Inter-Totem: Sensing the Seismic Spirit
I am a visual artist and heritage historian based in Venice, Italy, where I manage Studio Angge. I obtained a PhD in History, Cultural Heritage, and Territory, focusing on the intersection of craft, art, and technology. My research and project interests are diasporic narratives, place attachment, and the impact of technology. Eko explores how heritage memory, identity, and spirituality, intertwined with technology, can reinterpret and reshape cultural stories from a contemporary viewpoint. I have served on the Curatorial Team for the Indonesian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2017-2019). Later, I showcased my own artworks at the Venice Biennale Architecture, 'as well as at CICA Museum of Contemporary Art, Larnaca Biennale, Ars Electronica, Palacio des Belas Artes Lisbon, and Art House Turku.
Inter-Totem is a speculative and practice-based project that explores the relationship between seismic activity, memory, and spirituality. Initiated in response to both personal experience and global catastrophe, especially the 2004 tsunami in Sumatra, Indonesia, the work seeks to materialize the Earth’s subtle yet persistent movements into a perceptible and poetic form.
In an era marked by climate instability and natural disasters, earthquakes act as visceral reminders of our fragile coexistence with the planet. Yet beyond their destructive power, seismic events are also signal carriers of planetary rhythms that resonate with ritual practices and ecological consciousness. Inter-Totem draws from these symbolic resonances and translates them into an immersive sound installation that uses real-time or archived seismic data to generate sonic experiences. These vibrational patterns are rendered through custom-built sculptural "totems," which act as both aesthetic and technical interfaces mediating between human perception and geophysical phenomena. Totems have historically embodied spiritual ties between humans and nature; here, they are reimagined as digital-ritual objects that listen to the Earth.
Inter-Totem is its layered methodology that connects environmental urgency, spiritual symbolism, and data translation into a multisensory public experience. It raises questions about how we sense planetary time, how memory is encoded in the land, and how technology might restore rather than sever our ecological and emotional ties to place. Moving forward, the project will evolve through expanded soundscapes and site-responsive installations situated in geologically active or historically affected regions.