Ghosts of workers lost to corporate violence in Jakarta and Korea; a future media archaeologist picking through Indonesia’s fossilized e-waste; sand miners under the watch of demonic paramilitaries at the foot of a volcano — these are just some of the worlds conjured by artist-filmmaker Riar Rizaldi. Defamiliarizing observational documentary with the conventions of the science fiction and horror genres — and taking a range of striking formal approaches to do so — Rizaldi’s films dissect capitalism’s toxic entanglements with technology and the environment.
Rizaldi’s latest project, Mirage, is to be a series, with a new episode made every year. Melding the philosophies of sixteenth-century Sufi mystics with the aesthetics of popular science documentaries, it reminds us that scientific rationalism is just one lens through which the world can be understood. Mirage – Eigenstate, the second installment in the series, was developed during a residency at London’s Gasworks, and continues to explore the meeting of scientific authority and spiritual belief to interrogate who gets to tell the story of human progress. I caught up with Rizaldi at Gasworks to discuss the range of recent work that led up to his latest show.
Theo Rollason: The first film of yours I saw — which made a huge impression on me — was Notes from Gog Magog [2022], a ghost story about corporate capitalism taking place between Jakarta and Korea. Where did that idea come from?
Riar Rizaldi: I have a friend working in a port who told me the story of a ghost living in a logistics ship. I was fascinated by how this ghost could appear in one of these ships, these things that move from one country to another. In my mind, there were geographical boundaries to ghosts; a ghost that exists in Indonesia surely doesn’t leave Indonesia. My friend told me that these stories emerge because there are a lot of worker accidents: people get crushed by the containers, thrown into the sea, all kinds of stuff. There’s a lot of unfinished business of the souls of people who die just because they’re doing their labor.
Years later, I had this opportunity to do a residency at MMCA in Seoul. During my time there, I became fascinated by Samsung. The company is an entity larger than some nation states, and in Korea they basically run everything: they have hospitals, they do funerals, they even have a film company. One of the founders [Lee Byung-chul] was very much into the occult, or at least superstition. The supernatural is something that is very much embedded in Korean culture, and I started to see an international connection between these two stories.
While I was doing this residency, I made a friend who worked as a graphic designer for what Samsung calls its Employee Assistance Program. It’s basically a place where you have psychiatrists on 24-hour standby to answer phone calls from workers who want to kill themselves. They also do things like mental health workshops. I started to think, if the story from the Indonesian port is about physical violence, then there’s something here relating to the mental violence of corporations. You’re not necessarily working on the assembly line at Samsung, so your type of horror is more psychological: working overtime, the pressure to perform well, and so on.
TR: I’m interested by how you use the ghost story to explore the spectrality or monstrosity of capitalism itself. There’s all this academic literature going back to Marx which discusses exactly this, but I wonder how useful those frameworks are for you?
RR: I’m actually not so much interested in the symbolism of capitalist horror, because my starting point is actual ghost stories that come up from actual labor, the many people who really are working in these precarious conditions. It’s more about the literal sense in which they’re seeing ghosts, or at least encountering something horrific. When I spoke to my Korean friend in this Employee Assistance Program, I asked her, do you have a ghost story in your building? Yes, she said, and told me about a ghost in the basement. Ghosts aren’t necessarily only a symbol here, they’re actually taking part in this capitalist society.
TR: I’m always suspicious of this phrase in English, “an accident waiting to happen,” because surely it’s not really an accident if we anticipate it as an inevitability. I’m wondering if you’ve seen Radu Jude’s recent film [Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World]?
RR: Oh yeah, that’s also about working accidents. I haven’t seen that one yet.
TR: There are some shared concerns about working conditions and corporate propaganda.
RR: There’s this long history of cinema being used as factory propaganda for working accidents. They’re usually very gory. That’s the reason I use graphic imagery in my film. Although it’s AI-generated, it’s inspired by how real working accidents are treated. I was in one textile factory in Indonesia where they displayed actual fingers in a vitrine in front of the factory, with a caption saying something like “beware of your hands.” It was intense.
