Pekalongan 2023: Where Batik Lives

Yesterday Pekalongan’s magic emerged for me again. This time it was in the meeting room of the Batik Museum.  When the batik maker Lim Po Him spoke I realized I was once again in the heart of passion. Afterwards Pak Sapuan explained that Lim Po Him frequently cries when she talks about her batik enterprise, a kind of trademark! He asked her whether she was crying from happiness or sadness or pain. It was unclear; it was all jumbled together. It seemed to be pure passion: gratitude, an expression of her great struggle, her success, the meaning of her entire life.  

“I have been able to live because I sell batik.” She explained that her father began the enterprise out of desperation and he started from ‘0’; he had to learn batik from scratch. (Tears of empathy). He died when she was just a teenager (tTears of sadness and shock) and she took over. She bore the responsibility for keeping it going (Tears to mark the struggle and the fear). Everything she knew was from him; he was her teacher (Tears of nostalgia and acknowledgement). Now she had white hair and she was grateful that she was still able to make batik. (Tears of gratitude.) Endlessly grateful. Even though it was difficult to survive. (More tears to mark her struggle.) Despite corona. She had managed to get through the pandemic with her workshop intact. (Tears of gratitude and pain.) Batik was her entire life: her upbringing, her relationship with her father, her avenue to learn about life, her repository of passion, aesthetic and skill, her pride, her success, her love. Oh yes, and her income. It was not a ‘business’ in any cut and dried ‘rational’ sense. It was her entire life.

 

This is the magic of batik in Pekalongan. I am not writing about the Pekalongan where batik is the centre of trade. I write about the Pekalongan where batik is inscribed on the hearts of the ones who wield and guide the wax pen (canting).

 

Pak Sapuan spoke with a kind of meta-voice. He revealed that that only five batik workshops where the wax pen is deployed (rather than the print production) had survived corona. It was a quiet fact. He did not complain, but this fact told me enough about the pain. Even here in the batik centre of the world! My heart dropped down to my sandals. It had been a ‘lockdown’ of craft. Lim Po Him’s words had revealed how profoundly hearts had been broken, how unwillingly the traditions severed, the immensity of the loss.

 

The first time I met Pak Sapuan was in the home of Ibu Fathiyah, about 12 years ago. That was when I encountered the vibrancy with which a textile tradition can live in a community. Ibu Fath had invited batik makers and they brought their favourite ancient batiks with them. Everybody discussed them avidly and shared stories of their families as batik makers. I referenced that meeting during my talk: “I grew up in Canada. There clothing and textiles are what one buys, wears and throws away. They are dead. Here in Pekalongan, they are alive. They are treasured and discussed. They bring their owners in touch with their forefathers and their histories. Here people live through their cloth.” That was the first time I experienced Pekalongan’s magic. Pak Sapuan referenced my words. They had struck a chord. Some people recorded Lim Po Him while she was speaking. She was voicing the essence of batik in Pekalongan. It was an historic moment.

 

Afterwards a young man came to me and said that there was also an exhibition of promising new batik talent in the museum. He took me to see two of his pieces on display. Such extraordinary talent! Falahy Mohamad is an architect, a textile design student devoted to his batik tradition, an artist learning about natural dyes. His batik deployed intricate geometry combined with the ‘buketan’ or flower bouquets that, since colonial times, have come to characterize the batik of the Pekalongan area. Most important, he is an aspiring batik maker and he faces an economic system that is hostile to art, particularly of the craft nature. He asked me for advice and I felt the enormity of his question. Two young colleagues were with him facing the same challenge and hoping for a golden bullet.

 

I suggested that they band together, make a community, survive through collective strength and action. Going it alone is not an answer. Later when I was interviewed for the batik television channel I was clear that a tradition that was ancient and vibrant should not be allowed by a government to suffer and die because of an economic blip. The young man’s appeal rests heavily on my heart. I know that an art form cannot survive on alms and donations and an occasional sale; it has to be part of the fabric of society. Is his only avenue for survival the high-end art market for rich collectors? Both of his batik pieces on display took two years to make and they reveal spectacular talent. Artists such as this deserve a prize and a path, not looming destitution. These are the treasures of humankind. More of Lim Po Him’s tears should be of joy.

Thank you to Arief Dirhamsyah of Pekalongan Heritage and the Pekalongan Batik Museum for putting on the informal discussion about batik on Sunday 29 January, and for including me in it. One of Stephanie Belfrage's batiks was in the Museum show about the Chinese tradition of batik in Pekalongan. I had returned this batik to the public collection, at her behest, some 7 years earlier. For a more complete account of this history, see MJA Nashir's writing. 

