Dialogue Arsip: On Archives and the Stories of Their Pursuit

Last Saturday, April 11, amid the lingering drizzle of Kemang, the Grafis Masa Kini team sat among the audience for a discussion on archives. The event, titled On Archives and the Stories of Their Pursuit, was held by Dia.Lo.Gue in collaboration with Dibawa Arsip Aja, with a format intentionally designed to be relaxed. This interactive talk show ran from 2:30 to 5:00 PM.

Three speakers came from distinctly different backgrounds: Christine Toelle, an archival practitioner working across personal, ethnographic, and research contexts; Sir Dandy, a visual artist and frontman of Teenage Death Star; and Bambang H., a collector of classic Indonesian comics who has been building his archive since the 1990s. The common thread connecting them was visual archives and how these shape the way they work.

Bambang began his story from childhood. He started reading comics in elementary school, influenced by his father, who was also a comic enthusiast. From there, he explored Kho Ping Hoo stories and expanded into other silat comics, including the works of Jan Mintaraga, which later became his specialization. He built his collection gradually, and that day he brought some of his finest pieces directly to the event.

Unlike today, when internet access is widespread, Bambang reflected on the physical experience of searching for comic archives in the 1990s, which he described as challenging. “In the 90s, the sales of silat comics had already declined. I once found comics by RA Kosasih, Gan Kok Hwie, and Gan Kok Liang in a bookstore that was about to close,” Bambang recalled. He even visited CV Gema, the publisher of Kho Ping Hoo, and returned home with a 15 percent discount. Later, he discovered a distributor who offered a 25 percent discount.

Christine approached archives from a different angle. She did not begin with comics, but with stamps, letters, maps, and KNIL books that she collected without fully understanding what she was doing at the time. “I used to think this was just hoarding. After studying art and anthropology, I realized that archives can be domestic in nature,” she said. For her, archives and access are what keep history from falling into oblivion.

She also brought a broader perspective on what can be considered an archive. “Archives are often associated with material culture. But what about intangible and unwritten archives?” she asked. Text does not always take the form of words. Symbols and images are also forms of text, as are oral traditions. All of these can become “plates” that produce new archives.

Sir Dandy spoke about archives from the perspective of a graphic designer who constantly needs visual references. He uses European comic archives as a source of inspiration, but recently he has become interested in something unusual: works that are considered bad. Teenage Death Star even once held an ugly poster competition.

“Good work will naturally attract attention, but for me all work deserves attention, including bad work. From bad work, we can ask again, ‘why is this bad?’ Maybe it is relative,” he said. He plans to turn this collection into a zine or exhibition in the future.

One question raised during the session lingered the most: do we find archives, or do archives find us?

Sir Dandy answered it in a practical way. There is an active and specific process of searching, based on needs of color, material, and style. But within that process, archives seem to appear on their own. Christine referred to this as situated knowledge, knowledge that emerges because you occupy a certain position as an artist, reader, or collector, which makes an archive suddenly relevant to you.

The conversation that afternoon did not offer a grand conclusion. But perhaps that is precisely the point of On Archives and the Stories of Their Pursuit: that archiving is personal, winding, and sometimes discovered in the most unexpected places.