TR: It’s ultimately about pushing the responsibility onto the worker, right?
RR: Definitely. They don’t want to cover health insurance, for example, so they make this stuff as cover, to avoid real responsibility if someone dies doing work. It’s like when you apply for a job as a shipworker, you have to sign something saying you’re aware that you might die. The history of working accident cinema runs parallel to the history of capitalism, basically. They want to run away from any responsibility to human life.
TR: How did AI make its way into this project?
RR: When I was researching Samsung, they were developing this new AI technology aimed at wellness and companionship. Samsung doesn’t want to eradicate their Employee Assistance Program, but they do want to improve the wellness of their workers and, of course, the consumer, because they recognize this emerging mental health crisis across society as a whole.
Using AI is a new tactic for an entity like Samsung to deal with working accidents. But, of course, they’re trying to find a shortcut to solve the problem rather than dismantling everything, thinking about what the structural problem is. That’s the reason I use AI in the work. It’s to ask, could this technology actually work? Or can a technology like that only offer us more horror?
TR: In the older model you mentioned, the working accident videos, violence is right at the fore. But now, all that violence is completely repressed and its place is taken by the sleek language of mental wellbeing, where they don’t really say anything. I think it’s interesting you put the violence back into it.
RR: These modern companies are always speaking in euphemisms. They never use the word “violence” or even “accident” any more. In general, I’m interested in how violence is used to control.
TR: In a few years, you’ll be easily able to create realistic-looking videos using AI. But for now, I think, there’s still something amazing about the potential for AI moving images where things go wrong, where objects on the screen can unnaturally morph into one another, where there’s no boundaries between a person and a shipping container. It’s amazingly creative, and it’s horrifying. And it can’t be separated from the capitalistic bent of the companies who develop and control this tech. How does that all this play on your mind as an artist using AI?
RR: It was very exciting when all this uncanny AI imagery cropped up in late 2020. I’m a big fan of all the ‘90s weird Lovecraftian biotech stuff — the video game Doom, for example, or the earlier story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” [by Harlan Ellison]. I like this whole idea of mixing organic life and machines with AI.
When I made Notes from Gog Magog and Fossilis [2023], I was using one of the first versions of Stable Diffusion. You could do pretty much whatever you wanted with these images. But now, because there’s been a lot of problems with child pornography and graphic violence and stuff like that — which is important to talk about — they’ve implemented censorship. You can no longer generate these kinds of degenerate images. So I’m kind of lucky, I guess, to have been able to have made this.
Now, of course, it’s easy to make almost realistic-looking AI images. Although some of them honestly aren’t there yet. Hands are still the main problem. There’s less hands in the image database, so the AI is forced to imagine hands from other body parts.
TR: Those mangled hands often end up being the only interesting part of an image.
RR: Exactly!
TR: Your film Fossilis also uses AI, alongside live action and CG environments. The central idea here is about what it means to excavate technology, and you approach it from the perspective of an archaeologist from our future. As an archivist, I was particularly interested by this idea of software — or even whole virtual worlds — that can’t be accessed anymore, because its hardware has become defunct. How did you come to this project?
RR: It was a commission work, but it had been on my mind for some time. I had done a project [Kasiterit, 2019] on Bangka Island in Indonesia, where a lot of tin is produced. Tin is very important for screen-based technology. While I was researching, I found a huge landfill of e-waste there. This was interesting: the tin that was produced on Bangka Island was going outside, becoming a Samsung phone or something, and then returning as detritus, as e-waste.
