Sparked by the knowledge of everyday realities in Padukuhan Boro II, a village located in Kapanewon Galur, Kulon Progo, Special Region of Yogyakarta, Prāṇaning Boro was chosen as the theme of Asana Bina Seni 2025. The word Prāṇaning, which means “wind” or “breath,” is taken from Kawi (Old Javanese). Prāṇaning Boro represents the transience, the fleeting presence, that passes by like the swift coastal wind sweeping through the tall coconut trees of Padukuhan Boro II. Though brief, the wind always returns and intertwines with the breath of Boro’s inhabitants. In a similar way, the presence of the artists and writers or curators of Asana Bina Seni 2025 with the residents of Boro, though temporary, merges various forms of knowledge with the lived realities of Boro’s community and becomes part of a longer breath.
The Kawi vocabulary of Prāṇaning, now rarely used, also represents the beginnings of an encounter with unfamiliar knowledge. Yet rather than being wholly alien, the participants of Asana Bina Seni 2025 embarked from a generative nothingness, consciously understanding, processing, and articulating the properties of everyday realities in Boro to enrich the concepts of their works. Ultimately, the word Prāṇaning illustrates how the knowledge present in Padukuhan Boro II and its surroundings has seeped in and become the very breath of Asana’s participants throughout the processes of encounter, dwelling, and dialogue with the villagers.
As knowledge that is never finished, Prāṇaning Boro frames Asana Bina Seni 2025 as a beginning to share the same wind, the same breath, between artists, writers or curators, and the residents of Boro II. This sharing forms, or at least gestures toward, a unity of knowledge. Just as the wind moves through Boro’s dense trees, this knowledge is hoped to reverberate back toward the villagers through the works presented by nine young artists: Anisyah Padmanila Sari, Barikly Farah Fauziah, Darryl Haryanto, Dionisius Caraka, I Kadek Adi Gunawan, Mailani Sumelang, Sri Cicik Handayani, and Taufik Hidayat.
Although originating from the same locus, Padukuhan Boro II which was also part of KAWRUH: Tanah Lelaku in Phase I of Biennale Jogja, Fioretti Vera, Gata Mahardika, and Laboratorium Sedusun bring knowledge as part of Prāṇaning Boro into Panggungharjo in Phase II of Biennale Jogja. Each artist and curator follows different paths. As such, the works can be broadly mapped into three subthemes: (1) Ecology, (2) Blurred Boundaries, and (3) Archives and History.
Ecology
Everyday life in rural areas may appear simple to outsiders, as activities seem to revolve around familiar spaces such as rice fields, places of worship, and homes. Yet, upon closer look, there is complexity. Dionisius Caraka’s work Nyang-Nyangan takes the form of property signboards filled with information about Boro’s land and territory. It stages a negotiation by bringing agrarian issues into the visual language of the everyday. A signboard, normally a marker of ownership or transaction, becomes a discursive space that foregrounds the farmer’s position within state affairs, their dependency on middlemen, the distribution chains of harvests, as well as the looming threats of land conversion. Caraka exposes the hidden power relations behind these seemingly mundane signs, showing how numbers intended for clarity instead become tools of distortion. Numbers lose their function as clarifiers and transform into instruments that obscure reality by erasing social, ecological, and even spiritual dimensions in the pursuit of profit.
The fading of ecological awareness is a critical issue not only in cities but also in rural areas, particularly when the majority of residents rely on water for livelihoods such as irrigating rice fields. Without a clean water supply, crops cannot grow optimally, and the flow of rivers must be preserved not only for human benefit but because it eventually leads to the sea. Allowing rivers to be polluted is to allow ecological collapse on a planet dominated by oceans. Through Wayang Kebon: Cekakak Terakhir, Anisyah Padma responds to this ecological concern with a puppet in the form of a Cekakak bird crafted from natural materials such as coconut fiber, symbolizing the persistence of river and coastal ecosystems.
