What if nuclear bomb had not been invented? What if the West had not win the Cold War, would the world be less benign or perhaps less malign? What if the Bandung Conference became a successful movement in gathering the Third World solidarity? What if there was a strong coalition of non-aligned governments in Asia and Africa? What if Southeast Asia had a different grouping that overcame Asia and bypassed the Pacific? What if the Berlin Wall never fell? What if the Berlin Wall had never been built? What if the leftist movement in Asia was able to gain bigger power? How close did we come to alternative worlds the Bandung Conference imagine?

From Bandung to Berlin is an open and shared immaterial platform of collaboration that revolves around the interplay of historical locations and times between the first Afro-Asian conference in Bandung in 1955 and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The project begins from Bandung Conference because the meeting is considered as the birthplace of the so-called Third World and the non-aligned movement amidst the ideological battle between the Western and Eastern blocs. Meanwhile, the fall of the Berlin Wall is chosen to represent the symbolic coda to Cold War epoch that resulted with the collapse of communism and the triumph of capitalism, at least within the prevailing Euro-American horizon. The past is revisited in order to inspect the fragility of ideologies that emerged from Bandung 1955

and Berlin 1989: the so-called neutral ideology in
the former, and the so-called democratic capitalism in the latter.
By creating imaginative and indirect interconnections between these events, the collaborative project serves as a shared immaterial platform to invent new passages in history. In this project, the spatiotemporal distance from Bandung to Berlin is retraced with transnational approach through creating various speculative routes and networks that involve the fictionalization of history as its modus operandi. Deploying fiction as a necessary narrative mode, the project circulates within a precarious field of literature as a means to provoke a productive ambiguity that confronts the general ambiguous interplay of subjectivities between fictional and historical writings.







Have you ever heard about Datura Wrightii? Also known as Sacred Datura, this is a perennial plant that blooms only one flower once a year, late at night and then in the morning the flower dies off. What a strange creature: perennial and ephemeral at the same time.


“Do you desire recurrence eternally once more and again?” asked the philosopher who was accused of mental illness in his late life. To endure the idea of the recurrence one needs: freedom from morality; new means against the fact of pain (pain conceived as a tool, as the father of pleasure...); the enjoyment of all kinds of uncertainty, experimentalism, as a counterweight to this extreme fatalism; abolition of the concept of necessity; abolition of the "will"; abolition of "knowledge-in-itself. That’s what exactly the philosopher have said. Was he under the hallucinatory effect of the Sacred Datura?

The stories here are narrated through the perspectives of three Chinese women from different era: Jian Qing, the wife of Mao Zedong; Ding Ling, a writer who was executed during the anti-rightist movement; and Yuchen Chang, a Chinese artist who currently lives in New York. Animated from Zhou En Lai’s slick and suave character of diplomacy and the malicious Hundred Flowers campaign in Mao’s era, the stories presented in this part revolve around the ambivalent relation between capitalism and communism in China, spanning from the Cultural Revolution period until present time; the endless present which has become shorter and shorter.

On Zhou En Lai

Never in history where being so called neutral could be the most dangerous political gesture. Zhou En Lai was the Chinese delegation for Bandung Conference. Too dangerous he may be, on his way to Bandung, the desperate Western bloc made a failed assassination attempt against him. A bomb was planted on Kashmir Princess plane that Zhou had chartered for his Hong Kong to Jakarta’s trip. It seems that Zhou was already warned by his own intelligence, so he knew the plot, changed his itinerary, but did not attempt to stop the bomb—those that died on the plane crash were low-level cadres, and perhaps for Zhou, it was a requisite sacrifice. Later, he would use this incident as a bargaining power to put pressure on British operatives intelligence in Hong Kong.

Zhou was success in overcoming the sabotage, but China’s explicit communist ideology was highly attacked by other countries delegations. How come a communist country intervened on this non-aligned conference? But Zhou was a man of cunning, of tenacity, and of charm. Nehru, the Indian prime minister recounted Zhou’s character as a mysterious charm, 'Altogether he created a very good impression. Even his opponents melted somewhat and agreed that he was an attractive person.’ Zhou sidetracked the negative impression upon China’s suspected hegemonic intention and instead offering everyone to seek a neutral common ground rather than exposing ideological divergences among the Asian African Countries. For this statement, Zhou’s diplomacy in Bandung eventually gained the support of overwhelming number of delegates and in fact laid the ground for the conference. His move was not dealing with diversity, but deferring it in the name of common neutrality. Was there something hiding behind this postponement? Something monstrous, perhaps?

On The Hundred Flowers Campaign

“Let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend,” was a phrase used by Mao Zedong to propagate the Hundred Flowers campaign. By 1956, Zhou En Lai who was also the Chinese delegation at the Bandung Conference, began to suggest encouraging public debate and criticism from China’s non-communist intellectuals and political thinkers, hoping this would enable constructive criticism toward a better government.

At first, however, the government did not receive much criticism although the campaign had made a massive publicity. Mao then announced that criticism was “preferred” and the government began to “force” those who did not participate in creating healthy criticisms. Subsequent to this campaign, many intellectuals, particularly those who had been educated in Europe and USA, started to direct protest against Mao and attacking the government’s political policy. This situation had gone beyond what Mao considered will be a reasonable debate and instead turned to reach at “harmful and uncontrollable" level. At this time, the flowers had flourish too wild, and it’s time to cut them down. In July 1957, Mao ordered to abrupt the campaign and began to utilize the Hundred Flowers campaign to “entice the snakes out of their caves,” that is by using the campaign to identify and eliminate his political enemies. Those who had expressed their criticisms were labeled as rightists, and by the end of 1959, an estimated 550,000 people were persecuted, and the hundred blooming flowers were forced to decay.