writing Archives - Dinda Mundakir

When I read news about architecture becoming the #1 most-coveted faculty at my alma mater, I wondered about what factors could have made it happen. This was despite architectural studies being presented in bad light for a political campaign last year, which illustrated how today’s university graduates have difficulty finding employment. The sentiment was denied (unsatisfactorily, according to me and my peers) by the chairman of the Indonesian Institute of Architects. Perhaps, this is merely testament to how “all press is good press”. [I want to hear your view if you are a student interested in architecture — drop a comment below or reach me elsewhere.]

But it is well-known that the majority of architecture school graduates in Indonesia don’t end up becoming architects. The head of the architecture department at the University of Indonesia stated that only 50-60% of their graduates go on to practice in their field. He did not cite architecture-specific tracer studies, so I would even hazard to say that 60% is an exaggerated percentage. For regions outside of Java-Bali, some schools even state that around 40% of their graduates are not absorbed into the job market at all. Several factors were mentioned to contribute to this problem, including the legal trickeries of the construction system which often hurts architects, as well as the difficulty of completing architectural studies itself.

“Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, even realms that are yet to come.” —Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

To me, writing is the only effective way of thinking. Aren’t there few acts lonelier than thinking to yourself—of absorbing concepts and processing affect in your mind and body? It’s an activity that produces such amorphous fruits of thought, and unfortunately my mind is not rigorous enough to maintain the shape of thoughts for any useful period of time.

Thus: writing is my way of giving tangible shape to thoughts, a documentation of phenomena to come back to later. And like Deleuze said above, writing allows me to identify the gaps and also keep sight of the next frontiers to venture upon.

Even though the ‘death of the author’ suggests that a text is like a mined crystal—removed, like a broken extension of the original creator’s body, then left to be marked and shaped at the mercy of the world—writing as a process is deeply personal work. It requires you to mull inside and outside of yourself at the same time. Nothing exists in a vacuum, not even the most original seeds of thought. Ideas always grow forth from something else. And it is this process of writing that is more valuable to me than achieving a completed text.

So, this space will contain pieces of writing—often short, never perfect—that serve to document my life and identify new frontiers for me. I hope that you can also come across things of interest to you—be it some place or event that I visited, a person I talked to, an idea I mulled on—from which we can find common ground to connect and grow our worlds a little bit more.

Enjoy your stay; welcome to my realm.

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Perspectives on Practice: “Narasi Arsitektur” Podcast by bvnd

A short prelude on thinking and written documentation