Beyond Walls and Makassar International Writers Festival collaboratively present WANUA: an international research and artist exchange that brings together artists, writers, and cultural practitioners from Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and the diaspora in the Netherlands. Together, they explore shared heritage through research, storytelling, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
We invite you to their artistic creations at the Makassar International Writers Festival 2025 at Fort Rotterdam, Makassar, South-Sulawesi.
Learn more about Wanua: Beyond Home – the artistic process, artists, translated texts, and the La Galigo visit in Leiden.
-
ROOM 1 / RUANG 1 - Artist Exchange: The Background Of WANUA: Beyond Home
Beyond Walls and MIWF invited 8 artists from Makassar, Ambon, and the Netherlands to co-create and reflect on the meaning of Wanua. The journey began with a residency in Amsterdam and Rotterdam (April 2025), where the artists explored oral histories, colonial archives, and local heritage. ‘Home’ played an important central role in their collaboration. In this room the artists share about their feeling of homes.
-
ROOM 2 / RUANG 2 - La Galigo: heritage as a pathway to connect
For the WANUA artists, the La Galigo manuscript was a key source of inspiration. This epic Bugis text, rooted in oral traditions and dating back to the 14th century, is one of the world’s longest literary works. During the exchange week, the artists visited the original manuscripts at Leiden University. Click below to read Louie Buana’s reflection.
-
ROOM 3 / RUANG 3 - Wanua: Beyond Home
Room 3 is about the question ‘what does home mean to you metaphorically? In the exhibition you hear the soundscapes of the artists, read parts of their poems and see art installations. Here you can find the translation (Bahasa Indonesia and English) of the works. And more about the Kutika inspired installation.
“Through La Salaga and the vast cosmos of La Galigo, we rediscover the ancient bonds between Makassar and Maluku — ties forged long before colonial borders, in shared seas, sacred kinships, and ancestral exchange.
Programs such as WANUA matter. They create space for us — across islands, continents, and generations — to retake the knowledge, to hold our past in our own hands, and to speak our stories in our own voices.”
— Louie Buana, PhD Candidate, researcher and storyteller
Wanua
Land, Community and Connections Across Oceans
Wanua holds many meanings – land, world, universe, home, portals – but at its core, it signifies deep connection. Artists Theoresia Rumthe, Djé-Rimo, Safa Liron, Hirah Sanada, Rachmat Mustamin, Tiga Batang Rumah and Louie Buana come together to explore Wanua as community, place, and the living relationship between people and their environment.
Inspired by Bugis and Austronesian cosmology, Wanua examines how identity is shaped through ecological interdependence and place- based relationships. Wanua acknowledges the vast geographic and cultural expanse of oceanic communities—from Sulawesi to Madagascar and across the Pacific—where, long before European colonization, Austronesian societies were deeply connected through shared cosmologies, kinship networks, and ecological thinking. Like the ancient epic La Galigo, where sky, sea, and land are united through ancestral ties, we too carry stories in our bodies, memories and voices.
For the artists, Wanua represents the interconnectedness of people, place, and time. Despite oceans, borders, or generations, the emotional and spiritual bonds between us remain strong. Their exchange process offered space to learn and reflect on the meaning of Wanua, of home – not as a physical space, but as a shared sense of belonging. A place beyond walls, where imposed borders are not barriers that divide us, but threads that connect us all.
Wanua began with a feeling, an intuitive urge to express something that lives within us: stories, knowledge and experiences of living and being in Sulawesi, the Moluccas, and the diaspora. Wanua: Beyond Home invites you to a creative space—a doorway—for us all to enter and reflect together on what Wanua truly means.
What does Wanua mean to you? Let us know in our exhibition WANUA: Beyond Home, Building C, at Makassar International Writers Festival, Fort Rotterdam in Makassar, South-Sulawesi.
The poster design of WANUA is created by Hirah Sanada.
