PROMOTING PEACE AND HOPE
Founded in 2001, the FDGI is a small community of relatively young Indonesian graphic designers and educators with an agenda to empower the graphic design profession by encouraging participation in social, cultural, and educational activities. They have organized free lectures and seminars for students, national scale seminars for professionals, campus workshops, exhibitions, and have distributed periodicals. In June 2003, the FDGI conducted a poster exhibition—which featured 50 local designers, mostly students—titled Looking at a Peaceful Indonesia in response to 9/11 and the first Bali bombing. Despite negative reviews, this event marked an Indonesian design revival. The last major design event was an international poster exposition held by the Indonesian Graphic Design Association (IPGI) in collaboration with the Japanese Graphic Design Association ( JAGDA) in 1983.

“Shortly after the tsunami, I presented the idea of a poster exhibition, but it quickly diminished from lack of support,” says FDGI cofounder Hastjarjo B. Wibowo. The idea was revived when a consortium of graphic technology producers, the FGD, offered space in their biannual exposition. “This was an excellent opportunity for us to build our brand, a key to network and access for future activities,” he adds. A bigger goal and concept had to be drawn up for the exhibition. FDGI wanted to avoid the mass media strategy of depicting destruction and tragedy. The tsunami represented the accumulation of crises that Indonesia has had to face in the last decade and encouragement or motivation was what people needed instead of portraying devastation. The prolonged crises became the bigger theme, but the content was morally motivational, a positive propaganda.

With less than two months to organize the exhibition, certain ethical submission requirements—such as calling for entries—had to be sacrificed. We felt this exhibition needed to be ambitious, so we proposed that international designers be invited to participate. The tsunami was, after all, an international disaster. “Foreign designers must be included to provide a different perspective of Indonesia and also establish communication with them,” Wibowo acknowledged.

Through lobbying and persistent correspondence, 66 designers from 17 countries agreed to participate in the event, including Milton Glaser, Seymour Chwast, David Carson, Luba Lukova, Rick Valicenti, Nancy Skolos, and Karlssonwilker, among others. Leading Indonesian designers included Hermawan Tanzil, Iwan Ramelan, Danton Sihombing, Priyanto Sunarto, Irvan Noeman, T, Sutanto, Sakti Makki, and many more. Designers from as far as Iran, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Thailand, and neighboring countries such as Malaysia, U.K., and Australia also participated. A discussion held on the exhibition at Institut Teknologi Bandung on Oct. 21, 2005, concluded that the quality of the posters was difficult to measure. Unlike advertising posters, the Light of Hope target audience was vague, and the designers’ involvement and commitment to the cause was also unpredictable.

“It would be odd to apply the variety of foreign cultural codes used in communicating the posters to Indonesia,” panelist Priyanto Sunarto confided. One example is “Wing of Life,” contributed by Taiwanese designer Aphex Lin—a sequential depiction of a cross morphing into a flying dove, the symbol of peace. Sunarto argued, “The context of the cross signifying death contains an alien meaning to the Aceh people, because the dead there weren’t buried with cross markers. Here, contextualizing the messages in the local culture was imperative.” In contrast, a poster by Ian Perkins of London used universal symbols in simple and minimal forms—a red heart with a rectangular cutout on its edge. The cutout piece formed the Indonesian flag of red and white, which communicated succinctly that Indonesia needs more heart. Luba Lukova’s poster was deemed by the panel as distinctly “Luba Lukova”—the designer both creatively amusing herself as well as conveying a message. Her usage of the universal symbol—the gecko’s severed tail—as an object of regeneration is communicative among the Indonesian audience.

Most of the local artists took the path of “contemplation.” For example, Hermawan Tanzil’s poster of a traditional puppet is decorated with various ethnic motifs signifying urgency to forget differences in order to recover from the tsunami. Or the poster by Lans Brahmantyo, which illustrated a glowing womb of a pregnant woman, identifying hope through regeneration. The poster by Wagiono appropriated a photograph of a pebble as symbol for lightness, strength, and hope. The exhibition boasted the largest graphic exposition in Southeast Asia drawing a record-breaking crowd. After the expo, the FDGI was invited to exhibit the posters in four major cities in Indonesia—Bandung, Surabaya, Yogyakarta, and Aceh.

“There are many plans for the donated posters: One is to communicate the moral messages to a larger audience. Right now we are looking for sponsors to support this. There are also demands for organizing a bigger event, such as the first Indonesian Poster Biennial,” Wibowo explains. The BRR invited FDGI to exhibit the posters in Aceh and also requested it contribute a research team of graphic designers and students as part of the reconstruction consortium. The research team will investigate communication methods most effective for the Aceh people when dealing with future disasters such as evacuation and survival plans, and hygiene and sanitation procedures.

The FDGI and its small community of designers have achieved some much-desired and hard-to-reach goals. With few resources, it created an intelligent international and regional network and paved a road for future designers to advocate for the profession and its community. With graphic design awakened and available channels and sources open for it to be socially and politically engaged, the hope for future socially conscious Indonesian designers is secured. And perhaps through graphic design the prolonged crises in Indonesian economy and society can be ameliorated.