Human Machine Fellowship 2021

Vita

Natasha Tontey is an artist and graphic designer living and working in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Her artistic practice predominantly explores the fictional accounts of the history and myths surrounding “manufactured fear”. Tontey observes possibilities of other futures projected not from the perspective of major and established institutions but the subtle and personal struggles of outcasted entities and beings. Her work has been shown at transmediale 2021 and Kyoto Experiment 2021 amongst others. In 2020 she received the HASH Award from ZKM and Akademie Schloss-Solitude.

Residency

For the Human Machine Fellowship I will continue my research on ancient technology, healing practice, and philosophy of machine in the Minahasa cosmology in North Sulawesi, Indonesia. For centuries in the Minahasan culture, technological apparatus for ritualistic purposes and healing processes has been their epistemological attempt to maintain the equilibrium amongst human and nonhuman kin. For Minahasan, technology is a pharmakon; it’s the poison but also the cure. During the fellowship, I’m planning to produce new work that questions what technology and mechanisation mean for Minahasan society in the past, present and future.

Member: Siegfried Zielinski