 

Batik Day 2021: Leading the World of Fashion

 For awhile now I have engaged with various groups to work on ‘the problem of fashion’, an out-of-control industry that over-produces, pollutes, and emits life-threatening amounts of carbon dioxide. For decades I have argued for a more inclusive definition of fashion, or better said perhaps, for the recognition that the fashion behemoth that we currently know and reify, is just a culturally-specific narcissistic fat-cat that needs to be cut down to size to allow the clothing expressions of all other cultures to flourish once again. How to accomplish this goal?

This entails, on the one hand, helping people recognize that ‘fashion’ is not a ‘thing’ out there, but a creation of our own doing. The real human universal is not ‘fashion’, but creativity in dressing, regardless of how you adorn your body, regardless of your cultural medium. That is what we have in common with all other people, not a globalized industry.

 

On the other hand, the task entails helping people to recognize that the clothing produced by the industrial system is an expression of deep psychic poverty and wafer thin superficiality, all in the interests, perhaps, of deflecting our thoughts away from the great harm that it is doing to our planet. It is a status commodity and pretends to help us construct dreams and myths about who we would like to be in this world, but in reality most is cheap, disposable junk. Coming from the West, where cheap, disposable clothing has been normalized, it is challenging to figure out how to convey to people just how deeply meaningful clothing in other cultures can be, has been, and sometimes still is. 

 

Today I saw an image that captures the essence of what I would like to convey: a poster about Javanese batik inspired by the spiritual and philosophical essence of batik. My photographer and artist friend in Central Java, Mas MJA Nashir, sent the image to me in a chat this morning. Memayu hayuning bawana means laku secara spiritual, to perform in a spiritual way, he explained. Literally it means to ‘beautify this beautiful world’ (mempercantik bumi yg cantik). The beautifying that he meant runs so deep. It means to perform in a beautiful way towards the earth, towards nature and towards life (terhadap Bumi, terhadap Alam, terhadap Kehidupan). Life for the Javanese, for the batik maker, for the batik lover, is beauty.  The root word in memayu and hayuning, is the same, he pointed out; it is ayu, ‘beautiful’. Memayu is ‘to make beautiful’  (Hayu=Ayu=Cantik . Memayu = membuat cantic). 

 

“I always remember Mas Ismoyo saying that memayu hayuning bawana is the essence of batik for the Javanese,” Mas Nashir confides. Mas Ismoyo is a mutual friend and master batiker, living in Yogyakarta, whose studio has been an inspiration for Nashir and me for more than a decade, a place where we go for stimulating conversations and to get in touch with spiritual roots. I always leave that Eden in a spirit of peace and wonder. 

 

I perceive their batik workshops as teaching the essence of the environmental movement: loving the earth and all creatures in it. This is what inspires all the batiks of Mas Ismoyo and his beautiful wife, a master batiker in her own right, Mbak Nia.

 

Mas Nashir has a small patio behind his house. During the corona lockdown he has been fixing it up and collecting plants to decorate it. “I made this photograph this morning and used it in my poster to celebrate Batik Day,” he wrote.

His poster is inspired by Mas Ismoyo’s words and the workshops that he gives with Mbak Nia, by the plants that Nashir tends, by Nashir's love for batik – both his mother and his brother are involved in the batik world – and not least, by his cultural activism. Nashir’s soul is dedicated to memayu hayuning bawana; it is what he longs for in this world of rapacious business, this Anthropocene. He knows that Anthropos can do the opposite, can beautify instead of making sacrifice zones of peoples, cultures, nature and even our future.

Suddenly tears prick my eyes. The penny drops.  This poster shares what I would like to convey to people about indigenous clothing traditions of other cultures. Depth, beauty and going further than ‘doing no harm’: doing good to planet, nature and people; living a spiritually true life; aspiring to beauty.  To wear beauty, to create beauty, to insist on beauty. That is when you have desirable clothing. 

 

 

 

(blog dedicated to Sara Arnold, who understands)

The Batak Textile Heritage Saujana Conservation and Sustainable Development OR When Batak Textiles were Honey and How They can Change the World

I delivered the webinar 'The Batak Textile Heritage Saujana Conservation and Sustainable Development' on 21 May 2021 as part of the 4th International e-Public Forum on Intangible Cultural Heritage and Sustainable Development. This, in turn, was part of the 2021 INTERNATIONAL ONLINE SUMMER COURSE ON JOGJA WORLD BATIK CITY: Balancing Creative Economy and Heritage Saujana Conservation to Foster Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Why, you might wonder, is a seminar on Batak included in a webinar on batik?

