TO MARK. TO GROUND. THE SHADOWS OF PLACE: BOEDI WIDJAJA | Artist

Boedi Widjaja is a prolific, international artist whose work is deeply tied to his personal experience of an itinerant childhood in Southeast Asia. Impacted by the region’s complicated entangled histories, his poetic art explores themes of diaspora, memory, cultural hybridity, identity and space.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Boedi: 

[00:00:11] "The need to ground myself. It's still something that I am discovering. It's a very profound thing, because it affects almost everything that I do... yeah, a lot of freedom comes when my feet is off the ground. But, I am looking for another kind of freedom. One day is found when my feet touches structure. The freedom that lies with the presence of that structure, which is quite different from the one that I sense when I don't quite know where I am exactly rooted in. Being able to feel that grounding brings me to the present, and the present is for me a desirable realm to be in, to contemplate both past and future." 

[00:01:04] Nina: I'm Nina Freedman, and this is WHEREING. WHEREING explores where we are. It is dedicated to those who believe in the inherent right of belonging and all the ways we feel we belong, and connect to ourselves, to each other, and the spaces that hold the stories where all of this comes alive. Where each experience of belonging is a work of art, created by chance or by design. Dare I ask, is belonging where you are, not what matters most? WHEREING is the spatial story. Welcome.

[00:01:47] Boedi Widjaja is a prolific international artist whose work is deeply tied to his personal experience of an itinerant childhood in Southeast Asia. Impacted by the region's complicated history, his art explores themes of diaspora, cultural hybridity, identity, and space. Originally trained as an architect, he then practiced as a graphic designer prior to becoming an artist. His works have been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including live works, throughout Singapore, where he lives, and abroad in England, France, Italy, Australia, Indonesia, and the United States in New York City. He is the recipient of many awards, residencies and commissions. 

[00:02:39] Good morning Boedi. I'm really honored to speak with you. 

[00:02:43] Boedi: Thank you, Nina. It's a privilege to be here with you for the podcast. 

[00:02:47] Where are you right now? Is this your studio I'm looking at?

[00:02:52] Oh yes, it is. It is also the living room in my apartment that I have family has sacrificed in order for me to work. This is where I have been working from since the beginning of the pandemic. 

[00:03:06] Nina: You keep it quite neat. 

[00:03:07] Boedi: I like things that we neat. That way allows me to be able to access the materials that I need at any time. And, the visual order is rather necessary for me to keep a clear mind. So there is a relationship between the topology, if you like, of my workspace with my internal mindscape. 

[00:03:30] Nina: I completely agree with that philosophy. 

[00:03:32] Boedi: It's not so much a philosophy. It's really something that I feel very viscerally. I can't think very well in a visually noisy and chaotic environment. Yeah. But strangely enough, I think that order allows me then to think about how to introduce chaotic elements into my artwork. It allows me to think about orderly aspects of life, and of my memories and experiences and to bring them into the conceptualization of my artworks. 

[00:04:11] Nina: That's interesting, because I guess when structure is there, it's possible to see the voids. For you, it might be poetic, but I'm thinking it's almost an irreverant gesture to try and change something that is structured. 

[00:04:24] Boedi: Yes, exactly. I think what just said seemed to describe quite a common methodology in art-making. There has to be some kind of a structure or order for some kind of resistance to happen. You can't perform that resistance in a vacuum or in an entirely fluid environment. You can't fight against water, so to speak in its fluid form. But, once you have set up for yourself these structures, it will be easier to perform that resistance.

[00:04:52] Nina: The structure invites resistance.

[00:04:54] Boedi: Yeah. Historical narratives support such an idea. Mythical ideas as well. You need to have that full weight that you then try to move or pull along. Yeah. It's a very interesting thing to note. 

[00:05:07] Nina: And, it's interesting to think about our homes like that as well. As an introduction to understanding who you are and who you are in your art, you have written very beautifully and I'm going to quote here, if you don't mind. 

