Subdued ResidueListening After Geneva (1967)
A lecture performance by Ariel William Orah
Subdued Residue: Listening After Geneva (1967) is the first public articulation of Ecstatic Extractions, an ongoing artistic research by Ariel William Orah exploring how histories of extraction continue to shape contemporary ideas of sustainability, development, migration, and coexistence. The lecture performance also introduces the early emergence of Hanōmannō, an evolving sonic persona and research interface through which lecture, music, humour, and speculative storytelling become methods of critical inquiry.
Subdued Residue: Listening After Geneva (1967) is the first public articulation of Ecstatic Extractions, an ongoing artistic research by Ariel William Orah exploring how histories of extraction continue to shape contemporary ideas of sustainability, development, migration, and coexistence. The lecture performance also introduces the early emergence of Hanōmannō, an evolving sonic persona and research interface through which lecture, music, humour, and speculative storytelling become methods of critical inquiry.
Photos by Jetmir Idrizi
Premiered at Burning Silence: A Symposium on Fire Ecologies and Sound at SPORE Initiative in Berlin, the work was commissioned as part of the symposium curated by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Yasemin Keskintepe within the Free Radicals platform. Alongside the live performance, the accompanying essay Subdued Residue was published in the symposium reader.
The performance begins with a simple but unsettling question.
Can today's promises of sustainability and green innovation truly escape the extractive logics inherited from colonialism?
Rather than offering an answer, Subdued Residue listens.
Approaching this question from the perspective of an Indonesian diaspora artist living in Europe, Ariel William Orah brings together fields that rarely meet: economics, sustainability studies, sound art, performance, and personal experience. Without a formal education in the arts, but grounded in studies of economics and sustainability management, the work occupies an intentionally unstable position between artistic imagination and socio-economic analysis. It proposes that understanding the present ecological crisis requires not only scientific knowledge or historical evidence, but also music, memory, emotion, humour, and collective listening.
Indonesia becomes the point of departure, but never the only subject.
The lecture traces the country's political and economic transformation following the events of 1965, paying particular attention to the often-overlooked restructuring of Indonesia into a global extractive economy after the 1967 Geneva conference, where international corporations and financial institutions participated in redefining the country's economic future. From this historical moment, the performance expands towards wider questions of colonialism, global trade, resource extraction, labour, migration, and environmental injustice that continue to shape relationships between Southeast Asia and Europe today.
The work is equally informed by the increasing frequency of ecological disasters across Southeast Asia, where floods, forest fires, rising seas, and resource extraction expose the unequal realities hidden beneath the global language of resilience and sustainability. As governments and industries celebrate renewable technologies and green innovation, Subdued Residue asks whether the transition itself risks reproducing older colonial infrastructures through new forms of extraction. Whose landscapes provide the materials for a sustainable future? Whose communities continue to absorb its social and ecological costs? Can a green future truly be called sustainable if its foundations remain extractive?
The performance begins with a simple but unsettling question.
Can today's promises of sustainability and green innovation truly escape the extractive logics inherited from colonialism?
Rather than offering an answer, Subdued Residue listens.
Approaching this question from the perspective of an Indonesian diaspora artist living in Europe, Ariel William Orah brings together fields that rarely meet: economics, sustainability studies, sound art, performance, and personal experience. Without a formal education in the arts, but grounded in studies of economics and sustainability management, the work occupies an intentionally unstable position between artistic imagination and socio-economic analysis. It proposes that understanding the present ecological crisis requires not only scientific knowledge or historical evidence, but also music, memory, emotion, humour, and collective listening.
Indonesia becomes the point of departure, but never the only subject.
The lecture traces the country's political and economic transformation following the events of 1965, paying particular attention to the often-overlooked restructuring of Indonesia into a global extractive economy after the 1967 Geneva conference, where international corporations and financial institutions participated in redefining the country's economic future. From this historical moment, the performance expands towards wider questions of colonialism, global trade, resource extraction, labour, migration, and environmental injustice that continue to shape relationships between Southeast Asia and Europe today.
The work is equally informed by the increasing frequency of ecological disasters across Southeast Asia, where floods, forest fires, rising seas, and resource extraction expose the unequal realities hidden beneath the global language of resilience and sustainability. As governments and industries celebrate renewable technologies and green innovation, Subdued Residue asks whether the transition itself risks reproducing older colonial infrastructures through new forms of extraction. Whose landscapes provide the materials for a sustainable future? Whose communities continue to absorb its social and ecological costs? Can a green future truly be called sustainable if its foundations remain extractive?
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These questions unfold not only through historical documents and economic analysis, but also through music.
Running throughout the lecture is the genealogy of dangdut, Indonesia's immensely popular musical genre born through centuries of encounters between Malay, Indian, Arabic, Chinese, and Western musical traditions. Rather than functioning as cultural illustration, dangdut becomes another historical archive. Its rhythms carry stories of migration, trade, colonial encounters, class struggle, religious negotiation, desire, humour, and everyday resilience. The music proposes another way of understanding history—not only through official documents, but through collective memory, embodiment, and popular culture.
This dialogue between research and dangdut also reflects the artistic methodology behind Ecstatic Extractions.
