This third episode of How to be Good Ancestors on Indonesia will zoom into the architectural scale to look at another form of debt: the act of disseminating building knowledge as a form of epistemic imposition. We revisit Indonesian colonial history with architectural historian David Hutama Setiadi focusing, on design pedagogy. Together we unpack the ways in which systems of knowledge were imposed through new ways of building generated by capitalist ideology, revealing the complicity of drawing methods and classification systems in marginalising the metis, an unstructured type of knowledge learned through embodied experience. We will also discuss the possibilities of reversing the logics of the episteme.

How to be Good Ancestors means rereading our past to disentangle future possibilities from systems of oppression. In this podcast series, hosts and AA students Ferial Massoud, Maria Putri and Aude Tollo retrace the common histories of three nominally decolonised states – Burkina Faso, Egypt and Indonesia – through the systems of debt servitude to which they were condemned in the wake of their independence, and which they remain subject to today. We ask: what are the spatial and material consequences of these systems and how can we begin to undo them?

SHOW NOTES:
- David Hutama Setiadi, Building Practice in the Dutch East Indies: Epistemic Imposition at the Beginning of the 20th Century, 2023
- Summarised version of David’s book: https://ar.fa.uni-lj.si/2020/re-drawing-javanese-b...
- James C Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, 2020
- Richard Sennett, The Craftsmen, 2008
- Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, ed, The Invention of Tradition, 2012
- Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz, 1973
- Jean Couteau, Tubuh, Moral dan Jiwa Zaman, 2019

ABOUT A LINE TRACED:
As our society continues to unveil fractures within its social and political systems, A Line Traced aims to examine topics that are immediate, prescient and impact the build environment in ways that require urgent architectural responses.