[00:05:20] " I draw significantly from my itinerant childhood, leaving Indonesia due to ethnic tensions, separation from parents and moving between stranger families in Singapore, the experience seeded my interest in national and geopolitical histories, past and contemporary, and how in so many ways they collide violently with our personal lives."

[00:05:47] I'm interested in the impact of beginnings on long-term perceptions of non belonging, and how they're later sourced for choices that we make. Would you tell the personal story of your beginnings, moving between Southeast Asia's entangled histories? 

[00:06:03] Boedi: Sure. I think you are right. My childhood experience, as I had observed, seem to have profound impact on the way I make my art. And, it stemmed from this feeling of uneasiness of unrootedness of being in a place that never quite stopped feeling foreign, despite having lived in it for almost four decades. And, it's a feeling that I was very curious about at a time when I started making my art, hence, a number of my earlier works, dealt with this curiosity very directly. So what happened was when I was about nine years old I migrated together with my elder sister, who was 10, from Indonesia, from a town called Solo City in central Java, Indonesia to Singapore. And, I didn't know what really was happening then, at that age, but my parents communicated to us that it was something that had to be done because of ethnically or politically driven events that had taken place in Indonesia in the mid eighties. I vaguely remembered that was a day or a couple of days when we couldn't go to school and where we had to stay for the entire day at home with our lights turned off. I recall the experience to be quite fun because as a child, you know, not having to go to school was something that was fun. But, looking back, I realized how serious the situation was, and that move to Singapore without our parents, because they had to continue to work in Indonesia in order to support our lives and our studies in Singapore, marked a big turn in the way I think about my identity, as a migrant, the way I think about where I belong. Also, it started my interest in looking at nationalistic and geopolitical histories that surround the region of Southeast Asia. All this seems to surface in my art practice. 

[00:08:30] Nina: I'm curious about a few details. Where did you stay when you came to Singapore, and also did you return to Indonesia after a period of time? 

[00:08:38] Boedi: This may sound rather bizarre, but my dad was the one who brought us to Singapore in the beginning because my sister and I were minors, and what he did as he had no connections whatsoever in Singapore, was to open up the newspaper, look at the classified section to look for families or homes, that were advertising to rent out a room, and who are willing to take on the legal guardianship of foreign students. Then, he went to make phone calls, meet with some of these families and consider practical issues such as rental costs and made his decisions as best as could, based on these parameters. So yeah, that's how it went. This continued for a few years. My eldest sister and I, we moved between families under such a set of circumstances a few times before we eventually got to stay in an apartment that was rented by our aunt who was then in Singapore to seek medical treatment. That was the first time we got to live with a relative in Singapore. 

[00:09:55] Nina: So you stayed there until you went off to university?

[00:09:58] Boedi: Yeah. 

[00:09:59] Nina: Okay. And, I understand you went to study architecture in Australia. 

[00:10:05] Boedi: Yeah. Even that decision to go to Australia, I now see that it was based on familial considerations, because my sister had first chosen to study in Sydney. Hence, later when it was time for me to think about where I would like to pursue my architectural education, my father, I guess instinctively suggested. 

[00:10:30] Nina: Keep you together. 

[00:10:32] Boedi: Yeah. 

[00:10:33] Nina: Wow. That's an interesting story. Yeah. So, the making poetic, meaning out of this memoir as a more universal story, has led to various themes in your art. Can you speak about the threads and the key themes that have surfaced and resurface. We'll have a chance to talk about a few of your specific works, but I'm curious to frame the conversation about some of these key themes. For example, hybridization. And hybridization seems to be cultural hybridization, language hybridization, process hybridization, material hybridization. And there's also how these themes become live in the materials and the process of how you use materials. And there's a sense of ephemerality, things that are there, but not there. These are some of the things that I was thinking about, but you may have more. 

