Riksa Afiaty

As a platform for exchange information and cooperation between museums worldwide, CIMAM with its museum members all over the country has a responsibility to contribute to the knowledge and to the comprehension of the role museums and contemporary art institutions play in the social and cultural
development. Museum placed as a center of the knowledge and the distribution. Based on that idea, taking a point of view as a citizen in Southeast Asia and reflecting on the 3 days symposium makes me realize that the knowledge distribution still manages by the institution that geopolitically reside in the west part of the world. It is interesting if we talked about center-periphery, how to access the knowledge from the periphery or how we do this as a citizen in the southern part. The platform of meeting is less interesting, since the speaker still looks and reflects how the western context contested, and less now with the idea of dewesternisation and decolonialisation since the meeting is in Southeast Asian context. The second day, the panel is more interesting, nevertheless, the speakers should be more into the new generations to indicate and read how this young generation reinterpret into the past and forecaste the future.

The idea of the symposium should be carried out in a dialogical way to not generate the potential of one-sided domination, applied contextually where the discussion is held. So, the activity demonstrates how knowledge should continue to be produced, reproduced and distributed to recognize the potential around us.

In my opinion, this meeting should serve as a collective space to share ideas in exploring some relevant topics or issues around the Southeast Asia. Colonial relations became important again for the struggle, each nation has its own epistemology to live its life. Through context in various fields, especially art and culture, horizontal forces were built to create our own thinking how we dealt with the institution as learning process, let it be private museum, national museum, (art) school, artist run space, artist collectives etc.