GARDEN OF MEMORIES

On September 28, 2018, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, resulting in a tsunami and soil liquefaction in Palu, Sigi, and Donggola. 4340 victims lost their lives as a result (BNPB).

Balaroa National Housing in Palu was among the hardest hit places where soil liquefaction caused the area to become a mass grave; it appears that 1747 homes fell. Liquefaction is a phenomenon in which the strength and stiffness of a soil are reduced by earthquake shaking or other rapid loading.

In 2022, a few days before the disaster's fourth commemoration, I visited the deserted Balaroa. The area, which was formerly overrun with abandoned ruins, has now transformed into a forested landscape and is serving as a burial ground for the victims who disappeared there. Through the Garden of Memories, I depicted the families’ grief, trauma, and the memory of their missing children caused by soil liquefaction.

According to the Society for Research in Child Development, natural disasters present a significant and growing threat to the well-being of children. Every year, 175 million children globally are expected to be affected by natural disasters, including floods, cyclones, droughts, heatwaves, severe storms, and earthquakes.

TECHNIQUE: The cyanotype method is used to produce the Garden of Memories. The project consists of two different types of images: the first is a landscape I photographed in Balaroa in 2022, and the second is a skeleton leaf-exposed family archive of children who have gone missing. I dyed the cyanotype images with boiling dried leaves and jasmine to evoke associations with the grief of the landscape.