed by communities over many generations. The knowledge passed down is diverse and encompasses artisanal skills, cosmological knowledge, food security, health, disaster risk reduction, and environmental conservation. It also preserves traditional values of social solidarity and peace. By building on this foundation of living heritage, we can work towards achieving sustainable development that reflects the needs and aspirations of communities.
Our commons, kadedek, and machine
“A plantation is a giant, an inefficient and lazy giant, but still a giant. It takes up a huge amount of space. It is greedy and careless, destroying everything around. It is alien, strange, and unpredictable. It is human, but you cannot form a normal human relationship with it. It can trample you, eat you, or drain your strength then spit you out. It guards its treasure. You cannot tame it or make it go away. You have to live with it. But it is a bit stupid, so if you are clever you can steal from it.” – Pujo Semedi
“A plantation is a machine that assembles land, labor, and capital in huge quantities to produce monocrops for a world market. It is intrinsically colonial, based on the assumption that the people on the spot are incapable of efficient production. It takes life under control: space, time, flora, fauna, water, chemicals, people. It is owned by a corporation and run by managers along bureaucratic lines.” – Tania Murray Li
These quotes by Pujo Semedi and Tania Murray Li appear in their book Plantation Life.1 Since one of the main threats posed to the Kebahan community is the approaching palm-oil plantation companies, these quotes stood out to me. Pujo compares plantations to giants, highlighting their size and power, but also their destructive impact on the environment and local communities. He suggests that it is not possible to have a normal human relationship with plantations, but that they can be exploited if you are smart enough. This comparison to a giant helps to convey the complexity and danger associated with plantations. On the other hand, Tania describes plantations as machines that produce monocrops for the global market. She notes that they are colonial by default, as they assume that local people cannot efficiently produce what is needed. This dehumanising viewpoint is reflected in the way that plantations take control of all aspects of life, from land to people. The fact that they are owned by corporations and run through bureaucratic means has compounding effects on the sense of alienation and detachment experienced by the local community. This perspective underscores the economic and political aspects of plantations, as well as their exploitative nature.
Through my current work with the mouth organ, I am playing with subtle ironic gestures by building kadedek instruments and incorporating machines and computer-controlled kinetic energy. I was intrigued by the imagery conjured by Pujo and Tania in their texts, with their use of words such as “giant,” “machine,” “alien,” “strangeness,” “unpredictable,” etc., and it caused me to think about how we manage our commons in the midst of these machines. The question includes how people, including Indigenous people like the Kebahan, fight oppressors on their land. The land, our common resource, must be protected through community resilience and mobilisation against the plantation “giants,” which they stand a good chance against since, in the words of Pujo, are “[…] a bit stupid, so if you are clever you can steal from [them].”
I want to close this text with a quote from Dion Nataraja, an Indonesian composer and scholar who wrote about my previous work “Lawing” with the kadedek and machine.
“[…] Instead of falling into one of these categories, Lawing appropriates the oppressor’s machine, incorporating them into an aesthetic project as an act of survival. The conceptual richness of Lawing could be tapped into via the prism of, first, Derrida’s notion of writing as a form of survival, where in Yadi’s case, composing as survival; second, the double entendre of survival: the “living on” and the “living” on, two phrases which would be pertinent to Yadi’s approach. The first one refers to the dream of, literally, survival. The second, however, pictures the complexity of this dream by using the quotation mark, which evokes a hint of irony (“living” as in bare life, life in suspension), and “on” as the corporeal matter to be dealt with, of soil, of earth, and of life itself. It is this tension that fuels Lawing, utilizing the tools found (and made) the state of bare life to, paradoxically, achieve the dream of “living on”: turning the oppressor’s tool on its own head. Echoing the dilemma of the categories mentioned earlier, Rosi Braidotti warns of the danger of approaching technology as if the possible treatments are limited to two paths: apocalyptic fantasia or the pursuit of the Vitruvian man, which, for her, are entangled with the residues of colonialism. To exit these residues is not simply the dispelling of the aura – in the Walter Benjamin’s sense – with machine, but rather, it is to grapple with that which is relegated as “cult value,” delinking from Europe’s totalizing historicization, embracing the new that is outside of the univocal telos. Yadi provides this path by showing that, in a place where machine signifies local and foreign capitalist exploitation, a reversal could be made, an intervention to the floating signifier: machines as a means towards collective survival.”2