Indigeneity can always resonate with the contemporary world. In the sense that both things, modernity as well as customs and traditions, must be seen not as two opposing poles but as a unity that can support each other.
Ancestral Circuits: Myth, Memory, and the Hybrid World | Natasha Tontey
Natasha Tontey draws deeply from Minahasan cosmology, treating myth, ritual, and ancestral knowledge as evolving frameworks for understanding the present. Rooted in community work and field research, her work blends indigenous perspectives with cyberfeminism, ecological critique, and speculative fiction. Through ritual processions, poetic writing, performance, and video, she constructs nonlinear narratives where time collapses, ancestral chants ripple into imagined futures, and fragments of oral history are woven with pop culture and theology.
Working across sensory media, she transforms ritual and memory into acts of resistance, positioning her work as a dialogue between ancient cosmologies and the digital present. It is a form of pilgrimage, a conscious return to ancestral roots and an exploration of identity shaped by displacement, colonialism, and hybridity. She invites audiences to reconsider their relationships with land, technology, and the unseen, proposing that Indigenous knowledge systems can guide new futures rooted in solidarity, care, and imaginative possibility.
Your work often draws from Minahasan cosmology and indigenous practices. How does it guide your approach to storytelling and world-building? How do these shape your understanding of the present?
Over the past few years, I have been deeply involved in community work and extensive research on Minahasa culture, drawing inspiration from cyberfeminism, indigenous movements, and technological perspectives. The insights I’ve gained have sparked speculative and alternative ways of understanding the world. My artistic practice initially began with a series of ritual processions, which brought forth new worldviews through ritualistic frameworks. Each functioning as a world-building experiment that revealed new cosmologies through enacted rites. Working within and around Minahasan traditions has become, for me, a form of pilgrimage: a conscious return to ancestral soil that continually informs my approach to myth, ritual and speculative fiction—particularly in relation to the interest of “manufactured fear”.
Through years of fieldwork, I have observed how Minahasan practices—such as the communal consumption of wild boar, macaques and fruit bats—raise complex questions around biodiversity and ethics. Whilst such customs may differ with contemporary sensibilities, they also attest to a profound kinship with the forest, underpinned by the philosophy of mapalus and the gift economy, in which land and resources are held in common. These processes led me to learn and reconceive these narratives on understanding the present, exploring how myth does more than reflect cultural identity: it actively shapes and sustains it.
In your storytelling, time often flows outside of linear progression. How does this shape the way the past and present interact in your work?
Fiction, for me, is both a platform for narrating my findings and field diary and a means to project speculation. Through a fictional approach, I practice world-building, assembling scripts as verbal collages of invented scenes, ancestral utterances, community dialogue, and even lines from Marianne Katoppo, a Minahasan radical theologist, placed beside a local internet catchphrase. In rejecting a straightforward linear chronology, each fragment carries its own temporal resonance: a ritual chant can ripple into imagined futures and a childhood recollection. In this method, past and present do not merely follow one another; they converse, overlap, and refract, allowing ancestral wisdom to permeate contemporary concerns and modern life to shed new light on ancient myth.
Also, poems become the tool through which I unlock these layered timelines. Writing in verse—sometimes even asking, “What poem might a cockroach poet compose?”—enables me to appropriate anything that intrigues me, from sacred texts to tabloid headlines, and set them in playful stanzas.
Working within and around Minahasan traditions has become, for me, a form of pilgrimage: a conscious return to ancestral soil that continually informs my approach to myth, ritual and speculative fiction—particularly in relation to the interest of “manufactured fear”.
Natasha Tontey
Visual Artist
Your performances, videos, and installations often blur the boundaries between the natural and the synthetic, the organic and the technological. When developing a new work, how do you determine which medium—or combination of media—will best express the concept or story you’re exploring?
My practice often unfolds in overlapping stages, as I continuously refine existing methods while venturing into new experiments. The people I work with—whether as interviewees or collaborators—frequently become the primary source of my narratives, inspiring me through their gestures, wardrobe choices and ways of speaking. Occasionally a technique I devise—such as a bespoke costume—proves ill-suited to the performer, prompting me to improvise with alternative materials mid-process, which ultimately reshapes the entire work.