I kept thinking, what if this waste became fossilized? There’s this Italian writer, Laura Tripaldi, who’s written about how the idea of a fossil is always something hard, how you never find any kind of fossils that relate to something soft. Maybe some animals did weaving or some other kind of cultural activity, and that’s just disappeared. You’d never know the actual history of a culture during that time, because only the hard materials survive. Then I started to think about the dichotomy of hardware and software, and how the e-waste I found on Bangka Island contains materials both hard and soft. I imagined this scenario of a future archaeologist looking back into the 21st century, but she doesn’t have the capabilities to access our software — our archive, our memory.
Fossilis was a work commissioned by Hyundai, another company from Korea. They’re very into creating electric cars and most of the batteries also come from extractive activity in Indonesia. Now, I know I can’t just say, Hyundai, you’re doing bad thing. But I’m trying to speak in a subtle way to how this fascination with electric cars doesn’t solve anything, you’re just creating a new product that will be eventually become fossils. You’re not like making something sustainable. But it’s very, very subtle, because I know I have to deal with the money from them.
TR: There’s also questions of repurposing hardware, less out of environmental concern than practical necessity. Your film takes aesthetic cues from the cyberpunk genre, but it also stresses that these still-fashionable ideas about repurposing or “retrofitting” are actually just a material reality for a lot of people.
RR: I grew up quite close to what in Indonesia we call a “cannibal market”. We have a lot of these e-waste landfills, most of the stuff comes from Europe and China. There are these scavengers who will take broken TVs, refrigerators, phones, tape recorders, and then they will cannibalize all of this into, say, a working transistor, and then sell it. So it is similar to ’80s cyberpunk, this repurposing of technology.
Of course, there’s also this whole debate around the right to repair. It’s something that I’ve been putting a lot in my work. I mean, yes, I see it for sure as an environmental concern. But because I grew up near these cannibal markets, it’s much more about the necessity of living, how people survive by repurposing trash.
TR: Am I right in thinking you repurposed materials for the sets of the film?
RR: Yeah, everything. The sets were made from material used for a large film production. The tube was a septic tank — we had to clean it like crazy. The 3D animation was from my friend, a game designer. He has this tropical material that he didn’t use for his game, we used it. For the AI section, there is this huge dataset called ImageNet where you can check which images have never been used to generate AI imagery. I looked for unused images in the dataset, anything related to Indonesia, tropics, and e-waste. We were trying to use the ideology of the cannibal market in our film production.
TR: Your first feature, Monisme [2023], was in gestation for a while. Can you talk about that process, and how the project changed over those years?
RR: 11 years ago, my partner and I moved to a volcano in Java Island. It was the cheapest place we could get, and also the most dangerous. The volcano is very active. It’s called Merapi. Since I moved there, I started to realize that my neighborhood has a different understanding of the volcano. One of my neighbors a couple of houses away from our studio is a volcanologist. His understanding of a volcano is totally different than, let’s say, the neighbors 100 meters away from my house, who are sand miners. And then if I go maybe 500 meters uphill from my place, there’s what we call stateless people, people who don’t have an ID because they are against state formation. These people see the mountain as their God. I was starting to think about the dynamics of different kinds of worldviews, and how they don’t really interact with each other. I decided I wanted to make a film with them.
We started with an observational approach. Obviously, when you make a film like this, people aren’t happy with it. They think, oh, you’re a journalist, you’re going to show us as a caricature. And maybe that’s true. So I started to ask the people in my neighborhood whether we could write the script together. When we first met at this workshop, we were confused about what kind of story we wanted to make. I had an idea to ask what films we all watch, so that we could have a cinematic lingua franca. 90% of them said horror films from the ’80s and ’90s. Living in rural areas in Indonesia, you were exposed to these kind of horror films, full of brutal scenes, which were pretty much state propaganda films. I made a film essay talking about that [Ghosts Like Us, 2020]. So we started writing a script for a horror film. I said to them, you know, as an artist, I have also my own ego, and I don’t want to make a straight-up horror film.
TR: And they agreed?