[00:11:34] Boedi: Yeah, that's a sense of entanglement within several things. Identities. And when I talk about identities, I have to talk about my ethnic identity as somebody who was born Chinese. Chinese national identity, something that was rather confusing for me growing up as a foreigner in Singapore. As I thought a lot about the place I came from while not having a real and bodily connection with it, yet this imagined homeland was so strongly present in my mind. In contrast to the actual physical surrounding that I was in, which was Singapore and the feeling of not being able to ground myself in the city. These entanglements of identity of place led to, I suppose, the impulse to try to connect what I had always felt to be disconnected. And, that takes the form of these hybridized concepts, media, languages, histories mythologies and so forth. And I guess it is not a random thing to think about hybridization in a place like Singapore, where we are so well known for our multicultural environment, as with any cosmopolitan urban environment. It is really a place that offers that opportunity to see things from multiple perspectives and to consider elements. that seem to be contradictory at first, and to think of ways or finding some common ground or to generate new things out of that contradiction. And, that is where my interest lies in with this idea of hybridity. It is always a method to look for something new, something unknown, at least to me and something personal, something idiosyncratic to the experiences that I had lived through. 

[00:13:47] Nina: Right. It feels like conversation. You create conversations between things when you speak about things that are contradictory and trying to find common ground. It feels like when you bring all these things together, it's a new form of conversation. 

[00:14:01] Boedi: Yeah, I love that way of looking at it. I think a conversation is a process that is alive. It shows something being worked out. It shows something that isn't static. Something that is still being resolved as we go. And, that gives me a huge sense of hope, a huge sense of a future that that is a very positive thing.

[00:14:28] Nina: I am speaking with the artist, Boedi Widjaja, an artist whose poetic work, explores memory and grounding inside of the hybrid migrant experience. 

[00:14:43] To go back to when you went to architecture school, you studied architecture and then you worked in graphic design, as I understand, and then came to your art a bit later. I'm curious about this transition and I'm asking for two reasons. One is that as an architect or a graphic designer, one can work on a typology, a theme, a niche of one specific interest, right? But, unlike art, these practices, even though they can be inspired by stories, they feel dissociative and they are very seldom, visibly personal. You're on the outside of it . And the second thing is that they're both a service. So, of course there's less agency. I assume that when you transitioned into art, it was a calling. And, though some of your work draws on architectural themes or materials, I'm curious if you can speak to this risk, if it was one, or more important, the internal spirit that asked for that change.

[00:15:50] Boedi: Oh yeah. Yeah. Well, it is still a conversation that I'm having within myself. Although I am happy to say, that it is a conversation where I think I have become more sure where the direction is going. You hit the nail on the head. What I had experienced in architecture school was so different to the reality of how architecture as a service is offered in the marketplace. In architecture school, whenever I went to the bookshop and I flipped open these beautiful books 

[00:16:29] Nina: poetry, philosophy.

[00:16:31] Boedi: Yeah. Yeah. I believed back then that this was what architecture could offer me. I was so immersed in that narrative. I spent pretty much all my time in the library, reading the philosophy behind many of these practices, and it was an amazing experience. I loved the library and just being in the presence of all these books.

[00:16:57] Nina: By the way, I just wanted to mention, I didn't study here in the states. I studied in London at the Architectural Association. 

[00:17:04] Boedi: Oh, wow. It was one of my dream schools. Yeah. I mean, wow. I look at the list of tutors who had taught there, and those are the people I was reading about. 

[00:17:17] So, when I graduated from architecture school, I came back to Singapore. I already had a few friends who were working in large architectural companies. And, I didn't really fancy the kind of professional life that they described. And, I knew that working as an architect in Singapore, wasn't going to be the thing for me because listening to the stories that my friend told me. I knew what it meant to work as an architect, over here. Hence, I wasn't keen to pursue that. I was still holding on to the dream of being able to work in a highly creative environment. I didn't know at that time that what I was expecting and what I was demanding was not to be found in the marketplace. But, I didn't know better. 

[00:18:10] Nina: You could have traveled for a better office. Wouldn't have been perfect, but it would have been better. To Europe, for example. 

