Asmat Fashion Takes Off

The male Asmat artists of Papua are internationally known for evocative, bold forms in their traditional carvings. Not as well-known are the show-stopping Asmat fashion designs that apply a modern twist to traditional motifs and accessories on funky casual wear. Trisha Sertori reports.

The Asmat fashion movement was the brainchild of longtime arts supporter and designer, Ursula Konrad. She says there was a need for women’s arts to take its place alongside the highly recognized men’s art.

Lowlanders, the Asmat people live in small villages along the remote central southern coast of Papua. The central town of Agats is reached only by boat.

Konrad first visited Papua and the Asmat people in 1971, and since that time has developed one of the world’s finest Asmat arts collections, assisted Indonesian museums expand their Asmat collections and written several scholarly books on Asmat arts and its traditions.

She was well placed to spot the gap in recognition for women’s arts, something that  also worried the regent’s wife, Karola.

Asmat women are known as great crafts makers; weavers of bags colored with ochre, charcoal and lime, which are then decorated with feathers and seeds of local birds and plants. The weavings can take as long or longer than major carvings, according to Konrad, with the collecting and preparing of materials taking several weeks before the weaving can begin. However as functional crafts, rather than art, weavings have attracted little attention and are sold at very low prices, far below their true value.

“Last year, 2006, during the annual Asmat Festival in Agats, Ibu Bupati Karola was angry that women were excluded, [from selling their arts in the festival’s annual auction]. Mary Ann Murphy, a great supporter of Asmat arts, and I started to think about what could be done to bring the women’s arts into the public eye,” says Konrad of a project resulting in a fashion show during the Asmat Festival.

The festival and its central auction has been running for almost three decades, attracting art collectors from around the world; the perfect showcase for the Asmat fashion collection.

Konrad and Murphy say that while all went splendidly on the day, the logistics of putting the collection together in such a remote location as Agats bordered at times on the hysterical, at others the seemingly impossible.

Reaching Agats on Papua’s southern central coast takes a 45-minute flight in a twin Otter light plane from Timika to a bush landing strip on the only spot of dry ground along this mangrove swamp coastline. From there it’s another 45 minutes by speedboat to the stilt house and wooden walkway town of Agats, home to more than 3,000 people. Agats is built over tidal mangrove swamps, hence the stilts and raised timber walkways that thread throughout the town – an Equatorial Venice.

With limited time, the sample designs of formed sarongs, double paneled skirts and singlets, cool summer dresses and extended jackets were sewn in white cotton in Jakarta and Bali before being shipped to Agats for dyeing and printing.

Well-known German artist Stefan à Wengen was invited to assist in the project. He had volunteered in the tiny Asmat village of Sawa in 2006 and taught youngsters rubbing techniques with paper and carvings. He was an ideal candidate to work with adults on the lino cut prints that would give the fashion collection its genuine Asmat flavor.

He lugged cases of lino squares and carving tools to Agats from Germany, just squeaking through the baggage weight checks.

“Lino cuts are a very different technique to wood carving. The material is soft and thin, too much pressure and the chisel cuts straight through. I worked with Asmat carver, Kaitahus. He’s a great carver and got the material so quickly,” says à Wengen of the process of translating the three dimensional into image.

But it was the printing onto the garments that proved the greatest challenge. Lino cuts require steel presses for printing – logistics did not allow for a 100 kilogram press to be carted to Agats ; à Wengen found himself giving a full body press to the women’s fashion.

Says Konrad, “This was a very primitive method. Stefan à Wengen had to use his body weight as a press. It was a constant battle to find a flat surface (to lay the garments for lino cut pressing),”

Another problem, says Konrad, is “we were back to the men as carvers.” A simple solution was for the women to draw their designs onto paper and create stencils that were then applied to the garments. “These worked beautifully,” she says.

The 2007 Asmat fashion show is just the beginning, says Konrad.

“People were fascinated by the work and Father Vince Cole from Sawa plans to continue the lino cuts and see what comes out – he has a deep interest in developing an arts based economy for his remote Asmat community,”

While in its infancy, Asmat fashion and its motifs that define it so richly could be the next big thing out of Indonesia.

Stealing the Show

German fashion photographer Detlef Ilgher traveled to the isolated Asmat village of Bajun prior to the Agats fashion show to scout for potential models. He was also planning a location fashion shoot of German high fashion.

“I met Ursula and Katie, two girls from Bajun who had never modeled before or worn clothes like this. They were incredible. The looked like princesses and the whole village was in awe of them when they were wearing the clothes,” said Ilgher of the Asmat models that he feels could stand alongside supermodels in a snap.

“We got the whole shoot done in two days. Ursula is almost 180 centimeters tall with  long fine bones and this fantastic haughty expression; Katie moves and is so natural. They are both brilliant models. I could not believe it – I spoke in German asking Katie to move her foot or tilt her head and she understood what I was looking for; she is an instinctive model and a dream to photograph,”

Katie and Ursula joined several other first time models for the Asmat fashion show, in Agats during the 2007 Asmat Festival, including potential male model, Petrus, who like Katie and Ursula, would be at home in the glossy pages of Vogue.

For more information on Asmat fashion contact Ursula Konrad at e-mail:
 ursula-konrad@t-online.de

The writer was a guest of PT Freeport Indonesia for the 2007 Asmat Festival in Agats, Papua.

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