Between Ecology and Blurred Boundaries
The acceleration of movement is inseparable from large-scale infrastructure development, which not only spurs change but also migration. Carried by hope, individuals leave their hometowns, often with promises to return once those hopes are fulfilled. Yet reality frequently betrays these promises, leaving behind empty homes shrouded in silence. In Rumah ke Rumah, which incorporates architecture, the body, oral literature, strings, and kites in collaboration with Meneroka Indonesia, I Kadek Adi Gunawan reflects on environmental issues surrounding abandoned homes. The work builds a context of “coming-and-going” between environment, self, and home where they intersect, understand, and harmonize with life.
Blurred Boundaries
Migration does not stop at the question of place or space. It signals encounters between individuals of different backgrounds. These encounters produce interactions, sometimes conflictual and often involving knowledge exchange. Sri Cicik Handayani’s Papangghiyân creates a space for such meetings, constructed through dialogue with women in their private domains. Using trays as both media and symbols of gathering, the work ties into a lineage of other historical encounters in Boro and its surroundings.
But not all encounters demand speech. Listening is equally essential. Too often, in speaking, we forget to truly hear not only words but also laughter, murmurs, sighs, and breaths that embody meaning. Drawing from intensive listening with women in Dusun Sawit, Panggungharjo, Fioretti Vera’s Spektralieri challenges conventional approaches to archives, history, and women’s bodies. She reclaims the habitus of listening, often subjugated by dominant narratives, by restoring a space where sound is not mere noise but living memory and embodied knowledge.
Yet listening is increasingly difficult in a world driven by speed and profit-oriented development. Like cities encroaching upon villages, growth often arrives without consent or dialogue. As economic centralization turns cities into giant factories, villages risk becoming unplanned housing for workers. Responding to this condition, Gata Mahardika’s Griya Fantasi highlights the paradoxes of development logic and provokes critical reflection through dialogues and discussions with audiences.
The interplay of dispersal, infrastructure, and acceleration produces a condition of “non-belonging.” What is close and everyday becomes alien, mediated rather than emergent. In Quote Unquote, a performative semantic intervention using Boro’s everyday materials, Darryl Haryanto employs quotation marks across moving installations, video art, and performance archives to unravel tensions between the Indonesian language and lived realities. The work reveals how official language mediates, distorts, and disciplines meanings that might otherwise grow wildly outside national narratives. Operating as a fragile repertoire, the work embodies processes of liveness and concurrency within blurred temporal boundaries. In short, an invisible performance.
Archives and History
Ecological issues are inseparable from women’s lives, as their bodies hold local knowledge through practices such as rewang or communal labor. When ecological systems collapse, embodied knowledge such as culinary traditions begins to vanish. Using jarik textiles, cyanotype, photography, and video, Barikly Farah’s Wewarah Pawon Simbah archives and honors women as bearers of local knowledge that is increasingly forgotten. Meanwhile, Laboratorium Sedusun gathers and re-presents intergenerational knowledge through a recipe book. Recipes, beyond mere instructions, hold collective memory and lived experience.
Change often comes not by choice but by force, shaped by more powerful entities. Taufik Hidayat’s Tutuwuhan, a ceramic installation, examines historical events from colonial times to the New Order, offering hypotheses on the cyclical disappearance and resurgence of Growol, a staple famine food of Kulon Progo. From colonial sugar capitalism promoting cassava, to the New Order’s rice canonization displacing cassava, Growol has oscillated between necessity and erasure. Rather than asserting a single truth, the work opens dialogue around food heritage, shifting legacies, and the layered issues entwined with them.
Mailani Sumelang also engages history, though focusing not on objects but archives derived from Boro’s surroundings. Archives are inscribed not only in documents but also in bodies, marking what is allowed or repressed, what is remembered or forgotten. Muscles and tissues act as living recorders. Her work Ngramut uses hand-cut butterfly installations to evoke embodied memories of post-independence events. The work organizes recollection through empathy rather than dominant narratives. Ngramut opens sensorial spaces where the body remembers joy, history is shared in communal gatherings, and society claims ownership of a safe space for peace.