Familiars

Familiars is a VR-video work from my research about ghost stories. Working with immersive and digital art productions – like contemporary electronic music, 3D, and virtual reality – I tried to reflect on what it means to tell ghost stories in a disenchanted world, to sit with the complexity of otherness and the desire for familiarity in the diaspora. I started by approaching members of the Indonesian diaspora in Germany, to retell each other stories that normally would have been considered fictitious. In collaboration with artist songxin, a 3D world is imagined and created based on the familiar symbolism in our ghost stories. An environment of collaborative processes, where I envision these memories can thrive. Along with the fragments of stories I collected, the 3D world also presents my manifesto on how ghosts can inspire us to imagine a different understanding of seeing and building relations.