[00:18:18] Boedi: Hmm. Well strangely, I have a strong aversion to, or maybe not strangely, maybe understandably, I have a strong aversion to traveling. Yeah, I do not like the idea of having to displace myself again to a place where I feel unfamiliar. It was a huge disadvantage looking back. But something interesting came up and that was the .com boom in the late nineties. I had the opportunity to work on some freelance projects, and I started to pick up skills on how to design graphics. It wasn't something that I was formally trained in, but I went along from one job to the next and that work gradually grew into a design office, that I ran together with my wife, Audrey, and it was fun. However, as we went along with design jobs, I didn't feel entirely happy with constraints of having to offer creativity as a service to commercial clients. There were clients who were more open of course, to creative experimentation and so forth, but many were not. And, I don't fault them for it. But, that tugging for creative independence just got stronger and stronger and it reached a point, I guess, Audrey and I decided perhaps we could give art a try. I didn't know what it meant to be an artist, at the time. It wasn't an identity thing. I didn't feel that I was called to be an artist, but I felt a strong desire to make things and to conceive of ideas and projects, and that impulse had always been strong since my university days that led to a lot of trouble with the tutors. Yeah. We would have very long discussions about why the building had to be done that way, and where are you going to fit in the car parks? Why are you making people walk so long to reach the restaurant? Things like that. I don't know if this is also something that is at some deep level connected with my childhood experience of displacement, because I think a sense of place, sense of the real concrete world, is a very unstable thing for me. It is something that I really have to wrestle with to get to know. Place is something that is so amorphous somebody that I cannot see very clearly, something that I have to try to sense using different methods, using my body, using my hands, using sound.

[00:21:07] Nina: You need to touch it. 

[00:21:09] Boedi: Yeah, I need to sense its concreteness. 

[00:21:12] Nina: Perhaps it's what I started saying earlier that there's this sense of it being dissociative. Yes, you can be on a site, and touch the building. If you were a construction worker, you might've felt it. But as an architect, you're making place, but there's a distance, as a process. I was also thinking when you were talking about your time in university, when you would debate about the car park and the structure and why does it have to be this way? Why not that way? It brought me back to the first thing I asked you about your clean apartment, and you talked about the structure, allowing the chaos to come in. Remember. 

[00:21:48] Boedi: Yes. 

[00:21:49] Nina: Anyway, I understand what you're saying. It's interesting how you came to art really was because, if I'm understanding correctly, this need to ground yourself. And, you grew up independent. This independence was probably very natural for you. But this desire for creative independence and grounding in place, it feels to me, that's what brought you to art?

[00:22:12] Boedi: It sounds like that. I had never articulated in that way before, so I'm really grateful with how you had described... 

[00:22:20] Nina: That was the way you described it. 

[00:22:21] Boedi: Maybe implicitly, but you made it explicit. Yeah. Then the need to ground myself. It's still something that I am discovering. It's a very profound thing, because it affects almost everything that I do, the way I perceive and the decisions that I make in my everyday life. Yeah, a lot of freedom comes when my feet is off the ground. But, I am looking for another kind of freedom. One day is found when my feet touches the structure. The freedom that lies with the presence of that structure, which is quite different from the one that I sense when I don't quite know where I am exactly rooted in.

[00:23:08] Nina: The word presence feels very important. 

[00:23:11] Boedi: Oh yes. Yes. Being able to feel that grounding brings me to the present, and the present is for me a desirable realm to be in, to contemplate both past and future. 

[00:23:28] Nina: I actually said presence, but it's interesting how you heard present. The two words are any way very close.

[00:23:36] Boedi: The presence of the ground.

[00:23:38] Nina: When you have presence, you feel the presence of the place. 

[00:23:41] Boedi: Wow. Yeah. And, feeling one's own presence is something that is worth thinking about because I think I have some difficulty with that too. 

[00:23:50] Nina: I am speaking with the artist, Boedi Widjaja, an artist whose poetic work, explores memory and grounding inside of the hybrid migrant experience. 

[00:24:05] Let's talk about some of your work now. And, for the listeners the links to videos and images of Boedi's works will appear on the WHEREING website, and they can be directly found at boediwidjaj a.com. Today, we're only talking about a few pieces, but I invite you to explore the wider archive of his works at the provided links. Boedi, I'd like to first focus on two projects, which I feel are related. One is the 'White City', which you did in Singapore, and it was part of your 'path series'. The second one is 'From the Earth Black', which was commissioned for the Jerusalem Biennale, and that was part of your 'stone telling series'. Can you explain what each one was about, and the meaning that they had for you?

