Fitri DK: Nyawiji Ibu Bumi at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, Yogyakarta, Juni 13 – August 9, 2025
Emerging reports in a 1930 Dutch East Indies newspaper described the Samin movement, an anti-colonial messianic movement that spread throughout Java. The newspaper said that Samin Surosentiko, who was just an ordinary farmer in a village, proclaimed a commune where no one rules and no one is ruled—where hierarchy is meaningless. (See Djawa Tengah Newspaper Archive, March 10, 1916, National Library of Indonesia.) Since then, the Samin movement has spread, from era to era, forming an Indigenous community often called Sedulur Sikep.
Carrying forward this legacy of resistance nearly a century later, the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society on June 13th, 2025, was full, crowded even, as I arrived for the opening of Nyawiji Ibu Bumi, the solo exhibition by Fitri DK. While art openings often function primarily as social gatherings for the art scene, this night at Cemeti felt different. Among the attendees were mothers and other community members from Kendeng, Pati, in Central Jawa. These attendees were Sedulur Sikep—members of an Indigenous community possessing a long history of resisting colonial power and fiercely defending their ancestral lands. Through the diverse artworks presented, Fitri demonstrated something profound: her role is not limited to collaborating with communities; she actively immerses herself in their struggles, becoming part of a long, seemingly endless fight for justice.
Figure 1. Installation view of Fitri DK: Nyawiji Ibu Bumi at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, 2025. Photograph by Amos Ursia.
The exhibition’s title, Nyawiji Ibu Bumi, thus becomes a crucial point: it celebrates how practices of nurturing and caring are, in themselves, powerful forms of resistance against multidimensional crises. This exhibition marks Fitri DK’s inaugural solo presentation, a significant moment for an artist who is already known globally through the Ulaanbaatar Biennale 2025 and collective practices in Taring Padi. Fitri DK’s works across media and has created woodcut prints, intricate batik textiles, traditional potteries, and several installations.
An important work is the woodcut titled Homage to Yu Patmi. This piece documents the figure of Yu Patmi, one of the nine Kartini Kendeng, the mothers who gained political attention for their powerful cement-foot protest in front of the Presidential Palace in Jakarta. The mothers placed their feet in wooden boxes and poured cement over them, a visceral symbol of their land being cemented over.
At the main area of Fitri’s installation, a large batik is prominently displayed. The upper portion of this batik features a dark blue textile with a detailed white line drawing of Omah Kendeng, a Sedulur Sikep hall in their village that becomes a place to gather and consolidate when there is a protest or cultural activities. Another section of the batik, also dark blue, depicts a series of figures dressed in peasant hats and Javanese traditional attire, rendered in white outlines. In front of the banner, on the floor, a collection of objects is arranged. There are numerous terracotta or unglazed pottery vessels of varying shapes and sizes. These are kendi, traditional Javanese water pots.
The collaboration with Kendeng mothers manifests as political intimacy—a radical rewiring of art beyond object-making. Batik patterns, which are traditionally floral, morph into subversive imagination: the mothers from Kendeng and their cement-foot protest. For years, the Kendeng community has fought against the construction of Semen Indonesia cement factory, which threatens to engulf their ancestral lands and disrupt the vital water sources of the Kendeng Mountains. (See Debora Hammonds’s essay in After the Death of Nature.) Fitri’s connection to the Kendeng community is deep and personal: she is not merely an observer but an ally, fighting alongside the community.
Figure 2. Installation view of Fitri DK: Nyawiji Ibu Bumi at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, 2025. Photograph by Amos Ursia.
Understanding the Kendeng struggle and Fitri’s work requires examining the late nineteenth century, a time of violent Dutch colonial state expansion across Indonesia. The regime seized control through military power, industrial force, and political surveillance. Vast sugar factories and sprawling plantations emerged; new railways and highways cut through landscapes. By the early twentieth century, this era was often viewed by historians as a period of protest, and historian Takashi Shiraishi aptly termed it “an age in motion.”
Conventional historiography tends to record anti-colonial movements primarily as institutional actions led by newly emerging political parties or trade unions, framed within narratives of modern political consciousness and the rise of nationalism. However, the reality at the grassroots level was far more complex. Resistance against the colonial government often didn’t manifest through organized nationalist institutions. Indigenous communities in Java fought back in their own ways, they created new rituals, refused to pay colonial taxes, and established autonomous systems that defied external control. It was within this context that we see the rise of messianic movements, a phenomenon common among peasant and fishermen communities across Indonesia.
The Samin movement, or Sedulur Sikep, became one of the most feared by the Dutch colonial authorities precisely because of its massive spread across villages throughout Java. The Sedulur Sikep primarily consisted of farming families working their own ancestral lands. Their resistance was multifaceted: they refused to pay colonial taxes, built their own communal food granaries, and rejected the government-established education system. The colonial state apparatus in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought to infiltrate and control everyday life—through hospitals, politics of hygiene, massive taxation, and Western-style education. (See Denys Lombard’s book Nusa Jawa.)
Newspapers of the time often misinterpreted the movement. Some labeled Samin Surosentiko and his followers “communists,” while socialist papers sometimes dismissed the Samin movement as a premature and uncoordinated revolution. (See Djawa Tengah Newspaper Archive, June 14, 1930 at the National Library of Indonesia.) The Sedulur Sikep of the early twentieth century chose a “revolution” unlike those prescribed by communist party leaflets circulating in the Dutch East Indies. Theirs was an autonomous system that mobilized peasants without a single leader, without a strict hierarchy, and without convoluted bureaucracy.
Crucially, the Sedulur Sikep Indigenous community persists to this day, continuing to defend their lands, their ancestral territories, and their embodied cultural knowledge systems. Their struggle against factories seeking to seize land, displace water sources, and forcibly excavate the earth resonates powerfully with Fitri DK. It is precisely at this intersection of past and present resistance that art reveals its potential as a methodology reaching far beyond mere object-making. Fitri DK’s practice exemplifies art as long-term engagement within resistance—a struggle that may never truly end, as coloniality and oppression constantly find new forms of power. However, art with political intent often faces significant pitfalls. It can become trapped in models of festivalism, where short-term, spectacle-driven events distance art from sustained participation at the grassroots level.
Figure 3. Installation view of Fitri DK: Nyawiji Ibu Bumi at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, 2025. Photograph by Amos Ursia.
The exhibition Nyawiji Ibu Bumi articulates deep reflection on these challenges. It asks how community-based art practices can avoid becoming confined to festivals, gallery objects, or staged-performances. Fitri DK’s sixteen-year friendship and shared struggle with the Kendeng community is a powerful practice, and her work demonstrates that meaningful community-based art requires immense patience and long-term vision. It demands a solidarity that transcends the fleeting programmatic timelines of the art-world and the mode of production of art festivals. In the multidimensional crises—environmental, social, cultural, political—our collective resilience relies on cultivating mutual care. Fitri DK’s Nyawiji Ibu Bumi and the enduring resistance of the Sedulur Sikep, both past and present, offer a profound vision to resist coloniality.
