Dear driver…: a sticker by Andry Mochamad

YOU ARE looking at the picture of the sticker made by Andry Mochamad, a Bandung-based artist. He produced the sticker in 2001. Stick it on every means of public transportation which you think has a good driver, he told me a few years ago. The sticker depicts the back of a bus driver, complemented with the writing: “Dia adalah supir yang baik, sapalah dengan bijak karena (ia) akan mengantarkan Anda sampai tujuan (He is a nice driver, speaks politely, he'll bring you to your destination safely)”—along with its translation in English and Arabic.

In short, if you see this sticker on your bus, you can relax. This is actually what Andry Mochamad precisely intends to create: to reduce the stress level on the public transportation. Probably if we can start being friendly to the bus driver, he might gradually drive better; besides, bus drivers also have so many domestic problems, which might be why they are driving wildly on the street, Andry reasons.

Many other passengers start to pose questions about the stickers when Andry Mochamad began to stick them on various means of public transportation. The passengers then go on to talk about the public transportation system in Bandung, the increasingly worse traffic jams, and about the city as a whole. This, Andry believes, is more interesting than the sticker itself, which eventually ends up as a trigger for conversations. The sticker looks plain, just like any other sticker on any bus. The use of the Arabic translation also has the goal of making the sticker look familiar, like the stickers containing the prayer for a safe trip. The Arabic writing, giving the impression of a prayer as it is, also creates a feeling of peacefulness, just like the prayer it resembles, relaxing you as you become assured that you have a good driver on board.

Today there are many kinds of stickers that you can easily find in various places. The public transportation provides some of the best locations for this. The stickers can be adhered any time there, and many people will read them. An artist can simply come to a terminal to adhere his or her stickers on many public buses. The places where the stickers are attached generally serve as merely a “space” where the readership for the stickers is the highest. There are not many sticker works that truly talk about the ‘space’ where they are found—this sticker is one of those few which has made me smile, and will certainly make me smile again if I encounter it again someday on one of the public buses in Bandung. Making me feel relaxed until I reach my destination.




Jakarta, August 2007
Translated by Rani Elsanti




ARDI YUNANTO was born in Jakarta, November 21, 1980. After graduating from the Department of Architecture at the National Institute of Technology in Malang, in 2003 he returned to Jakarta, the city where he grew up. In 2004, he joined ruangrupa and has been working as the editor in chief for www.karbonjournal.org since 2007. Besides writing tremendously unproductively about the city and art, he also works as a book editor, researcher for several cultural projects, and a graphic designer, while still trying hard to write fictions.

ANDRY MOCHAMAD (1977-2008) was born in Bandung, March 15, 1977. He graduated from the Department of Art, Bandung Pedagogy University. His video works have been screened in OK. Video—Jakarta Video Art Festival 2003; OK. Video Sub/version (2005); and OK. Video Militia (2007) at the National Gallery of Indonesia, Jakarta. He took part in the exhibition “Beyond Panopticon”—Art and Global Media Project 2004, Bandung Electronic City, Bandung (2004); and “Carte Blanche # 5: Passages” at the French Cultural Center, Jakarta (2005). He once worked as a designer at a T-Shirt company and at the French Cultural Center in Bandung. He was active in VideoLab, an organization that documents and screens video works in Bandung. The collector of an assortment of peculiar objects dreamt of owning a mammoth fossil and was a guitarist at the A Stone A, a noise-rock band in Bandung. On May 1, 2008, he died at 31 because of a malignant tumor. The world of the contemporary art in Indonesia has lost a talented young artist.