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Dismantling The Mistress’ House: Co-production Using Community as Method and Museum as a Tool
First and second supervisors
Abstract
Lasem, an ancient port town on Java’s northern coast, has long thrived at the margins – of commerce, culture, knowledge and time. Once a hub for maritime traders, its multicultural identity arose due to the co-existence of ethnic Chinese and Javanese ‘host’ cultures. Despite efforts over the centuries to erase Chinese-Indonesian presence from Indonesia’s civic spaces, hybridity has survived in the intimate traditions safeguarded within homes. During anti-Chinese riots across Java, Lasem’s gated courtyard houses acted as places of refuge, preserving everyday artefacts linked to transnational histories. These remnants now offer an opportunity to recover Lasem’s disconnected past and shift Indonesia’s historiography away from Javanese hegemonic narratives towards an understanding of lived experiences of marginalised coastal communities.
This project of collective history writing embarked on an elder’s initiative to transform his ancestral home into a humble museum he called Nyah Lasem (The Mistress of Lasem), filled with family memorabilia which rely on oral histories to reveal lives otherwise forgotten. Shortly before his passing, he handed Nyah Lasem to our group of local cultural activists to continue the work of community-based memory-keeping. Tweaking Chen’s phrase of ‘Asia as method’ to ‘community as method’, this paper offers a personal reflection on my task as museum director in repurposing what was once the ‘master’s tool’ into one of liberation. Acknowledging the colonial roots of the act of collecting and museum-making, my strategies seek to dismantle the mistress’s house by excavating the micro-narratives of domestic spaces grounded in the practice of care as a means to engage local people in producing their own knowledge and recognising their own voices in Lasem’s postcolonial history.
By seeing collective archiving as a collaborative act of co-production, this project seeks to reclaim Lasem’s identity as a vibrant coastal community in which the periphery can once again become the centre.
Biography
Feysa Poetry is a PhD Candidate in Architectural Practice programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture from where she also acquired her MA in Historic Architecture and Urban Environments. Her research interests include contemporary heritage, community engagement, and museum-making that centre around postcolonial knowledge production.
Her project involves establishing and directing a community-based museum that voices the role of women in safeguarding their heritage through domestic practices in the port town of Lasem, Java. Working alongside Lasem Heritage Foundation, both she and the museum are funded by LPDP.
Image: Dismantling The Mistress’s House. Archive and Collection: Museum Nyah Lasem, Lasem Heritage Foundation, 2024.
Collage Credit: Feysa Poetry, 2024.