Aryo Danusiri

ARYO DANUSIRI, University of Indonesia, Depok City, West Java, was awarded a Fejos Fellowship in October 2021 to aid research and editing of ‘The Underside.’ FPI (Islamic Defender Front) is one sign of trouble in post-Suharto Indonesia. Self-identified as an Islamic moral guardian, FPI is infamous for being actively involved in various violent practices. THE UNDERSIDE is a feature-length documentary based on year-long research with a camera on urban space, political violence, and Muslim subjectivity. It is a coming-of-age portrait of Sahrul, transitioning from finishing high school to entering the labor world. He lives under a toll road in a Jakartan urban village whose inhabitants are predominantly FPI supporters. His family encourages him to be an FPI sympathizer, hoping it will help make him a good Muslim. The film follows the affective process of Sahrul as he learns about labor, piety, and maturity. The grantee posits this film as another chapter of their dissertation. It means that the film is not a projection or visualization of what has been written in the textual dissertation. The grantee argues that video cameras produce a different composition of knowledge than textual. Visuality produces sensuous knowledge about the subjects and their social worlds. In their project of world-making, it is often that words could only capture what the subjects have said in everyday situations. What a video camera could reveal is the spaces that lie between words. But a video camera is a medium that can capture that sensuous knowledge independently. It requires anthropologists or filmmakers whose skills make it possible to ‘correspond’ with the subjects/actors.