[00:24:57] Boedi: ' The White City' was meant to be a durational life art work that took place in the oldest independent space in Singapore called the substation. Through out a period of about two weeks, I invited members of the public who walked into the gallery space to pick up squash balls that were left all over the gallery's floor, and these squash balls were covered with a layer of charcoal. And, they were invited to pick up these squash balls and to mark the walls of the gallery that had been covered entirely with large pieces of white paper as a way to collectively personalize the gallery space with these human-made marks together with me. And, as they were doing that, having fun, throwing these graphite covered squash balls onto the paper, leaving their marks, I then started to sketch in very loose lines, akin to what Kandinsky did, with his trace lines as he observed the movements of dancers, onto these large pieces of paper in the gallery, as well. In my mind, it was a process that convey psychologically for me at least, the presence of community in the rooting down of myself, in this city, in this country. Hence, the idea of belonging started to shift from one that was only solitary to one that also contained the presence of others. That belonging became more than just belonging, to something that can be described as belonging together with, so that was in essence what the work was about. 

[00:26:57] Nina: Then, there's 'From the Earth Black'.

[00:26:59] Boedi: That was another really interesting project. The title itself is a translation of a Chinese saying that describes the formal and semantic qualities of the character used to represent ink in Chinese. So, how we write the character pronounced as 'more' in Chinese for ink is made up of two sub characters, one that represents the color black and the other that represents the earth. Hence, the phrase 'From the Earth Black'. Ink was a primary medium for that work where we h ad brought stones from a historic part of Singapore, and we combined that with stones that we picked up in Jerusalem, to make prints using these stones together with members of the public, again, as a live art installation in the museum.

[00:27:58] Nina: So, in a way the mark making of the stones, is the language of the land. 

[00:28:03] Boedi: Yes, exactly. When I went to Jerusalem, I had the pleasure of the company of a local artist for a half a day tour of the old city. He showed us the wall of the old city. I hope that I remember this correctly, but he said something along the lines of, if you look at that wall, you could see in sequence, the history of the city, because each time it was taken over by a new kingdom, the old wall would then be torn down to serve as the foundation for the new wall to be built. It was a mind blowing experience for me to see history and time and trauma being embedded in these stones in such a concrete way. We were brought to this place called Zacharias tomb, and I saw small stones being placed on top of what looked like a tombstone. It was fascinating to see how the geology has become part of a language of everyday living, everyday culture, rituals and physical environment, storytelling. For someone like me who enjoys the presence of stones, it was fascinating. I knew that I had to bring in some of these historical, geological elements into the work. 

[00:29:25] Nina: It's important that you use the stones, to combine them with the stones that you brought. You had another project called 'A Tree Rings, a Tree Sings', which was presented in Liverpool, and, this one is really a fascinating project. It's about the ancestral inheritance of memories, images, and sounds, and you're doing something very different. It seems like the work is evolving using the Indonesian gamelan soundtrack with, and I want you to explain this, the hybridized DNA code set over blurred photographs of your trip with your grandfather to his hometown. You speak about it being generative, this DNA sound coding that keeps going on almost like an infinite loop. And the music feels pulsing, and like a heartbeat. How did this project come about, and can you explain this process? Because it's really fascinating. I may have explained it wrong. 

