[Reader-list] Seminar @ Sarai: Patricia Spyer: Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Post-Conflict Ambon (Indonesia)

[aarti at sarai.net]

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Seminar @ Sarai
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Blind Faith: Painting Christianity in Post-Conflict Ambon (Indonesia)
A talk by Patricia Spyer
Seminar Room
Monday, 12 P.M., 8 May 2006


During the war in Ambon and since, popular Christian painters have been
plastering the city’s main thoroughfares and Christian neighborhood
gateways with billboard portraits of Jesus and Christian murals. These
artifacts perform in several capacities: as visual emblems of Christian
territory, as an alternative urban counterpublic to the political and
televisual prominence of Muslims nation-wide, as a way of presencing and
therein a being-seen-by God, and as a mode of intervention in everyday
Christian behavior.

The paintings’ migration from church interiors to urban public space and
their non-institutional base raises questions concerning the
transformations post-war of religious sensibility and the specific role of
both mass and alternative media therein.

During and following the war, different dimensions of the visual have been
both explicitly and implicitly thematized in a variety of ways first, in
the
sense among ordinary Ambonese of not being able to trust appearances, of
not seeing or foreseeing what might come, of a radical refiguration of
not only subjectivity but, more precisely, sensory subjectivity during
the war. Second, the pervasive sense that they themselves were unseen,
that their suffering went unnoticed by the Indonesian government, their
fellow countrymen, the larger world. Among minority Christians who in
the late Suharto period saw their prior privileged social, political,
and economic position diminished, the sense of being unseen is even
stronger.

Implicit in some practices albeit a theological impossibility is the
perception among Ambonese Christians that their own desperate plight may
have been invisible to God himself. The gigantic Christian portraits and
murals rising on the ruins of war across Ambon bear witness and give
material form to Christian anxieties about invisibility while also aiming
to alleviate the very condition of being unseen. Homing in on blindness as
much as varied refractions of the visual, the paper also expands our
understanding of what the visual might be.

[Patricia Spyer is Professor of Anthropology at Leiden University, Leiden,
the Netherlands. She is the author of is the author of "The Memory of
Trade: Modernity's Entanglements on an Eastern Indonesia Island", (Duke,
2000) and editor of "Border Fetishisms: Material Objects in Unstable
Spaces", (Routledge, 1998.)]