Date of Award
Summer 8-3-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Film and Media Studies
First Advisor
Reiko Tahara
Second Advisor
André Daughtry
Academic Program Adviser
Andrew Lund
Abstract
Tubuh yang Mengingat (The Body Remembers) is a single-channel, site-specific performance film set across coastal and extractive landscapes in Cirebon, West Java, Indonesia. Reinterpreting the five transformations of Cirebonese mask dance—Panji, Pamindo, Rumyang, Tumenggung, and Kelana—the project examines how colonial extraction, ecological deterioration, and systems of social regulation continue to shape embodied experience materially and somatically. Drawing from Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action and Stacy Alaimo’s notion of trans-corporeality, the work approaches body, land, technology, and history as relationally entangled rather than separate entities. Through live biodata sonification generated from environmental sensors and bodily movement, the film establishes reciprocal interactions between dancers, landscape, and modular synthesizer systems, allowing sound and movement to emerge responsively through environmental fluctuation and bodily interaction. Within this framework, land functions not as passive setting, but as an active participant within the film’s choreographic, sonic, and perceptual structure. Ultimately, The Body Remembers proposes memory as something that persists across bodies, ecologies, technologies, and historical conditions through ongoing material and sensory entanglement.
Recommended Citation
Mrajabwana, Prameswari, "Tubuh yang Mengingat (The Body Remembers): Ecology, Ritual, and Embodied Memory in Contemporary Cirebon Mask Performance" (2026). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/1573
Included in
Art Practice Commons, Asian History Commons, Ethnic Studies Commons, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Film and Media Studies Commons