RR: They agreed. Writing the script together allowed them to speak about the concerns they cannot speak about in public. For example, the volcanologists can’t just say that the world will end soon because a volcano will mega-erupt and it will change the climate and the population will decline. We have this long history of volcanoes in Indonesia changing the trajectory of history. We had a Krakatoa eruption that altered the climate even in Europe. Edvard Munch’s The Scream looks like that because the color of the sky in Europe was changing. Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein during the period that Tambora erupted [the so-called “Year Without a Summer”].
Obviously, the volcanologists can’t say publicly that this could happen again. They’re not certain, and it will make people anxious. But they wanted to talk about it through their characters. The same thing happened with the sand miners, who wanted to say they don’t really care if the mountain erupts, it’s good for them in terms of producing more sand. The stateless mystic people wanted to talk more about their spiritual relationship with the mountain.
It took us like six years to produce, and added together we have around 180 hours footage. In the beginning, we had 14 people editing, it became ten, and then six, and finally four, and these four people decided on the cut. Many involved weren’t happy with the cut because it’s too artsy, so we made a horror cut for them. Everyone was happy. It’s my attempt to understand the volcano, as well as state violence and violence in general.
TR: Militarism plays a part in a lot of your work. In Monisme, we see how the state pays off paramilitary organizations not to talk about water contamination from volcanic ash. In this film, are paramilitaries an extension of the state, synonymous with the state, or something else?
RR: Indonesia was under a military dictatorship for 32 years, and during that time many people wanted to become soldiers but couldn’t. They formed these paramilitaries to do extortion, stuff like that. There are a lot of people who don’t want to pay taxes, for example, and they will go to these people. The paramilitary is kind of synonymous with the state, but at the same time it’s an extension of the state. It’s still active even since the end of the military dictatorship. They live in their own universe because they think of themselves as having this position of power, when in fact they don’t have that much official power. But the state lets them roam freely because they are very useful.
Of course, we dealt with paramilitaries when we were making this film. They are the ones who organize the sand mining; the company needs them to suppress journalists, activists, and even scientists who are maybe too vocal. The paramilitaries roam between different worldviews, and these different worldviews have different understandings of paramilitaries in turn. We also have real paramilitaries in our film. The most unethical part of the film is that we were actually deceiving them to be part of it.
TR: You can see the difficult relationship the film crew had with them in the finished film.
RR: It was important for me that we say that the film is semi-fiction in order to avoid any possible encounters with these people. But we did have one encounter, which eventually got them involved in the film. When we were shooting in the sand mining area, a guy from the paramilitary found us. He was asking for extortion money, and wanted to know what we were making. I said we were making a film. “Where is this film going to be? Is it on TV?” I told him no, it’s going to be in cinemas. “What kind of film are you making?” Horror. He was asking, “Can I be involved in this film?” I was looking at my producer… do we still have money? “Sure you can be in the film, but can you come tomorrow with 20 more of you? We can pay you like a day fee. You will be in the film, in the cinema, you’ll just be doing marching and stuff.” The next night he texted me and said “yeah, we’ll come tomorrow, we’ll do whatever you say.” The next day they came with 20 people.
We were very aware that we didn’t want to involve the miners or scientists or stateless people in this scene. So we got some theater actors who were involved in the film to shout at the paramilitaries, really playing up the theatrical aspect. We paid them and they left and never asked where the film is. If they ask, I’m showing them the horror version.
TR: Your most recent project, the series Mirage, immediately feels different to what’s come before. For a start, the first episode is done in 2D animation, in a sort of Hanna-Barbera style. How did this come about, and how are you planning on developing the series during your residency at Gasworks?
RR: It actually started with Monisme, working with the stateless mystic people. This term monism is from Greek philosophy, and then it comes into Sufi teaching, because the Sufi during that time were so internationalist. These stateless people are descendants of Sufi mystics, who were historically persecuted because of their understanding of the universe. They believe in what they call Fana, the annihilation of worldly self, or anything that relates what we might call a modern lifestyle. It’s kind of like a radical asceticism. Anyway, they were persecuted, some of them were killed, most of their writing was burned. Many of the survivors ran to the mountains.
