Ghosts on the Scene of Gas: Filming Post-industrial Sites in Aceh, Indonesia

• Published in: European journal of East Asian studies 2022-07, Vol.21 (2), p.308-334
• Main Author: Vignato, Silvia
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 1568-0584; 1570-0615
• DOI: 10.1163/15700615-02102005

This article describes a vision of time (the past and the future) in post-industrial dynamics that the author and her co-researchers could gain through shooting a film in the region of Lhokseumawe, Aceh, a once fruitful site of extraction of natural gas subsequently planned to become a Special Economic Zone. It engages with the notion of “worlding” processes and pinpoints, in the ethnographic case of Aceh, the difficulty to access them through discourse because specific strategies of silencing and erasure are enforced throughout an emotional landscape. It is argued that it was the use of film-making as a relational tool aiming to create images that enabled the researchers to see through time and beyond regimes of invisibility. This is how they met ghosts on the gas scene. The steps in the making of an ethnographic film are used as a narrative lead. A scene is set up where the extractive economy of gas is linked to a global vision of development and prosperity as well as to present and past national politics, including a thirty-year-long war of resistance (1975–2005). The creation of a Special Economic Zone is shown to provide a relevant interpretive prism. Different styles of self-staging reveal cultures of suffering in North Aceh. It is argued that fear as a collective emotion takes different shapes across time and serves different political scenarios. Dispossession of land and under-remunerated work appear on the scene; the film’s feminine characters’ positive look to the future appears as an active effort of elaboration of the evolving context. The film Aceh, After is on free access at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SR89korhLwQ .