History as shown on Monas' dioramas, resulted from New Order's political manipulation. For years, millions of visitors, including children from every corner of Indonesia paying mandatorily visits through their school programs, has been and still is witnessing the über-militaristic Indonesian history hogwash. Historian JJ Rizal examines how and why the historical corruption in the dioramas was allowed to happen.

After the May Riot in 1998, the urban villages in Solo guard themselves. The seemingly protective fences surreptitiously make people forget. To Yosafat Hermawan Trinugraha, it is peculiar how the kampong gates exist in the midst of the celebration about the success of Solo urban management scheme and how friendly it has been to the poor commoners. The kampong, the urban village, is the last bastion for urban pluralism. With the fenced-in kampongs, the hidden memories will someday find their way out and rebel.

The building that formerly housed the Immigration Office of Central Jakarta is truly in misery. It has been left abandoned, caught in a tug of war, looted, sold, bought back, then made into Buddha Bar. Now, after the news about the building gradually disappears from the media, does it mean that the problem has actually been concluded? What can we do to save it? The Karbon Journal interviews Pradaningrum Mijarto, an observer of heritage buildings, to answer these questions.

Hidden Jakarta, an anti-luxury organized trip, is the latest development of a nasty-yet-gorgeous market condition in which everything is for sale. Anissa S. Febrina, who decided to dig deeper into her voyeuristic side, tried to explain the phenomena by paying poorism, a newly popular term, a tempting glance. Also considering the subject-object interaction happening through the process, this essay could be considered as an act of foreplay.

Kota Tua Jakarta is the “Queen of the East”, a designated city heritage. However, sometime in 2008, the Fatahillah Park, the heart of this heritage area, was used as a parking lot for a grand wedding ceremony at the Art and Ceramics Museum. Pradaningrum Mijarto reviews the doubtful state of health of “the queen” due to too many conflicting interests and too much indifference in the efforts to revitalize her.

From the ban to wear European clothes for the indigenous students at the STOVIA, the controversies regarding the use of hijab in 1979 – 1991, to the subsequent students’ resistance against the policy of wearing uniforms, there have been endless problems pertaining to the policy. Haris Firdaus does not only offer us a sketch of such resistances, but also observes the changing trends of uniforms in the city of Solo, and uses three Indonesian films from three different eras to define five categories of resistance against school uniform.

Grace Samboh is not originally from Yogyakarta, but she feels uneasy seeing how her city of residence is continuously portrayed. In this essay, she describes the peculiar parts of the films created by directors whom she thinks are satisfied enough with being local tourists in Yogyakarta.

The movie Taksi (Arifin C. Noer, 1990), starring Rano Karno and Meriam Bellina, collected six Citra awards at the time when the issue of the city took center stage, when a “Jakarta-centric” perspective became increasingly prevalent. What kind of ‘voice’ does the movie record in its narrative, and how does Taksi document the historical traces of the city space in Jakarta? Ifan Adriansyah Ismail reviews it for you.

In collaboration with the itinerant photographers at the National Monument (Monas), Daniel Kampua selected works by these photographers and took a group picture of all the photographers. The results of this collaboration were exhibited at Monas in February 2009. Irma Chantily reviews a variety of new interactions betweeen Monas, the visitors, and the itinerant photographers, generated by this photography project.