July 5 – 29, 2021

Natasha Tontey

Wa’anak Witu Watu (Toulour) / Beranak Dalam Batu (Bahasa Indonesia), 2021

24 mins 37 seconds, Full HD, with sound (stereo). Written and directed by Natasha Tontey, 3D Animation by DDDBandidos, Sound designed by Divisi62

Selected by Tiago de Abreu Pinto

Chapter 6

(Holding a stone in my hand, feeling the weight, trying to understand. A voice is heard.)

— So, how does one talk to a stone? Better yet would be to start thinking about the stone, I told it, when holding it in my hand, and actually it didn’t reply. And then I started thinking about it, by reminding the words of Graham Harman, about how Kant placed the noumena far from us, “in another world far from human life” and how Heidegger showed us how “the thing-in-itself enters and disrupts all thought and action in this world”. But, I was thinking about the stone in particular because of some Heideggerian remarks on the way that things manifest themselves through their physicality. “The stone presses downwards and manifests its heaviness”, wrote Heidegger in Off the Beaten Track. And, ‘heaviness’ as he mentions it when manifests itself by weighing down on us “denies us any penetration into it”. Or, as Wisława Szymborska said, “‘I don’t have a door,’ says the stone”. We smash as many rocks as we wish and the result will always be pieces of itself and anything inward will be revealed. “The stone”, Heidegger continues, “has instantly withdrawn again into the same dull weight and mass of its fragments”. And, of course, his next example, of a pair of scales to translate or capture the stone’s weight or mass essence, would be a dull metamorphosis of a sensation (the weight of a stone through our hands) to a precise number (the one shown by the scale). Enough of it. I want to throw it away in the nearest pond and, in line with Harman, “that encounters the pond in a ‘stony’ way even if it has no trace of anything like consciousness, and likewise, the pond encounters the stone in a ‘pondy’ way”. Would it be right to call it panpsychism? How can, as Nancy Rosenblum asks, a stone sing? As Gayatri Spivak says “the body ‘bereft of voice’, is a stone”, right? But they can talk. Natasha Tontey told me that. Because in Minahasa there are almost no boundaries between life and non-life. And, surprising as it may seem, it is also an act of resistance against colonialism and their government to go back to the ancient belief. Afterall, the government officially recognizes only six religions^[1] despite the fact that there are many more of local beliefs. In Minahasa’s belief, for instance, the goddess came in the beginning to knock the stone and the stone became a child^[2]. Tontey told me she loves the idea of minerals because our bodies are full of minerals and they need them to develop and function normally. So, it should come with no surprise that around 1000 BC a division of nine Minahasa sub-ethnics came to decide their futures around a stone of democracy called Watu Pinawetengan. And, it shouldn’t come as a surprise also that Tontey thinks about future speculation with stones and puts the stone economy (full of mutual aid) into perspective.

(So, I turned to Natasha and heard her words)

— It is my privilege (and pleasure) to tamper with the historical and mythical account of Minahasa. However, in this instance, I feel an apology is due to the people who have lived during the colonial era in Minahasa. In my defence, I can only acknowledge the ancestries of Tou Minahasa, Karema Lumimuut and Toar—people of the Malesung Land—as well as to all the elders whom we call Opo, from the past and present and future of Malesung Land. The indigenous sovereignty of paying respect to ancestors between stones and humans is deemed as something unusual. Modern society sees these phenomena as irrational. Furthermore, it is alienated by modern religion. Yet I acknowledge the pact of the stone Watu Pinawetengan made by 9 ancestors, the ancient artefacts lisung of the origins of Lumimuut and Toar’s descendant; and that the first person was a woman, the Goddess Karema, who gave birth through a stone.

^[1] The sixth religion is Confucianism admitted in Indonesia around 1999-2001 therefore people can have their religion legal in the national identity card. https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/laporan_khusus/2011/04/110407_agamakong

^[2] According to both Fendy E. W. Parengkuan (a Minahasan archaeologist, historian and cultural theorist) and Bode Grey Talumewo (Minahasan historian), in Minahasa there are over 92 versions of the story on how the first person in Minahasa came to be. But most of the evidence, as Natasha told me, proofed that the cosmology is non heteronormative and non Darwinian “survival of the fittest”.

Natasha Tontey, Wa’anak Witu Watu (Toulour) / Beranak Dalam Batu (Bahasa Indonesia), 2021, 24 mins 37 seconds, Full HD, with sound (stereo). Written and directed by Natasha Tontey, 3D Animation by DDDBandidos, Sound designed by Divisi62