The accompanying essay is structured through the ADSR envelope of electronic music—Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release—allowing arguments to emerge as sonic movements rather than linear chapters. During the live performance, this electronic logic enters into conversation with the emotional, communal, and often theatrical qualities of dangdut. Experimental electronics meet karaoke. Academic research meets popular music. Analytical distance meets collective pleasure. Rather than resolving these tensions, the performance inhabits them. This dialectic has become a defining characteristic of Ariel William Orah's artistic practice.
Interwoven throughout the lecture are two original music videos introducing the first appearance of Hanōmannō. Humorous, melancholic, and gently absurd, the character navigates the contradictions of nationalism, migration, ecological collapse, consumer culture, masculinity, and extractive capitalism. Through satire and music, Hanōmannō opens another entry point into histories that often appear overwhelming when approached through facts alone.
Throughout the performance, lectures become concerts, archives become songs, economic agreements become melodies, and karaoke becomes a method of historical inquiry. Listening becomes a political act.
Rather than concluding, Subdued Residue leaves audiences with a series of questions that continue to resonate long after the performance ends.
What remains after extraction?
How do colonial economies continue to organise contemporary ecological futures?
Can sustainability exist without justice?
What kinds of relationships become possible when listening itself becomes a form of repair?
As the first public manifestation of Ecstatic Extractions, Subdued Residue lays the conceptual foundation for a long-term artistic inquiry into extraction—not only as the removal of minerals, forests, and natural resources, but also of labour, memory, culture, rhythm, imagination, and future possibilities. From this foundation, Hanōmannō gradually unfolds as an expanding artistic universe where lecture performance, experimental music, speculative fiction, humour, and critical research converge to imagine more empathetic forms of coexistence in a world still shaped by extraction.
FormatHybrid lecture performance combining live lecture, electronic sound performance, moving image, archival materials, spoken word, karaoke aesthetics, and two original music videos.
Duration: 45–60 minutes (adaptable)
Language: English
Previous PresentationBurning Silence: A Symposium on Fire Ecologies and Sound
SPORE Initiative, Berlin
Curated by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Yasemin Keskintepe as part of the Free Radicals platform.
KeywordsEcstatic Extractions · Hanōmannō · Indonesia · Southeast Asia · 1965–1967 · Geneva (1967) · extractive economies · colonialism · neo-colonialism · sustainability · climate justice · political ecology · diaspora · migration · dangdut · electronic music · karaoke · sound art · lecture performance · archives · popular culture
Running throughout the lecture is the genealogy of dangdut, Indonesia's immensely popular musical genre born through centuries of encounters between Malay, Indian, Arabic, Chinese, and Western musical traditions. Rather than functioning as cultural illustration, dangdut becomes another historical archive. Its rhythms carry stories of migration, trade, colonial encounters, class struggle, religious negotiation, desire, humour, and everyday resilience. The music proposes another way of understanding history—not only through official documents, but through collective memory, embodiment, and popular culture.
This dialogue between research and dangdut also reflects the artistic methodology behind Ecstatic Extractions.
The accompanying essay is structured through the ADSR envelope of electronic music—Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release—allowing arguments to emerge as sonic movements rather than linear chapters. During the live performance, this electronic logic enters into conversation with the emotional, communal, and often theatrical qualities of dangdut. Experimental electronics meet karaoke. Academic research meets popular music. Analytical distance meets collective pleasure. Rather than resolving these tensions, the performance inhabits them. This dialectic has become a defining characteristic of Ariel William Orah's artistic practice.
Interwoven throughout the lecture are two original music videos introducing the first appearance of Hanōmannō. Humorous, melancholic, and gently absurd, the character navigates the contradictions of nationalism, migration, ecological collapse, consumer culture, masculinity, and extractive capitalism. Through satire and music, Hanōmannō opens another entry point into histories that often appear overwhelming when approached through facts alone.
Throughout the performance, lectures become concerts, archives become songs, economic agreements become melodies, and karaoke becomes a method of historical inquiry. Listening becomes a political act.
Rather than concluding, Subdued Residue leaves audiences with a series of questions that continue to resonate long after the performance ends.
What remains after extraction?
How do colonial economies continue to organise contemporary ecological futures?
Can sustainability exist without justice?
What kinds of relationships become possible when listening itself becomes a form of repair?
As the first public manifestation of Ecstatic Extractions, Subdued Residue lays the conceptual foundation for a long-term artistic inquiry into extraction—not only as the removal of minerals, forests, and natural resources, but also of labour, memory, culture, rhythm, imagination, and future possibilities. From this foundation, Hanōmannō gradually unfolds as an expanding artistic universe where lecture performance, experimental music, speculative fiction, humour, and critical research converge to imagine more empathetic forms of coexistence in a world still shaped by extraction.
FormatHybrid lecture performance combining live lecture, electronic sound performance, moving image, archival materials, spoken word, karaoke aesthetics, and two original music videos.
Duration: 45–60 minutes (adaptable)
Language: English
Previous PresentationBurning Silence: A Symposium on Fire Ecologies and Sound
SPORE Initiative, Berlin
Curated by Hanna Grześkiewicz and Yasemin Keskintepe as part of the Free Radicals platform.
KeywordsEcstatic Extractions · Hanōmannō · Indonesia · Southeast Asia · 1965–1967 · Geneva (1967) · extractive economies · colonialism · neo-colonialism · sustainability · climate justice · political ecology · diaspora · migration · dangdut · electronic music · karaoke · sound art · lecture performance · archives · popular culture