Heritage in Focus: La Uma / Our Home (Sumba Island, Indonesia)
Artist Fransisca Angela captures the resilience of Wainyapu Village as the residents rebuild their lives in the aftermath of a devastating fire.
By World Monuments Fund
Fransisca Angela
Villagers in the ocean by Fransisca AngelaWorld Monuments Fund
Sumbanese mark time according to the cycle of nature. When I arrived in the humidity of early March, it was the sowing season, the only time sea worms (nyale) appear near the shore and people are allowed to hum a nyale song.
Villagers at a stone structure by Fransisca AngelaWorld Monuments Fund
The melody echoes a longing for ancestors whose presence you can feel strongly around the stone graves surrounding Wainyapu Village.
That first night, I lay awake, my restless body waiting for the 4 am calls to join Mama Umbu’s children in a quest to collect sea worms.
Once you get the sea worms,
you can't let them stay too long in the water.
Otherwise, they'll disappear
Things started going missing in the village after a fire burned down 30 houses in one night following a long dry spell. The distinctive Sumbanese high thatched roofs were conspicuously absent from the landscape; the houses themselves had vanished in a flash, leaving only marks on the ground.
On Sumba, houses are imbued with symbolism, their structural elements mapped to the human body or oriented according to the flow of rivers and the movements of the sun. Sumbanese take pride in preserving the knowledge and skills necessary to maintain traditional buildings.
But due to environmental changes, houses across Sumba Island are very vulnerable to fire. Fires consumed 30 houses in the village of Tarung in 2017, 16 houses in the village of Bondo Morotuo in 2018, and, most recently, 30 houses in the village of Wainyapu in 2022.
However, Sumbanese take pride in keeping a body of cultural knowledge and manual skills in maintaining the traditional building structures alive.
During my time at Wainyapu Village in Southwest Sumba, I had intimate conversations with local people about their homes, their ways of life, and what they had lost.
Kepala Adat adds the first reed as a ritual to mark the process of installing the roof of the main house in Maliti Village by Fransisca AngelaWorld Monuments Fund
Toward the end of conversation, I’d always ask them the same question:
Apa yang ingin kamu selamatkan waktu kebakaran terjadi?
What would you save from a fire?
A daughter still wanders the remains of her house, mourning her broken plates scattered among the ashes. She cooks every day for 15 people in her uma, or home.
A grandmother wanted to jump into the flames after she realized her indigo textile, which had taken a year to make, had been consumed in the fire. She takes pride in having grown the cotton, harvested the indigo leaves, and woven it.
Without that, she said, I'm as good as dead.
A mother looks at the horizon, neither hunting for sea worms nor mourning her home. She prays to her dead son, whose name she must hear every day: mothers are called by their eldest son's name. Mama Peter, they say. Peter, the one who obeys, who lends a hand to his mother.
The locals' days had the repetitive rhythm of slow village life, heavy with domestic responsibilities. Filling their time with work was the only way to repress the overwhelming feelings of wanting to leave after the tragedy.
Nauta means a stairway, a way out for a soul who dies by Fransisca AngelaWorld Monuments Fund
"But some natives–most native people in the world–cannot go anywhere. They are too poor. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives, and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live."
Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
During my stay in the village, the children always followed me wherever I went. When I talked with the villagers, the children would sit beside me for hours and draw things inside a sketchbook that I brought along. I put various archival images of Sumba from the collection of the Wereldmuseum in the book and let the children’s creativity run wild.
On one landscape photograph, they wrote the names of their friends around the edge and colored over the sky in silver pen. To me, this gesture symbolized the collective ways of living that are rooted in the village.
I arrived at Wainyapu in the lead-up to the Pasola Festival. Village residents would go to pray for their ancestors in the burial site around the village. During these moments, I would ask them, What or whom do you pray for at night?
Disposable photo by Desmond by DesmondWorld Monuments Fund
The series of images that follow were taken using a disposable camera by Desmond.
Disposable photo by Desmond by DesmondWorld Monuments Fund
He was a child in the village with whom I collaborated.
Disposable photo by Desmond by DesmondWorld Monuments Fund
When I developed them, they seemed to depicted their answers to my question:
Disposable photo by Desmond by DesmondWorld Monuments Fund
What do you pray for at night?
I still dream of my father;
within three days he was gone.
I cannot remember his voice, and it kills me.
—Mama Merry
I pray that my husband watches over us,
especially over our son, who still calls his name.
Why would I change just because my husband died?
It’s better for me to take care of my only child.
—Mama Yanto
I miss him the most.
Wherever I went, he’d help me.
He helped me gather the wood,
cook rice,
draw water from the well.
I pray for him every night and day.
He was my beloved son.
I work hard so I don’t remember him.
Then I’ll fall asleep and forget everything .
—Mama Peter
Burnt-down candles by Fransisca AngelaWorld Monuments Fund
Sit or lay on the mat as you wish,
but remember the part of your house where you feel safe.
Look at the ground and ask yourself,
What would you save from a fire?
Don’t blink at the wall, and remember,
When was the last time you mourned?
Who or what did you mourn over?
Whisper songs that can only be sung once a year,
along with your prayers to the ceiling.
At dawn, wash the dishes from last night.
Walk tiptoe outside so as not to wake your father,
then catch sea worms near the shore with your bare hands.
Forget your dreams, dip in the sea water and wash your long, black, greasy hair.
When the second bell rings, wear your Sunday best and walk like a lady.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Rehi Pati, Agus Weeleo, Mama Ratna, Mama Marta, Mama Debby, Mama Merry, Mama Umbu, Pak Ode, Apli, Verry, Domi, Desmond, and Vandy Rizaldi.
Disposable camera images are by Desmond.
Heritage in Focus is a collaboration between World Monuments Fund (WMF) and Magnum Foundation to aid local emerging photographers in documenting historic places and their stewards. Sumba Island, Indonesia, was included on the World Monuments Watch in 2022. WMF has worked to raise awareness of the threats to the island's Indigenous architectural traditions and provide people on the ground with tools to prevent deadly fires.
The photographers of Heritage in Focus were tasked with documenting the sites of the 2022 World Monuments Watch. The featured sites are Asante Traditional Buildings, Ghana (Eric Gyamfi); Garcia Pasture, USA (Tahila Moss); Heritage Buildings of Beirut, Lebanon (Elsie Haddad); Hitis of the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal (Prasiit Sthapit and Shristi Shrestha) ; Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Training Home, Australia (Tace Stevens); Lamanai, Belize (Morena Pérez Joachin); La Maison du Peuple, Burkina Faso (Adrien Bitibaly); Sumba Island, Indonesia (Fransisca Angela); Teotihuacán, Mexico (Yael Martínez); Tiretta Bazaar, India (Soumya Sankar Bose); and Yanacancha-Huaquis Cultural Landscape, Peru (Víctor Zea Díaz and Diego López Calvín).
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