Agitare, educare, organizzare. Una conversazione con il collettivo indonesiano che è a Venezia con due progetti
Sale Docks, an activist art space born from a 2007 occupation in Venice, has invited the Indonesian collective Taring Padi to collaborate on two projects. The first is the exhibition "Taring Padi: People's Liberation," which reactivates banners as tools for propaganda, mobilization, and resistance. The second is a public intervention in Venice, where the collective and local community will repaint the walls of the historic social center Laboratorio Occupato Morion. The article includes an interview with Taring Padi, which was founded in 1998 in Yogyakarta by students and activists, and discusses their use of wayang shadow-puppet imagery and collaborative processes to agitate, educate, and organize communities.
This matters because Taring Padi's presence in Venice comes amid heightened geopolitical tensions and the upcoming 2026 Venice Biennale, with boycott campaigns like the Art Not Genocide Alliance. The collective's work extends and transforms their controversial banner "People's Justice," which was removed from documenta 15 in 2022, into an itinerant platform for struggle. Their projects challenge the boundaries between art, politics, and community organizing, offering a model for how artistic practice can directly engage with social justice and international solidarity in a repressive political climate.