Tanah Runcuk

Tanah Runcuk, or also known as Tana Runcuk, Runcuk Land, or Rundjuq is an artwork created by a contemporary artist from Indonesia named Timoteus Anggawan Kusno. The artwork was displayed for the first time in November 8th, 2014 and it was displayed in an alternative art space of Kedai Kebun Forum, Yogyakarta. This works had been responded as a theme for [http://ffd.or.id/2014/poster/ Indonesian Documentary Film Festival (FFD) in 2014].Tanah Runcuk is an imaginary territory that has been told as a discovery of a coffee merchant and an adventurer from Hamburg named Ludwig Stern with his colleague named Kreuzer Wallach, an anthropologist from Frankfurt in 1864. Tanah Runcuk has been described as an “imaginary” territorial area that operated undetected during the Dutch colonial period in Dutch East Indies.
Tanah Runcuk is told as an entity that “has been missing” from the collective memories of Indonesian people. The Tanah, or the Land, then was studied by a joint group of researchers under the Centre for Tanah Runcuk Studies (CTRS). The CTRS is an engineered institution that serves as another part of TImoteus’ art embodiment entitled “Memoar Tanah Runcuk.” This fictional institution had released an "(fictional) academic" journal named "Malalongké"
In the narration by Timoteus, the collaborators who consist of a number of researchers and scholars under the CTRS perform several reviews toward the ethnographic notes and the artifacts from the collection of Ludwig Stern and Kreuzer Wallach. The artifacts are manuscripts, picture records, photographs and objects of finding. These artifacts were told as the historical findings in the warehouse of an old library in Weimar 2006. The ethnographic notes and the artifacts that Ludwig Stren Jr. and Kreuzer Wallach collected are from the era of Dutch occupation. Through the literary approach that has been told into the fragments of poetries and stories in a book entitled “Per Fidem Intrepidus,” it is said that Ludwig Stern Jr. and Kreuzer Wallach disappeared after departing on a journey to Tanah Runcuk. This works was also questioning the legacy of colonial ethnography that embodied and reproduced epistemologically in our paradigm.
The artwork is actually an artistic response that departs from the autobiography novel by Multatuli entitled Max Havelaar. Through the magical realism approach that he presents in the medium of art, Timoteus has built his artwork narration as an effort to re-read the historiography through an art experimentation upon the history that might only be pursued by means of fantasy, both the fantasy of history and the “fantastic” history.

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