The Jakarta Post - Weekender

Dea Sudarman has a tale to tell: she wants the world to know about all the riches found in the Indonesian melting pot. Not to be forgotten is her love for beautiful, remote Papua. She meets Bruce Emond.

In a brown batik shirt, Dea Sudarman orders a carrot juice, lights a cigarette and talks. She talks and smokes, speaking with commitment and enthusiasm about the cause closest to her heart, occasionally remembering that she really should take a sip of her healthful vegetable juice.

The tony Central Jakarta traditional-style cafe in Alun-Alun, the new all-Indonesiana emporium where she is president director, is a fitting background setting for the fascinating story she weaves, about her and her great love for Indonesia’s cultural treasure trove.

But to know Dea Sudarman today takes looking at where she came from.

She grew up in New York City as the youngest of six daughters of Indonesia’s military attache to the UN. She graduated high school and decided she would learn life’s lessons in the field. She was 23 and working for The New York Times

in 1977 when she answered a newspaper ad for a position on the crew of Our Wonderful World, a long-running prime-time documentary series in Japan.

Dea got the job, and so began her grand adventure leading to a career in documentary filmmaking. For the next 15 years she traveled to remote pockets of the country, working for six months on research in the field to get hours of footage that would be edited down to 24-minute films in a Tokyo studio.

“Of course, I didn’t know how to make a film at first,” Dea had told me during our first meeting several years ago. “I was what we call the waterboy, the gopher, preparing the tea, making the coffee. I did that job for about two years, and then I got the chance to be a soundperson. And after two years I became a director.”

It was then that she was smitten by Papua.

“I found it was not like all the horrid stories you hear before you go. And I thought that I should show it as it is, with its kindness, with its beauty ...”

She loved roughing it in the jungle, even the experience of having leeches on her body, eating local food and getting to know the tribespeople.

“Most of the time you don’t need any language. You just speak with your heart and your eyes. In documentary films, you don’t direct the people, right? I just followed them with the camera on. There’s no language.”

Documentary-filmmaking in the wilds of Indonesia is a tough life; in 1992, she took early retirement and established the cultural foundation SEJATI (she also has worked as a mediator between copper and gold mining company Freeport Indonesia and local people).

With her extensive collection of artwork, slides, photos and videos from her encounters with Papua’s tribes, especially the Dani, Kamoro and Asmat, she set up Gedung Dua8, a cultural and community center in Kemang, South Jakarta.

“I did the museum because I do care about information and I do care about the cultures of Indonesia,” she says. “Of course, culture is dynamic; it cannot just stay as it is and it’s their right to change. And whatever we can collect of their changes, then we can understand how humans evolve.”

Her mission to spread the word about Indonesia has led to Alun-Alun, the sprawling showcase for Indonesiana located at Grand Indonesia in Central Jakarta that opened late last year. There are stands offering clothes, textiles, handicrafts, traditional cosmetics, Indonesian music, books and snack foods, all sourced from vendors large and small across the land. There also is the small coffee shop where we meet and the upmarket Palalada restaurant.

Her new job is both her hobby and work, Dea says. Careful to note that she was only one part of a team, she adds that she helped with the layout of the space to ensure everything came together smoothly in a transplanted alun-alun, the traditional town squares found from Sabang to Merauke.

“It’s the place people meet and do their trading or whatever. And a shopping experience should be interactive, you talk to the salesgirls, ask questions. Shopping is not just shopping, it’s an experience.”

The target market is foreign tourists and the response so far has been positive; a store is planned for Bali and there may be future ones overseas.

But the message contained in the store’s stunningly diverse range of products is an important and resounding one in these times of international unease and distrust of the “other”.

“It shows how rich we are, how adaptive we are, that we have the best craftsmanship in the world,” she says. “Alun-Alun show how the cultures of the past can be brought into the modern world with innovation.

“If foreigners think Indonesia is dominantly Muslim and, so, like Saudi Arabia, it’s definitely not. Because we have all these rich different cultures here, and all of those were brought in by foreign traders – Chinese, Arabs, whatever. That shows that Indonesia has been an open society for centuries.”

She does not give much thought to the recent furor over whether Malaysia shamelessly passed off Indonesian cultural traditions as its own -- “if they do that, then we will just create more, we are just so rich”.

In fact, Indonesia has so much to offer that it’s hard to put a bit of everything in one place. On this day her beloved Papua is represented by a few trinkets, bowls and one lone, intricately carved wooden statue in a corner. She goes over to pose with it, putting her hand on it in an almost reassuring gesture. They are old friends after all.

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