In earlier projects, I foregrounded in tatters, lots of fragmentation, and texts. By drawing on early web aesthetics—now ubiquitous in “shitposting”—I aimed to collect everyday anecdotes and recombine them as a puzzle of an entirely new narrative. And most of the time I do improvisation on the editing and foley recording.
Your project Pest to Power reimagines cockroaches, typically seen as pests, as powerful and even heroic figures. What cultural, political, or ecological ideas were you exploring through this shift in perspective?
By repositioning the cockroach from a maligned pest to a weird powerful agent, Pest to Power deliberately decenters the human subject and invites us to reimagine what forms of knowledge and social organisation might emerge in a truly multispecies world. Cockroaches, with their remarkable adaptability, communal foraging and resilience in the face of environmental upheaval, become models for sustainable futures in which cooperation—rather than domination—and respect for non-human agencies guide our ecological practices. In asking what humans might learn from the cockroach’s historicity and world-building, the project critiques our reliance on pesticides and fragmented conservation strategies, suggesting that unity and mutual support across species are essential to the health of the whole.
Politically and culturally, Pest to Power intertwines together anti-colonial and non-aligned solidarity through a method of text-assembling Yasser Arafat’s 1974 UN address and Soekarno’s 1955 Bandung Conference speech. By repurposing these historic calls to redirect resources from war towards collective well-being, the work casts the Leader of Blattodea as a figure of communal liberation—urging chemical warfare against ‘pests’ to give way to collaborative survival. In so doing, the project aligns ecological critique with human struggles for autonomy, envisioning a shared project of emancipation that transcends species boundaries.
What does the idea of return mean to you—whether as a re-emergence or a reactivation of the past? Could these kinds of returns be seen as acts of resistance, especially when thinking about Indigenous knowledge and histories shaped by colonialism?
In Minahasa cosmology, God is not a patriarchal deity. To me, the idea of coming home is an act of pilgrimage, such an act of reclaiming ancestral belief and restoring voices long silenced. Yet, over centuries, there are shifts of power from feminine to masculine around the 6th-7th centuries from Walian (feminine ritual leadership) to Tonaas (masculine leadership), and then under colonial and post-colonial regimes—Masculinity and war or military glorification came to overshadow these feminine origins. By reconfiguration of that narrative through art making: not simply to tell the fairy tales, but to reactivate its power in the present, honouring the deity as well as understanding how the state is formed. I tried to reconfigure and build a reflective dialogue on an ancient ritual practice that has been carried out for centuries and its interaction with contemporary worldview.
To me, the idea of coming home is an act of pilgrimage, such an act of reclaiming ancestral belief and restoring voices long silenced.
Natasha Tontey
Visual Artist
How do you work with intangible ideas like memory, spirit, or return through sensory media like sound, video, or performance? Does speculative technology play a role in interacting with unseen or forgotten presences?
In Of Other Tomorrows (2023), I activate the ancient Makatana apparatus as both philosophical entities and theatrical protagonists: a Minahasan “cyborg–vampire” from deep time whose ritualised acts of ingestion and discharge evoke collective remembrance. Through carefully choreographed movement, the body becomes a conduit for cosmological reverberations—each footfall or whispered chant inscribing the stellar calculations once used to harmonise human physiology with the heavens. In doing so, spirit and memory are not merely depicted but materially enacted, collapsing linear chronology into a cyclical rite of return.
At the heart of this work lies speculative technology conceived through an Indigenous Minahasan perspective. By re-enacting ritual instruments—using long chive leaves, make-shift fire and practicing Makatana apparatus—as pharmakon, I investigate how technology can simultaneously poison and remedy. The Makatana figure, stepping into our industrial present as a cyborg–vampire with a mechanical heart pulsing ancestral cosmologies, embodies this duality. As Minahasan cosmology has long regarded tools of ritual and healing as epistemological bridges between human and non-human kin, we must ask: in an increasingly mechanised world, what does authenticity mean for Minahasan society? How do shifting regimes of power and land ownership—from colonial times to the modern nation-state—transform our relationship to technology and to one another? Through Makatana’s time-travelling journey, I offer a speculative fiction for negotiating these questions, positioning technology not as a triumphalist end but as a bridge to otherwise imperceptible worlds.
