Lost in the Crowd

The Significance of Place in a Young Refugee’s Fight Against the Refugee Narrative

This documentary series is an audio presentation to the USF Seminar Series “Overlooked Cities in Asia: Interrogating blind fields in urban knowledge and praxes” in Bandung, Indonesia, 6-8 September 2023. The series is available for the public to listen between 1-10 September 2023 only.

If you join the USF Seminar Series, listening to the full series before 6 September at 15.30 Jakarta time (Introduction to the Artistic Session) is highly encouraged.

Abstract

More than 12,000 refugees and asylum seekers (hereafter, refugees) are living in Indonesia, a non-signatory country to the 1951 Refugee Convention. With only the Presidential Regulation No. 125/2016 as the umbrella regulation and no following technical guidance, each city responds to the issue differently, hence the different levels of service availability and access to refugees. Often forgotten is the granularity of those decisions; what each local government decides to do has a great influence towards how refugees live their days while ‘in transit’. This paper provides an account of how refugees in a state of liminality in Indonesia experience their city/ies. Taking a form of narrative audio storytelling, we will follow the account of a young Hazara refugee from Afghanistan on his journey to establish himself as an emerging writer and film director since his arrival in Indonesia as an unaccompanied minor in 2014.

This audio series starts with discussing his process of creating his latest works, “Fighting Forward” and “Lost in the Calm”, particularly about his exploration of the different spaces and places in the city in telling his stories. We will go deeper into his experience of the city/ies where he has lived in, particularly in how he sees himself as a ‘resident’ without a permanent residence, a ‘citizen’ without citizenship, and a human with a limited recognition of his human rights. We will then explore how he was able to emerge from the limiting situation to make a name for himself, highlighting his attempts to increase his freedom of movement, his efforts to build a connected social life with the locals, and his continued search of identity as a young person in displacement. His story is expected to shed light on the everyday experience of one of the most invisible groups in manifesting their right to the city.

Listen to the Audio Series

The audio series is divided into three parts.

In the first part, the narrator introduces the subject, a person who fled his country to seek asylum and is now living in Indonesia. He is a very accomplished young man, a person who fought a lot to be where he is at the moment throughout his prolonged displacement situation. The episode starts with an introduction of who he is by talking about his latest works, a film called “Fighting Forward” and a book called “Lost in the Calm”.

In the second part, the conversation focuses on the subject’s life in Indonesia, particularly on his experience of the cities he had been or still living in. We hear about how he builds human connections and attachment to places following his movement from one city to another and how his refugee status or the lack of its recognition hindered how he experienced these connections.

In the last part, the conversation focuses on how his movements and displacements shape the subject as a person. We hear about his quest of belonging and what he will bring to his future. At the end of the conversation, he sends a message for other youth who are experiencing similar situation of displacement.

Listen to the full episodes here or on RDI UREF Memento on Spotify on 1-10 September 2023.

Trailer