Batak and batik differ by only one letter, but there is a world of difference between the two.
o Batik is a textile decoration technique practised mainly on Java, and
o Batak is an ethnic group in the province of North Sumatra that weaves and does not make batik.

There is certainly difference between Batak textiles and batik textiles, but there is also similarity.
All of the hundreds of textile traditions in the island archipelago of Indonesia have similarities and differences; they relate to each other like variations on a theme.
To my mind, the entire Nusantara textile heritage deserves UNESCO recognition, because all these textile traditions are related to one another and reference each other like a single ‘set’ of material culture. They form a whole.
I applaud the wisdom of the organizers of this forum for including a comparative perspective on batik.


UN Sustainable Development Goals

This seminar focuses on the Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. The Sustainable Development Goals represent a remarkable step in the history of global relations. In 2015 the United Nations agreed to a global partnership to improve human lives and at the same time to protect the environment, through sustainable development. The date for achieving the goals was set at 2030. I understand that today’s seminar is one initiative of a member country to explore how to achieve these goals. I applaud this intention.


Detail of a Batak pinunsaan textile

The textile crafts of Indonesia represent an extremely valuable resource in the global attempt to live within planetary ecological boundaries. 

My position is that craft traditions present alternatives to the dominant global systems of production and capitalism, which have brought our planet into a precarious ecological position, with global warming, and over-exploitation of planetary resources and people.

Map of Indonesia

2017 Paris Climate Accord – a UN agreement

After the 2015 SDG agreement came the legally binding 2017 Paris Agreement to stay within 1.5 degrees of global warming, by peaking greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible to achieve a climate neutral world by 2050. This agreement implies and demands rapid and revolutionary economic and social transformation in the Global North, where most of the emission are caused.

Failure to meet the terms of this agreement are predicted to have dire climate consequences that will cost governments, including Indonesia, a great deal of money and will hurt most those who are least responsible for the CO2 emissions. Think of the cyclone earlier this year in Eastern Indonesia which threatened the lives of many weavers and the viability of their textile crafts. Think, too, of the corona pandemic which is believed to be a result of compromised ecosystems.



Degrowth Movement

The Degrowth movement has been building since the 1970s when scientists recognized the ecological limits to growth and it is becoming increasingly recognized and established.

It centres on a complex problem:
1. Capitalism requires growth to function
2. The Exponential growth of capitalism means that the terms of the Paris Agreement will not and cannot be met
3. Sustainable development, when it is based on capitalist growth, might be growth but it is not sustainable. 

Simply put, there is a problem when the SDGs encourage capitalist growth because this, precisely, is what leads to environmental degradation and social inequality.

Hence specialists are proposing degrowth as a way for the world to become more equitable whereby production and consumption remain within the ecological carrying capacity of the earth.

In other words, it is time to see the world turned on its head.

The word ‘development’, once a central, almost universal goal, has become problematic due to social consequences and the limited capacities of the planet.

Since the colonial era, craft has been seen as a vehicle to enable the poor to climb out of poverty. Revising craft for income generation is currently a predominant economic model for so-called ‘craft development’. Also in Indonesia.

However, recent research shows that capitalist growth creates poverty; it does not relieve poverty. Poverty in the world has never been as great as it is today. Growth of GDP does not imply improved well-being. (see Jason Hickel)
This means that the global economic system requires rehabilitation; the dominance of its economic and productions systems is currently a most pressing global problem.


Batak backstrap loom being manipulated by Ompu Elza, br. Sinaga. (2019)

Because capitalist growth creates poverty, environmental destruction and is exploitative there is a serious problem when craft is transformed into a vehicle for economic growth: I am speaking of faster looms, greater production, hierarchical workshop settings with a boss, and independent craft makers being transformed into labourers.

ATBM (semi-mechanized) loom being manipulated by a Batak weaver in Pematang Siantar. (ca. 2010)

Indigenous craft production systems are alternative models for business and industry. Indigenous production systems may offer strategies of sustainable production and social equality. Rather than conceptualizing craft as lagging in terms of global economic development, craft may be treasured for the kinds of models that it provides for alternative and sustainable economic and production systems. Then the challenge for craft activists becomes how to ensure that indigenous craft systems survive and thrive and are honoured rather than transformed into yet another capitalist activity. 

