ALEXANDRA CROSBY SUMMARY For participant information. Please do not cite. 14-6-2010 International workshop - Cultural Performance in Post-New Order Indonesia, 28-6-2010 1 Alternate arts collectives and the festival phenomenon Alexandra Crosby In Indonesia, the intertwined histories of art and activism have generated a range of very particular cultural practices that emphasize collectivity and community engagement. 1 These cultures of resistance in combination with the climate of greater political freedom over the last decade have prompted the formation of a number of art collectives that agitate for environmental change. Two such collectives are Tanam Untuk Kehidupan (TUK), based in Salatiga, and anakseribupulau, based in Randublatung. As part of the session ‘New Cultural Spaces and Forms’, this paper examines the festivals produced by TUK and anakseribupulau. These festivals generate fresh cultures of protest, open up new spaces of public engagement and provide viable alternatives to gallery-driven curatorial processes for the artists involved. Placemaking: When is a kampung not just a kampung? This paper looks at some of the ways that the collectives described above organise their identities in order to generate and express imagined localities. The formation of the identities of events such as Festival Mata Air and the Forest Art Festival are site-specific, adapting rather than adopting general ideas such as ‘community’, ‘art’ and ‘nature’. In teasing out how this adaptation occurs, I consider the imagination of a shared locality as the prelude to its expression (Appadurai 1996). In the cases here, this expression occurs through festivals, which I regard as collections of associated cultural practices. The festival sites are defined by participants in the context of these imaginaries. Each festival is, in a sense, a temporary enactment of an imagined place. In this way, the ͳ These histories have been traced by a number of others during this conference, which add context to this paper ȋ(alim (D, Brett (ough, Nuraini JuliastutiȌ.