[00:30:27] Boedi: You got it correctly. What happened was about three years ago before the pandemic, I had been invited to be part of an artist residency in Singapore, and the residency building wa s located at the Southern part of the island facing towards my hometown in Java, Indonesia. I saw an opportunity to think about memory as something that possess a kind of orientation, that when I think about my place on birth in Java, I would then be orienting myself to the south. That is also in some way related to the term that we use to describe the Southeast Asian region for migrants, such as my grandfather, who had migrated from China. They would describe Southeast Asia or the journey to Southeast Asia as a journey to Nanyang, which is southward bound. So there's that notion of wanting to orientate my memory, to do with migration. And, at the time I had started reading a journal that my paternal grandfather had left behind, where he noted down some of his life experiences as a Chinese migrant in Indonesia. And, I saw a very strong parallel between his migration journey with mine, his from south China, to Indonesia and mine from Java to Singapore. And again, going back to the notion of orientation, I see the four cardinal points in our journey as he left China southward bound. Hence, north south. And me, having to leave Java for Singapore against the backdrop of the cold war and the political transition and turmoil from an administration that leaned more to the Eastern block, to one that leaned much more to the Western block. So, the east west access. That idea of orientation, of journey, and of familial memories that crosses generations, it led me do think about how such a thing can be expressed in an embodied way. I went on to develop those ideas using the medium of DNA ,because I had come across an article earlier that seemed to suggest a generational passing down of stories, memories through the epigenetic process. And, coincidentally, I got to know of a geneticist in Singapore just before the artist residency project happened. His name is Dr. Eric Yap. And, we discussed these ideas of stories being embedded in the epigenetic process and so forth and it just organically developed into this idea of a hybridized DNA, that expresses a strong parallel between my grandfather's migration story with mine. That hybrid DNA was conceived to be three parts. The first part was a fragment taken from my Y chromosome through a swab. And, Dr. Eric shared with me that this particular fragment was the exact same one that lived in my father and also my grandfather. The second part of the hybrid DNA was taken from a leaf, or from the chloroplast of a tree, a Chinese parasol tree that my grandfather was named after.

[00:34:27] Nina: Beautiful. 

[00:34:28] Boedi: It contains his name in that way. And the third part what's an encoded piece of text, which was the title of that work,' A Tree Talks, a Tree W alks'. And two trees refer to my grandfather who was named after the Chinese parasol tree and myself. The root word of Boedi is the sanskritic word Bodhi, which is the same tree that Siddhartha meditated under. It doesn't mean a tree as its present expression, but it has roots in a sanskritic word that was used to name the tree that the Buddha meditated under, called the Bodhi tree. So, that basically is the Genesis of the hybrid DNA as used in that first project. 'A Tree Rings, a Tree Sings' continue the exploration into the hybrid DNA, where the DNA was used as a music score by reading the different letters or the different chemical bases within the DNA string and to correspond them to sound files of the Gamelan, which is a traditional Javanese instrument. How the Gamelan came into the picture equally fascinating, because I had in previous years for another sound architectural installation project, come across an online library of Gamelan sounds that was recorded from a 200 year old gamelan set that was acquired by a museum in the Netherlands, from the palace in my hometown of Solo City, Indonesia, and when I heard a library of Gamelan sounds, it occurred to me that I could see it in some way, as a kind of a sonic shadow or sonic touch of the physical Gamelan. 

[00:36:27] Nina: What a beautiful phrase, sonic shadow .

[00:36:30] Boedi: It resonated very strongly with the mediated experience that I had of perceiving my homeland in Indonesia, from Singapore throughout my childhood. In a way a recording was more specific to my lived experience as a migrant, then if I had listened in real life to the sound of the actual gamelan set. So, going back to 'A Tree Rings a Tree Sings' the hybrid DNA was used as a music score, and the music score was activated using a piece of algorithm that would pick from the library of Gamelan sounds. We had assigned a selection of gamelan sounds to correspond with each of the chemical base present in the hybrid DNA , but there is randomness to the process. The algorithm also starts to pull in video footages that were made through re photographing images that I had taken in 2012, almost eight to nine years before the project was made, when I went to south China together with my father and my mother, to visit for the first time my paternal grandfather's birthplace and where I also had the pleasure of meeting for the first time, a few of my long distance relatives. So, these images were rephotographed using a rather embodied technique where I took a piece of lens and I faced it backwards towards the camera and then moving my hands to create unstable visual movements, and in the process animating static images.

[00:38:15] Nina: They're also somewhat blurred, right? 

[00:38:18] Boedi: Yes. The blurs were caused both by the movement and also by the play of focal distance of the lens. So there's, again, this negotiation of distance from these memories. Sense of time, sense of space. 