To explain this, I would like to speak briefly (given the short time available), about the position of Batak textiles, in the physical and social environments of the Batak people.

The social role of hand-woven Batak textiles is an example of what industrial, post-colonial society is looking for -- and longing for -- when it aspires to become sustainable.

Indonesian people I think would all agree that the textiles of their ethnic communities are flags of identity. Each community has unique and characteristic textile designs.


detail of Batak Bintang Maratur textile

In the Batak area the weaving arts are in severe decline and much textile knowledge has been lost. As a consequence, many Batak people are not aware that the identity-function of the cloth relates to much more than just how it looks. It also relates to how the cloth was made and used. Because time is short, I will restrict myself to brief aspects of how it used to be made.

Ompu ni Sihol, surrounded by her grandchildren, is making indigo dye. (1980)

Batak textiles are like honey. A bee collects pollen from the flowers in the near vicinity and makes honey. A weaver, in this case Ompu ni Sihol, is like a bee. She assembles materials from the near environment and her honey is an ancient clothing tradition.

Batak textiles originally represented the near environment including:

1. Various kinds of wood to make the weaving equipment
2. Grasses used in weaving, dyeing and starching
3. Plants for dyes
4. Local fibres for the yarn, including banana and a kind of nettle as well as cotton
5. Water next to the village serving in all of the processes
The indigenous textiles were made using local materials and local knowledge, and stayed within local ecological capacities.

Here Op ni Sihol is using local, wild indigo, dye pots made from local clay, and the water flowing beside her village. She has transported the indigo in handwoven mats made from local grasses.

Her grandchildren are helping and learning. Call it capacity building, cultural survival, community building, valuing of the elderly, transmission of cultural heritage, or the indigenous education system.

Currently, Batak textiles are no longer like honey.
1. Fibres and yarns are imported from elsewhere; dyes are imported from elsewhere; equipment is imported from elsewhere. All of these Imports imply CO2 emissions for transportation and they put the Batak people out of work. They therefore also imply loss of skills.
2. The imported synthetic dyes and yarns are made of hydrocarbons, and these hydrocarbons are obtained from sacrifice zones, areas that are destroyed for the sake of economic growth.
Once ecologically sound, Batak weavings today represent the opposite of what they once were.
They no longer represent the homelands/local environment.
They represent pollution because they do not biodegrade.
They no longer support the community, and no longer use local equipment and heritage know-how.

Furthermore, the semi-mechanical loom is utilized in a different system of production. Weaving on a backstrap loom in the village helped to create an integrated social life. Local know-how is activated and shared when weaving was done. Precisely this kind of community integration is being lost due to industrial style production. There is loss of skill, knowledge of local environment falls into decline, local wisdom is lost, and the position of the elderly in society declines and there is the attendant gap between generations.
3. a production hierarchy occurs whereby the weavers become labourers in an owner’s or a designer’s set-up, instead of continuing as the independent artisans they once were. The new loom constructs inequality instead of community. When weaving produced integrated community life, cultural and historical identity were also produced.

The kind of cultural integration that I am describing runs very, very deep. If we look at what the Batak weaver makes, she is also demonstrating, through her cloth, her view of the universe.

  

I have depicted here the basic structure of Batak textiles. Western education teaches us to emphasize the patterning of a textile when searching for its meaning, but this emphasis on motifs and the visual is a colonial legacy. For the Batak people, basic composition was important for the whole cloth and all of its component parts. Not just motifs, but their  arrangement in the cloth. That basic structure had everything to do with how Bataks understood their universe was structured.

Traditional Batak textiles were always divided into three parts if they had a role to play in adat, or ritual. A cloth had two similar sides and a centre. That same 2:1 relationship was found in all the parts of a cloth. Note how the supplementary warp and weft patterns have two similar sides and a centre that is different. The structure is expressed in colour, technique and patterning.

The Batak loved textiles that elaborated a single theme in a complex way, so that the smallest design feature was homologous with the largest design feature. That was the Batak aesthetic.







Supplementary warp pattern













Supplementary weft and ikat patterns

The understanding of the structure of the universe spilled over into daily life: 

• In the kinship system, there are three groups: Wife-Giver, Wife-taker, Ego Clan
• The universe consisted of three layers: Upper World, Under World, the Middle World
• The three Gods in the upper world were represented by the three Batak colours: red, white, black/blue.
• Ritual, music, seating arrangements, village layout, house layout, house carving and colouring, all have that 3-part unity that is repeated and repeated. 