I wanted to create something that would still be about their worldviews, but also how we think about modern science, our current attempts to understand reality in terms of “objective truth.” I started rereading some scriptures and other writings of the Sufi mystics from the 15th century. I was thinking, what kind of other objective truth could be potentially generated from a different kind of perspective?
As always, I’m interested in cinema: so, the history of the science film. My idea was to have Mirage be a project 10 years in the making, meaning that every year I produce one video or film that is appropriating science communication in moving images. The first episode is a cartoon because that was what Walt Disney had envisioned in the ’20s, thinking about a tomorrow that is basically related to the advancement of science and technology — flying cars and all that. They wanted to communicate through cartoons for youngsters to understand science. So yeah, that’s why the first episode is that.
My residency here at Gasworks involves making the second episode of Mirage, which is inspired by this BBC-style science film or nature documentary. It’s kind of like James Burke’s Connections or Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, where you have a single scientist as its voice of God. I wanted to ask, how come in pop science there is always one guy — always, of course, a white male — telling you about the history of science and technology? I’m playing with that idea and creating characters who are telling you about the history of science from the Sufi point of view.
TR: Your work feels very Indonesian in character — or, rather, it makes frequent reference to Indonesian history and culture. How has working in London shaped the work? And, more generally, what’s your experience been of exhibiting outside of Indonesia?
RR: My project here in London involves looking at archives I can’t access through the Internet. For example, the BFI has old archives of the Shell Film Unit, 1920s science films, some very interesting animations about science. And there’s the British Library, where I can find Sufi manuscripts from the 15th, 16th centuries. That’s the most “valuable” for my project when I’m here. But, of course, here I’m also exposed to a lot of artists and filmmakers whose films I don’t have access to when I’m in Indonesia, which pushes me to think a lot more about form. I like to be playful with form so I really need to be exposed to different ways of thinking.
Ultimately, all of my subjects are Indonesian because that’s the only thing I know dearly. Obviously, in Indonesia people detect more nuance in the project. When I make films, I’m trying to be… not universal, but accessible to anyone who doesn’t know the history of Indonesia, for example. That’s maybe the reason why I’ve been interested in this more sensorial approach to cinema, why I’m working a lot with immersive sound and weird images.
Even outside of Indonesia, people see themselves reflected in the work. This is something that I like discovering in discussion with audiences from different cultural or political backgrounds, the ways they project themselves into the film. It creates discussion, makes the film more universal.
TR: I’m sure I’ve done lots of projecting in this interview!
RR: Maybe! For me it’s fascinating, listening to what people are projecting of themselves into my films. I’ve shown Monisme in America and it’s totally different to when I’ve shown it in Europe, for example. In Indonesia, I don’t get so many negative reviews saying that my films are mostly didactic, which I do find a lot outside Indonesia. People in Europe can find my work too complex in terms of information, there’s too much information that they never knew before. So then for them it’s didactic. Which is fine for me. I’m very free with whatever people want to think about my work. To be honest, sometimes I don’t even care. Well, I care what people see in my work, but if they find it didactic or think it’s a bad film, then sure, okay.
TR: You’ve taken a range of formal approaches in this new series and across your work as a whole, which always seems to grow quite organically from the subject matter. Are you ever tempted to start with a genre or form, and work backwards?
RR: So far, it’s always been natural. But now I’m starting to develop this new project, a feature film, where the starting point is the true crime genre. I’m interested in the idea of investigation, in the true crime genre using cinema as an apparatus for investigation. I don’t even have the subject yet!
“Riar Rizaldi: Mirage” is showing at Gasworks until 22 December 2024. Rizaldi’s performance lecture Ghosts Like Us will be shown at the ICA on 4 October, alongside screenings of Notes from Gog Magog and Neonatal Unit.
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