Primate Visions; Macaque Macabre, Primate Visions; Macaque Macabre

Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre is a speculative artistic response to these entanglements. Developed through ethnographic research, amateur primatology, and narrative experimentation, the work explores a fictional scenario in which an experimental primatologist and their group liberate a troop of Yaki and initiate a series of rituals, dialogues, and speculative experiments. This narrative operates less as a conventional conservation story and more as a framework for examining the epistemological tensions between indigenous cosmotechnics and Western environmental discourse.

For many Indonesians, North Sulawesi is known for its forests and coastal beauty. Minahasan people are often characterised by their so-called “bizarre” eating habits—routinely scrutinised for the consumption and commodification of game meat including rodents, wild boars, monkeys, bats, even cats and dogs. Environmentalists and wildlife conservation groups frequently campaign against these practices, insisting that such traditions are responsible for biodiversity loss. Yet this perspective reduces complex cultural practices to ecological scapegoating. What is often overlooked is that the act of eating game is not simply an issue of market demand, but reflects a historically rooted, affective relationship with the forest. For the Minahasan people, the forest is not private property—it is a shared space of survival, memory, and reciprocity. This belief is deeply embedded in Mapalus, the Minahasan philosophy of mutual assistance, which positions the forest as a communal resource, not a site of exploitation.

The film does not attempt to resolve these tensions but situates them within a speculative cinematic space—one that resists binary thinking and embraces ambiguity. Rather than framing Yaki as an “endangered species” to be saved, the work asks: what happens when the figure of the animal collides with the cosmological, political, and survival realities of those who have long coexisted with them? Can trance, ritual, and speculative imagination offer more than policy ever could?

In exploring these questions, Primate Visions Macaque Macabre  proposes that ritual performance can act as a medium of negotiation—between evolution and devolution, nature and culture, mourning and transformation. It is not a didactic film, but a speculative provocation: an invitation to rethink human—nonhuman relations through cosmology, friction, and the possibility of interspecies kinship beyond control and guilt.

It is deeply rooted in both personal memory and cultural critique. Aesthetically, the film draws from the DIY sensibility of 1990s Indonesian soap operas—shows I grew up watching, filled with low-budget special effects that, to me as a child, felt magical despite their obvious limitations. That campy, maximalist aesthetic—often dismissed as kitsch—has become a key part of my visual language. Rather than reject it, I work with it as a method: one that transforms marginalised pop cultures such as B-movies, horror, night market aesthetics, and Grand Guignol theatre into tools for critical speculation.

Minahasan culture has always played a pivotal role in my upbringing, though at first I was indifferent to it. Growing up in Jakarta’s Java-centric cultural environment often cast families from outside Java as peripheral—a stigma I initially tried to escape. But over time, my perspective shifted. I began to uncover the complexity and richness of Minahasa, particularly its intricate relationship between people and nature. I came to respect the inherent eccentricities of these customs, but I also approach certain aspects with a critical eye—especially the ingrained culture of machismo and the regional phenomenon I call the Minahasan spaghetti western, which blends local masculinity, frontier mythology, and cinematic bravado into something both culturally distinct and ideologically fraught.

This spaghetti western imaginary—rendered in the postures, glances, and costuming of the characters, but intentionally destabilised through elements of camp, trance, and grotesquerie. In this way, the film simultaneously inhabits and subverts Minahasan macho iconography, creating space for ambiguity and resistance. Costume and production design are central to this. I’ve always been interested in how clothing functions as a form of symbolic architecture—revealing belief systems, spiritual alignments, or social contradictions. In the film, costumes signal cosmological intent, but also dissonance. In some scenes, the cellular being costume speaks as loudly as its presence—invoking vulnerability, transformation, or a refusal to be categorised. These visual choices are not just stylistic; they are part of the film’s world-building logic, where mythology and absurdity collide.

The choreography emerges from this same impulse. Movement is neither naturalistic nor entirely ritualistic—it’s choreographed to evoke trance, possession, and displacement. The Yaki characters oscillate between agency and unreadability. Their gestures are borrowed from Minahasan ceremonies like Mawolay, but refracted through speculative distortion. They move like creatures who belong and don’t belong at once, mirroring my own relationship to Minahasa—part return, part estrangement.

The soundtrack and dialogue articulation were developed closely in collaboration with Wahono. Each character carries a distinct vocal presence: Imago Organella, in the real life, they are a child of the internet, speak English more fluently than Minahasan or Bahasa Indonesian; Yaki 1 is very fluent in Tontemboan language; Yaki 2 more confident to speak in Bahasa Indonesia, whilst Xenomorphia adopts a theatrical, almost ceremonial tone. Our aim was to sonically collapse the boundaries between the spiritual and the artificial, the forest and the feedback loop—while preserving the humour and improvisational energy contributed by the actors, particularly through the languages they embodied and inhabited.

Together, these formal decisions—costume, choreography, set design, and sound—form a cinematic vocabulary that is excessive, unstable, and speculative. You may call it hybrid, but for me, it’s simply the language I’m used to. A language shaped by 1990s soap operas, by night markets and Grand Guignol, by ritual, memory, and contradiction. It’s how I make sense of Minahasa and my place within it—through a grammar of estrangement, humour, discomfort, and trance. Primate Visions Macaque Macabre is not a definitive statement, but a haunted rehearsal—a way of staging what’s unresolved between human and nonhuman, myth and ecology, machismo and mourning.

The final section of Primate Visions: Macaque Macabre shifts into a more grounded, almost documentary register –not to offer resolution, but to deepen the sense of ambiguity. I’ve often been sceptical of the idea of a “happy ending,” especially in the context of ecological or postcolonial narratives. The notion that liberation automatically leads to restoration is too idealistic. In the case of the Yaki in this film—who had been held in captivity—the return to the forest isn’t a seamless reintegration. They’ve adapted to human environments, and when released, they behave like humans, unable to fully inhabit their ancestral habitat. That disconnect felt important to acknowledge.

This is why I chose to immerse the ending in the real landscape of Danau Tondano, a site that holds deep historical and mythological weight in Minahasa. The lake has always fascinated me—not just for its beauty, but for its layered ambiguity. It’s a place where nature, memory, and violence coexist. Returning to this location allowed the film to fold its speculative world back into the terrain that shaped it.

In the epilogue, Conversation with the Veteran of Battalion Jin Kasuang L. Sarapung, which exists as a separate piece from the main film, this ambiguity is extended further. The two Yaki protagonists, still in costume, interview a real-life Permesta war veteran. They ask him if he ever ate Yaki—a reference to the broader themes of consumption, power, and survival. But the veteran doesn’t answer directly. Instead, he recalls how his battalion once consumed the ears of soldiers from the central Indonesian army who had committed sexual violence against Minahasan women—an act he frames not as brutality, but as justice rooted in Minahasan customary law.

This encounter collapses the boundary between fiction and historical trauma, between costume and testimony. It complicates the idea of resolution. Rather than ending with clarity, the film concludes in a space where ancestral memory, post-war violence, and environmental displacement continue to haunt the present.