Not only the recapitulation of basic structures was satisfying for the Batak, but also increasingly complex elaborations of that arrangement.

The origins of this 3-part design unity can be found the culture history of the Batak, and appear to be rooted in early Austronesian influence, early connections with other parts of the archipelago (Timorese textiles are particularly striking for their similarity in general layout with Batak textiles), and early Hindu-Buddhist influence (still evident in sari layout). Their textile design, in other words, also reveals or reflects Batak culture history.

Design is community in yet another sense. The textiles were designed for the community, by the community. The Batak did not have ‘specialized designers’. That is a colonial invention. They did have talented weavers, some more talented than others. Designs emerged, developed and changed through the collective activities of weavers within their community. Designs grew incrementally, which explains why each ethnic group has strongly characteristic designs. The whole community approved or rejected the innovations informally, so that when new designs were accepted, this was a community decision. Furthermore, the adat community decided when and how a design could be deployed ritually. And on top of that, the full range of textiles design types represented the full range of social categories within the community. So social organization was reflected in the full range of designs. Clearly, textile design represented the whole society and was the work of the whole society.

So, what is this weaver weaving? She is weaving life. She is weaving together her physical environment, reproducing her intellectual universe, constructing community, enacting and depicting her kinship system, displaying her culture history, learning and expanding and passing on ancient skills.... Her identity has many, many layers, variously and deeply significant. The complexity of her work is spectacular, far greater than the sum of its parts.

It was therefore unthinkable that her work would become obsolete or ‘disposable’ like the commodities of industrial production. That would be throwing away her entire life, all that was precious and meaningful to her. There was no waste in her clothing system.

These multiple layers of meaning disappear when a piece of craft becomes a commodity representing only a single value: money. Then, the only value it has for the maker is at the moment of exchange, or when she gets paid as a labourer. This represents a considerable loss of social integration, cohesion, pride, know-how, uniqueness and on and on.

I would like to lay the goal of sustainable development beside the traditional Batak textile craft, when it was still like honey.  I have intimated that traditional Batak textile production already meets the goal of sustainability. The definition of 'development' is problematic, however.  Upon being used for capitalist development, that same tradition becomes unsustainable. And this is what we are currently facing. The word ‘development’ is problematic when it involves industrialization, and commoditization and all the consequences thereof for people, culture, communities and planet.

Attempts to use the Batak weaving arts as a source of income generation have led to an expansion of CO2 emissions and waste, as well as poverty for weavers, loss of know-how and community, de-skilling – all the things that I have mentioned above.

I propose that it would be prudent to safeguard the possibility of indigenous expressions of local genius. I propose that indigenous craft (clothing production) systems be recognized -- and also treasured – as models of sustainable production. The whole world, and certainly the Global North, needs these models. Craft can lead the world.

Indigenous Batak textiles show: 
o how goods can be valued socially (when they are not commoditized)
o how they can produce social harmony and justice (without the egregious exploitation that has resulted in the world from the capitalist system)
o how cultural pluriversality functions 
o How local textile traditions embody alternative values whereby community well being rather than money occupies the central position.

Some Resources

Degrowth Movement

https://www.degrowth.info/en/a-history-of-degrowth/

 

Hickel, Jason. 2021. ‘Extreme poverty isn’t natural, it’s created’ (Blog March 21)

https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2021/3/28/extreme-poverty-isnt-natural-it-is-created

 

Hickel, Jason. Growth is Killing Us.

https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/economic-growth-is-killing-us

 

Hickel, Jason. 2018. The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and it Solution. Windmill Books.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/111/1113531/the-divide/9781786090034.html

 

Hickell, Jason. 2020. The Great Unravelling: Inequality. Webinar: The Postcarbon Institute

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rGvz0ibPMI

 

If continued growth is not sustainable, would its opposite – degrowth – be the right alternative? EOI (Escuela de organización industsrial) blog.

https://www.eoi.es/blogs/guidopreti/2014/01/10/if-continued-growth-is-not-sustainable-would-its-opposite-degrowth-be-the-right-alternative/

 

Robra, Ben and Heikkurinen, Pasi. 2019. ‘Degrowth and the Sustainable Development Goals’ In Decent Work and Economic Growth. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Springer, Cham

