Rather Than a Great Tree, Laden With Sweet, Ripe Fruit: 17th Istanbul Biennial

ELEMENTAL FREQUENCIES: TELLURIAN DRAMA
TELLURIAN DRAMA

• Director: Riar Rizaldi
• INDONESIA / 2020 / DCP / Colour / 26’ / Indonesian; Turkish, English s.t.

• Screenplay: Riar Rizaldi
• Director of Photography: Natasha Tontey, Adythia Utama
• Editing: Riar Rizaldi
• Music: Nursalim Yadi Anugerah
• Producer: Riar Rizaldi
• World Sales: Riar Rizaldi

2021 Singapore Best Southeast Asian Short

In 1923, the Dutch East Indies government celebrated the opening of Radio Malabar, a new radio station that brought about a violent clearing of two mountain peaks and forced labour of the indigenous people of the mountains, to install a huge radio transmitter near Mount Malabar in West Java. In March 2020, Radio Malabar was reactivated as a historical site and tourist attraction. Tuning in to forgotten wavelengths, Riar Rizaldi’s Tellurian Drama imagines what could have happened in between, opening up questions on the vital role of the mountain in history, colonial ruins as an apparatus for geoengineering technology, and the invisible power of indigenous ancestry. Narrated based on a fictionalised forgotten text by prominent pseudo-anthropologist Drs. Munarwan, Tellurian Drama problematises the notions of decolonisation, geocentric technology, and the historicity of communication.

This film will be screened together with Mud Man and How to Improve the World.

This film was a Meetings on the Bridge participant.