Urs Ramseyer in Conversation with Made Wianta

U.R.: What was your first reaction when you learnt about the Kuta bomb attack? Did it surprise you, or had you felt that something like that would happen some day?

M.W.: Actually I had thought about the possibility of such an attack, long before the Kuta bomb. Therefore the metaphor of the bomb appears in both one of my early poems and in an installation of mine. The situation in Kuta has been explosive for quite a while. What happened there was far apart from the Balinese society's norms and tradition. For rural Bali, Kuta is, up to this day, something which is far away and represents a culture which comes from outside and manifests itself in strange activities in the forms of hotels, restaurants, bars, discos and boutiques. So, one cannot separate Kuta, the site of the bomb attack, from the attack itself which clearly shows both a global and a local aspect. Affected were, in the stricter sense, those tourist places "Paddy's" and the "Sari Club" which were left to tourists from all over the world; but also the island of Bali and the Balinese as a whole were affected. The tourist world has come into being during the early 1970s, and had developed into a globally orientated, networked tourism industry during the 1980s and 1990s. This potent industry promised a seemingly indefinite wealth and had fast bucks pouring into Bali. Intrinsically, this industry has always seemed shady to the Balinese, and therefore has never been really understood. They always had believed that tourism was nothing else but some trippers visiting sights. But those for whom tourism had become vital were distraught and dismayed to discover that behind it was hidden an economic system which was out to control capital, and which was controlled by capitalists, by people who thought and acted individually and were profit-oriented.

The Balinese society, on the other hand, had always oriented itself by communal institutions and values. The communal system of the agrarian Balinese society, based on divine rights (adat), which is closely linked to the system of temples and rituals, is still quite intact. So it happened that the traditional Balinese society quite accepted those material advantages of a capitalist economy, even though it knew that their agrarian and communal system was based on completely different and incompatible concepts.

U.R.: For most Balinese Kuta has always remained a faraway and alien place; a place which one only knew from hearsay and from what young people had to tell who, attracted by the dream of a better life, went there. Why this distance?

M.W.: Because - as a Balinese - one only went to Kuta to look for a job and to be part of the flamboyant international jet set. But as I've said, there was practically no understanding of the concept that came to Bali, along with the system of tourism; priorities are wholly different here. On the one hand there is what's important for the agrarian Balinese society: adat, agama and budaya, and on the other hand we deal with the interests of a capitalist-oriented tourism industry and of investors which only seldom come from Bali. Most come from Java or from foreign countries. The Balinese are the workers, and hardly ever the ones responsible.

U.R.: At the time of our conversation, two months have gone by since the Kuta tragedy. How does a humanistically and socially engaged artist such as Made Wianta reflect upon what has happened there?

M.W.: As a Balinese contemporary witness, I wanted first to form an opinion, on the spot, of what had happened. If I wanted to get to the background, and eventually to the core of the problem this was indispensable. I'm always searching in what is real! With my own eyes! That's important for sensorial perception: what one can touch, feel and see! So I first had to have a look at the site of the tragedy, the bomb crater and the remains of those houses where over 200 people perished. Looking at this eerie scene it entered my mind that we always, up to that day, had looked upon our own culture as the result of a centuries-long acculturation. The Balinese way of life has developed through a permanent process of giving and taking of different cultures to what it is today, and this interplay of outside and inside has always been judged, by us, to be something positive.

Now, for the first time this was quite different, because the big difference between tourism and local culture had, from the very start, made a positive acculturation impossible. Balinese culture had, over many centuries, created traditions and moral concepts of its own which couldn't interact with a tourism culture based on an arrogant will to self-assertion. One simply couldn't change one's own culture and submit it to global and international priorities set up by tourism.
What's of special interest for me, as regards the Kuta tragedy, is this direct encounter of two worlds or cultures with their totally different basic attitudes and values. On the one hand there is the international capital world, which is fought with the language of bombs, and on the other hand there is the Hindu-agrarian world of the Balinese, which protects itself with the language of its symbols, which manifested themselves in a huge ritual, based on the faith of all Hindu-Balinese in Karmaphala.

U.R: How do you want to translate this dualism of languages into the language of your art?

M.W.: In order to do that I first need the space of imagination which is outside of any forms in order to be able to put up a frame into which to fit what actually happened. I have decided to use media, materials, and forms which are connected, on the one hand with the bomb and its consequences, and which are on the other hand connected with the symbols of a cleansing ritual, i.e. with offerings and blood. In the centre of my artistic realization there is, for me, the question of how I can fulfil this without having to carry out a personal evaluation of the bomb or rather the symbolical acts.
Of course, bombs and terrorism are loathsome on the level of personal engagement. But artistically I mean to express both sides as a form of dualism. On the one hand, we have the terrible reality of the bomb, which is an explosive mixture of antiglobalism, anticapitalism, and religious fundamentalism and actually has nothing to do with Bali. And on the other hand there is the symbolism of Balinese religion, which refers to an agrarian, and traditionalist world. On October 15th, uncountable Balinese came to Kuta for the first time, in order to cleanse this desecrated place and to be able again to live in peace. To artistically assimilate this moment of a unique encounter of different cultures meant, to me, an exciting and rewarding challenge. With my installation I want to express the extraordinary complexity of what happened, and, at the same time, give it a frame.

U.R.: What is the message you want to impart to the reader of this catalogue, or rather the visitor of your exhibition?

M.W.: My message is that I, as an artist, don't have to give answers or to make a value judgement. I rather want to confront my public with a question or a problem. For me, good questions are more important than answers that we all already know, especially when it's about peace. We all know what peace is, or how peace could be, and still it doesn't show up in this world. That's my problem, which I present in my work and put up for discussion. I ask one question, in a universally understandable language, and I don't give any answers.
In Kuta the local and the global have clashed, in a way that has moved the world. What became apparent, there, were the problems of a traditional society which has put up tight, maybe too tight, restrictions as well as the problems of modern societies to which Bali has opened itself up. All conflicts are also about ideological aspects, because everybody believes that the right is on his side. As an artist I'm neither standing on the side of ideologies nor on the side of truth: I consider it my
most important task to uncover conflicts and to ask questions conc