 

SDG Index Finds No European Country on Track, Green Deal Brings Potential

http://sdg.iisd.org/news/sdg-index-finds-no-european-country-on-track-green-deal-brings-potential/

 

Sustainable Development, Poverty Eradication and Reducing Inequalities 

https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/05/SR15_Chapter5_Low_Res.pdf

 

United Nations Climate Change website

https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement

 

UN Sustainable Development Agenda 2030. – do the SDGs fit??

https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda

Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development

UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs

https://www.un.org/ga/search/view_doc.asp?symbol=A/RES/70/1&Lang=ETop of Form

 

Striking Gold

It is easy to imagine the Pekalongan of yesteryear when the Dutch were still here. There are still so many of their buildings: the home and office of the Resident, the “societeit” (soos) where they used to gather to satisfy their social needs, the church and so on. The city centre, now a huge traffic circle built around a park, is still intact; it must have made a glorious and majestic impression.

The newly-furbished excellent Pekalongan Museum is in an old VOC building. The floors are original, so are the ceilings. Even the bars over the windows of the room where the money was imprisoned are still there. 

The curator, Zahir, came up to me with his black eyes flashing mystically and said, “The money is still here. Perhaps the Dutch hid it under the floor.” I disabused him of his fantasy. “The walls of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam are decorated with gold purchased with colonial money,” I said. Zahir was only partly joking, however. He is intensely aware of the “value added” of the beautiful museum building. Precisely its authenticity, that it has been maintained but not overhauled, means that the building has a particular aura, like a whiff of something that half awakens a memory that cannot be defined. “This building is gold,” said the perceptive and articulate Zahir. “In any other building, this museum would be so much less.”

Alas, the home and workshop of Eliza van Zuylen have been demolished.

Zahir was captivating. His passion for batik was almost palpable. While I stood gazing at a beautiful copy of a Van Zuylen batik with pastel colours, he came up to me and his black eyes started to flash again in that mysterious way. “All of the original Van Zuylen batiks have been bought up by collectors outside the country. The batiks are now unaffordable. We have none left here in Pekalongan. Maybe there are a few in private homes, but the museum has none.” In a nutshell, Zahir had expressed one of the great ironies of this grand Kota Batik (City of Batik).

The next day, my host Arif Dirhamzah, took me to the computer office of a friend, named Zakaria. He teaches batik producers to access international markets using the internet. We sat at the screen of one of his computers and mas Arif showed me the photographs of Pekalongan batiks that he had found on the KITLV website. There were several from the Vlisco collection in The Netherlands, so we shifted to their website, and then I showed them the on-line collection of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. At one point Arif stopped when he found the name of a local producer in the documentation of a cloth. “Who is that person again?” he asked his friend. Zakaria reacted with amazement and peered at the cloth. “That was my grandfather,” he said and started to recite the names of several generations of his family. As we were about to leave, Zakaria said, “With this visit, I feel like I have struck gold. I cannot tell you how much this discovery means to me.” “Keep going with your discovery of museum collections,” I said. “There are more people in Pekalongan who will get that same feeling when they see the cloths of their ancestors. Perhaps you have struck gold in more than one way. Think of what your computer can mean to all descendants!”

Arif organized a dinner party around my visit. It took place in the gracious home of Bapak and Ibu Fatchiyah, a large Pekalongan batik producers. Mas Arif invited a remarkable collection of people who could offer memories or insights into the Van Zuylen batiks. Some brought textiles from their homes to show and I saw how deftly the people unfurled them and held them up, how they spoke the same language when discussing the cloths, how admiring their were of good designs. Again and again there were expressions of regret that the Van Zuylen pieces had been almost entirely bought up by people living outside the city and the country. There was little tangible evidence on which to rest their conflicting claims about Van Zuylen colour, dyes and designs. “Outside Indonesia, the collections are complete,” they said over and over again.

At the end of the evening it was my turn to say a few words. “We stand at the beginning of a new era,” I said. “The past was the era of collecting. Now is the era of sharing. The Tropenmuseum and other museums may have many textiles but these textiles do not live the way that I have seen them living here tonight. They are stored carefully, however, so that they will last. They are a priceless resource that can be consulted. They are a public resource. In this age of internet access is no longer as challenging as it used to be. I hope that you will think of them as your own collections. You can “revive” those museum collections lying “dead” in their storage chambers and make them live again, just like the cloths in this room. These collections are pots of gold waiting to be mined by you.