What does it look like to strike a respectful balance between honouring Indigenous knowledge and weaving it into modern digital and artistic spaces? And in what ways could this knowledge help shape the future of art and technology?
I believe the greatest challenge lies in remaining true to my very self and honouring my ancestral roots without resorting to exoticism. As an artist, I try to continue to reflect on my artistic practices and question the role of an artist through the community in Minahasa. I try to see my work as a form of solidarity and a reminder to think about how the existence of indigenous people is viewed by the state institution today.
Indigeneity can always resonate with the contemporary world. In the sense that both things, modernity as well as customs and traditions, must be seen not as two opposing poles but as a unity that can support each other. On the other hand, spirituality is a personal matter, yet I can still learn and unlearn to be a Tou (people of Minahasa) in the middle of shopping malls in Jakarta, yapping about land grabbing. The spirit itself has no defined form; rather, it is felt through a magical connection.
Minahasa constitutes a significant aspect of my upbringing, though my initial engagement with it was marked by disinterest. This ambivalence was rooted in the internal conflict I experienced growing up in Jakarta, a city that occupies a dominant position within Indonesia’s Java-centric cultural landscape. In such a context, families originating from outside Jakarta are often perceived as outsiders, a perception I was keen to avoid. However, my attitude shifted upon encountering various compelling aspects of Minahasa, particularly as I began to recognise the pervasive centrality of Jakarta in shaping cultural narratives. My perspective was also profoundly altered during a visit to Minahasa, where I observed a deeply integrated relationship between people and nature. One of the most striking examples of this was the use of stones as currency within a gift economy, a practice that reflects the region’s unique social structures. While I found many of these structures fascinating, I also critically engage with certain elements, particularly the entrenched culture of machismo in Minahasa. Additionally, my involvement in ritual practices during this period deepened my exploration of Minahasa, motivating me to further investigate my ancestral heritage within the region.
Indigeneity can always resonate with the contemporary world. In the sense that both things, modernity as well as customs and traditions, must be seen not as two opposing poles but as a unity that can support each other.
Natasha Tontey
Visual Artist
Are there any stories, rituals, or ecosystems that you feel drawn to but haven’t yet explored in your work? What calls you toward them?
I’m still very much on a pilgrimage of unlearning and rediscovery concerning Minahasan ancestral culture. There are countless stories, rituals and ecosystems I’ve only just begun to unpack. In that sense, every encounter feels like an open invitation rather than a chapter already concluded. I was born and raised in Jakarta, so I am also intrigued by the story of the migration of Minahasan people to Jakarta and other cities and it is also fascinating to imagine what Jakarta looks like from the perspective that is not written in the textbook or school.
Beyond Minahasa, I find myself drawn to the hybrid fringes of nature—perhaps a plant or fungi whose DNA bears uncanny resemblance to the mighty cockroach or an ecosystem in which disparate species form unexpected alliances. I cannot yet predict how these investigations will unfold, but the very possibility of such unusual kinships propels me forward. It is the thrill of discovery that fuels my curiosity.
Reverence is the deep respect and acknowledgement of the interconnectedness of all beings, recognising the value and significance of every story, culture, and experience. Do you consider your work a reflection of reverence for these connections, and how does that shape the stories you tell through your work?
Indeed, it can be an act of reverence—an archive of dreams, obsessions, cultural fragments, half-forgotten neighbourhood whispers, flights of fancy, and passages from my field diary, each element paying homage to the others, however modest or subversive.
In deep respect of every narrative I shape, ensuring that each fragment finds its voice and that, together, they speak of our shared, living heritage, whilst also maintaining a critical aspect.
It is my hope that, through this endeavour, we can stand in solidarity—reframing ancestral beliefs, particularly those of Minahasan culture in this context, which have long been marginalised and deemed taboo—as a thought experiment—and renounce the notion that such beliefs are inherently repellent, instead approaching them with considered curiosity and respect.
