Lecture and Cooking Performance: Moenipah OS

15 Nov 2025

Domestic Notes (Nuraini Juliastuti) and Reading Sideways Press invite you to attend their event Moenipah OS, on Saturday 15 November, 14:00 – 17:00 at Garage Rotterdam.

This lecture is about writing and reading systems – less for conveying and exchanging messages, and more for living knowledge production. The lecture will take place in Grandma’s Cubby – a room in the exhibition Underdeveloped #4 – which is recreated in the memory of Nuraini Juliastuti’s grandmother, Moenipah. Based on the conventional education standard, Moenipah (1924 – 2001) would be considered illiterate since she could not read and write. Throughout her life, Moenipah narrated a rich life guided by an alternative roadmap for reading and writing. Using various found archives and artefacts, this event attempts to shed light on an alternative alphabetical system for living, behaving and surviving.

The installation Grandma’s Cubby attempts to materialise a vision to survive within the environment which can feel suffocating and limited. Such an environment might be an over-crowded space with various things hovering between important and unimportant, traces of unspoken fear and trauma attached to things and spoken words.

“I created a replica of the small corner which I used to inhabit for a long time, but I cannot really put my fingers on how to define it. Making various kinds of collections of things is my personalised way to create a sense of agency and a breathing space amidst the clutter and hoard, literally and figuratively. Organising a series of collections forms a simple exercise to perform orderliness in the middle of chaos, living and dying. I refer to the room as the Grandma’s Cubby because this was the look of the space where my Grandma spent most of her days. But this can also be the room of other Grandmas, elder figures, manifesting the impulses to observe, tidy up in a persistent manner, listen quietly, and tell stories without being bothered by the division between fact and fiction. Developing a cubby amidst the rubbles represents the resilience to go on and the capacities to make use of everything including the discarded feelings.”