I chose Api Kartini magazine cover when I first held a physical issue between my hands. The paper was brittle, the ink bleeding at the edges, whole lines of text threatening to disappear. It was the sinking recognition that this vanishing resemble fading memory of a femicide. Forty-one volumes of this magazine were recovered from rare manuscript libraries abroad. They circulated, once, among 1.5-3 million women, peasant farmers, factory workers, teachers, and mothers who had formed one of the largest women’s movements in the world. Then, overnight in October 1965, their names were erased from the official record, their bodies disappeared into mass graves, and their existence was recoded as sexually grotesque and politically criminal.

Standing before those pages, I felt the weight of knowledge that does not arrive as information to be calmly absorbed, but as a demand to reckon with what one can, or cannot, bear to know (Luhmann, 1998, p. 128). For over three decades, the Indonesian state built its school curricula around an ideal of womanhood called ibuism, the self-sacrificing, apolitical, domestic mother. The Api Kartini cover is a queer pedagogical object because it “puts into crisis what is known and how we come to know” (p. 125). It refuses the binary of the tolerant and the tolerated, the oppressor and the oppressed. Instead, we ask: what must the nation refuse to know in order to remain “normal”?

My own positionality shapes this analysis in ways I cannot bracket. I am an inheritor of this silence. Growing up, the word “Gerwani” was heard as a scary name, as castrating witches, killers. The year 1965 was taught as a story of national rescue, not of gendered mass violence. To open Api Kartini now is to experience the eruption of the desiring body as a historical-racial-corporeal schema (Misra, 2022, p. 400–402). The woman on the cover is a revolutionary subject whose feminist internationalism was so threatening that the whole machinery of the state was deployed to unmake her. “Their names were erased—their memories refused to yield,” whispers one of the texts in my digital exhibition. That whisper is a forgotten voice, and it is also the voice of survivors like Ibu Lia, who said decades later: “It’s bitter to remember, very bitter. My memories taste bitter in my mouth. But people must know what happened to us. They must know what happened” (Pohlman, 2015, p. 1).

This collage and this digital exhibition cannot restore the dead. It cannot guarantee that a viewer, or I myself, will not turn away. As McCall (2022) writes of her own curation of a sexual violence prevention installation, pedagogies of difficult knowledge bring no safety and no guarantees; the materials carry a “vibrancy” that can both haunt and save, but the outcome of the encounter is uncertain (p. 8–11). The red thread that stitches Api Kartini to the military newspaper in my composition is an attempt to perform what Barad (2003) calls intra-action, a recognition that past and present, matter and meaning, human and non-human, are not separate but co-constitutive in an “ongoing open process of mattering” (p. 817; cited in McCall, 2022). Yet the thread cannot close the wound. The blood dripping from the torn newsprint is the tens or hundreds of thousands dead. And it is also the sexual slander, the blood libel, that still clings to the name Gerwani, a stain that the normalizing curriculum uses to inoculate students against ever asking what these women actually believed, wrote, and built.

This digital exhibition lets the covers slide slowly, one after another, like a slow pulse of memory that cannot stop. The song “Genjer-Genjer,” itself banned and deemed dangerous, loops quietly. The visitor can click, and blood drops will fall on the screen, a small, repetitive gesture that does not represent violence so much as remember it, over and over, in the body of the viewer. Hidden are dozens of survivors’ testimonies that people can barely see; once you see them, you can touch them, you can feel them. This is an archive designed to trouble the desire to look away.

I do not know if this project will succeed. I do not think “success” is the right category for a work that dwells on genocide. But I believe that holding these vanishing texts up to the light is a small act of fidelity. Fidelity to the women who wrote, marched, taught, and were killed. Fidelity to the proposition, the body is never just biology, desire is never just private, and the objects we hold are never neutral. A magazine cover is pedagogical. It taught women that they were not appendages of their husbands but comrades in a global struggle. That lesson was interrupted violently. May this exhibition be a small, trembling interruption of that interruption.