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.







Of all words that human beings have invented so far, one of the saddest is “It might have been.” What’s the use of asking what if? Entertaining pain? Indulging regret?


If history is written by the victors, then we are the losers, crying foul at the progress of time. The event of history, perhaps, is like the event of love—sometimes its just happened because it was in the right time and it was in the right place. Contingency.
Have love ever played any important role in our history? Or indeed, it is actually the motor of history? Love for nation, love for money, love for women, love for religion. Too much love will kill you.

These narratives are ephemera of a dangerous liaison between nationalism and communism. The West, however, tragically aborted their passionate love affairs. Our stories come from Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia. In the past, these countries once created a failed federation that only lasted for two months, they named themselves as Maphilindo. What if this union lasts longer?

The period of the 1950s gave optimistic yet anxious beginnings to the newly independent countries in Asia and Africa with colonial powers retreating in the face of staunch nationalist movements. The Bandung Conference in 1955 had established a community of feelings for the participating nations, where their affinities were more sentimental rather than geopolitical. The same experience of being colonized for a long period of time and the fear of another potential world war between the superpowers that likely to happen at that time were the main reasons for these countries to unite together in Bandung. While Bandung declared their union as a neutral bloc—meaning neither pro nor against any blocs—it is inevitable to regard this “neutrality” as a blank site where both the East and the West bloc contesting their influences and investing their ideologies to Asia and Africa. On the one hand the left was more central to the rise of nationalist sentiment, although on the other hand, with the escalating Cold War tensions nationalist agendas were harnessed to capitalist state building project.

This intense tension appeared clearly in the case of history of communism in Malaysia, Indonesia and Philippines. In Indonesia, the communist party was already established since 1920s and in Malaya and the Philippines they were established around the 1930s. In Malaya, this situation led to an armed

conflict between the British and the Malaya Communist Party (MCP) in a period called the “Emergency” (1948-1960). In Indonesia, Soekarno’s “Guided Democracy” system which fused nationalism, communism and religion in his regime showed an incongruent relationship with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI). To expand his ideology, Soekarno was drawn into supporting communist movement in Singapore and Borneo to oppose the federation of Malaya plan. Yet this alliance faced a challenge from the right-wing elements in military (arguably with support from the US) and the situation was culminating in a violent attack on the leftist movement resulted with a massive killings of PKI’s members without any jurisdiction started from 1965. Meanwhile, in the post-war period, Philippines’ political elites was also engaged in similar struggles against communist insurgency. This situation also accompanied by the height of ethno-religious conflict in Mindanao around 1950s-1970s between Muslim and Christian Filipinos. During Marcos dictatorship, the Christian militia group (Illongo Land Grabbers Association) was used as paramilitary group and instrumentalized by Marcos as part of counterinsurgency program.

What would happen if the communist movement in Asia successful?