Drawing inspiration from her own ancestral culture, Natasha Tontey creates digital animations, performances, and installations that rely upon speculative fiction to explore Indonesia’s historical narratives, local myths and traditions, and contemporary cultures of fear. Her works reimagine animistic cosmologies as queer alternatives to modern and anthropocentric politics by positing divergent future perspectives that evade the predetermined outcomes of a colonial world order, instead prioritizing the struggles of outcast entities and beings. Children of the Stones Number Two combines Tontey’s previous works into a short video that foregrounds the religious and spiritual practices of Indonesia’s North Sulawesi province and focuses on the distinctive worldview of the Minahasa tribe, which is defined by its relation to and communication with the geo entity stone. Adopting the format of maximalist digital visual elements, the work speculates on the potential of Minahasan culture to imagine an alternative society based on the principle of reciprocity that unites animate and inanimate realms.