[00:38:37] Nina: Every little piece of this work is so deeply considered.

[00:38:42] Boedi: Thank you. And, the algorithm allows the sound image combination to almost never repeat. It just goes on and on and on. Every moment is a unique moment. It's a way of reading from the score and reading from the algorithm, and writing it visually and sonically as a video piece, very much like how these memories were read and written in our lives, through the epigenetic process. It is a living thing. 

[00:39:16] Nina: It's a living thing, giving birth. Yes. It sounds so complex and scientific but for the listeners, I really hope you'll go and look at it on Boedi's website, because its very difficult to capture in words. It's a very beautiful piece. 

[00:39:34] I am speaking with the artist, Boedi Widjaja, an artist whose poetic work, explores memory and grounding inside of the hybrid migrant experience. 

[00:39:49] Do you have any new or upcoming work that you'd like to talk about? 

[00:39:53] Boedi: Yes I do. I have two ideas that I am pursuing and hope to develop more. The first has to do with language, and it is a new series that I am titling 'Root Words'. It stems from a desire to discover and to imagine a personal diasporic language of sort.

[00:40:18] Nina: Diasporic language. 

[00:40:21] Boedi: Yes. In my mind, It is going to be a way of thinking about language, not only through it's written or visual forms, but also in how languages live through our embodied experiences in its spoken quality, in its sonic quality, in its vibrational quality, in its spatial quality. And I am very curious about how my lived experiences can start to suggest this personal language that is also at the same time embedded in the greater context of r egional and international history and also in stories that are found in civilizational myths. So, that's something that I am currently working on. And, the second thing that I am developing at this moment has to do with the presence of cosmic stardust, particles called muons. They are particles that surround us even right now, highly energetic, radioactive particles that are so small that they pass through molecules. And hence, it passes through our bodies. It passes through our walls. our floor, our ground. It reaches as deep as two kilometers into the ground, and they come from stars thousands of millions of light years away. And these particles are generated at the atmospheric layer of the earth when this cosmic rays break up due to the collision with our atmosphere, and muon particles generated from this collision cover the entire planet .

[00:42:07] Nina: Are they around us all the time? 

[00:42:09] Boedi: All the time, with a fairly regular frequency. And how I came to know about muons was through this imaging process called muography where muons are used like x-rays are used in x-ray machines to produce images of hidden things. Except, that with muons we have these free particles around us, that are then used to image hidden chambers or archeological artifacts as structures for archeological projects. One of the high profile projects would be the discovery of two hidden chambers in the pyramid in Egypt. Muography is also used to monitor seismic activity by observing the lava movements in volcanoes, the structural integrity of under sea tunnels, and so forth and so forth. 

[00:43:04] Nina: It's a nice gift.

[00:43:05] Boedi: It is. I'm using muons to try and see if I can start seeing that process of grounding to one that goes beyond a cultural or my immediate environment, to one that has a stronger sense of a planetary perspective. I think this is very important to be discussed right now. That sense of belonging is not only limited to one's cultural or biological origins, but to our common ground in this earth. I hope I am explaining it. 

[00:43:45] Nina: You are. And, it sounds like a beautiful evolution of your work. This exploration feels healing to your story. It's also a beautiful way to end our talk, with this hope and optimism. Thank you Boedi, for this awesome conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. 

[00:44:04] Thank you so much, Nina. Thank you for having me on your podcast. 

[00:44:07] Dear listeners. Thank you for being here. I invite you to reflect on what you've heard today and send your thoughts or stories. We would love to hear from you. Stay in touch on Facebook, Instagram, or on our website thewhereing.com. Subscribe free to WHEREING wherever you get your podcasts, so that you are alerted when the next episode airs. WHEREING is a pro bono initiative of Dreamland Creative Projects, which provides architectural and interior design services for the places where we live, heal, age and inspire. If you wish to have a design consultation, visit dreamlandcreativeprojects.com or email me nina@dreamlandcreativeprojects.com. Until we meet again, goodbye from WHEREING.