In 2014, artists Tita Salina and Irwan Ahmett embarked on their ten-year (now still ongoing) project, the Ring of Fire; travelling across the instable, earthquake-and-volcano-prone Pacific Ring of Fire to explore shared experiences through art. This paper brings Tita and Irwan’s project into dialogue with similar, contemporaneous art-ideas explored elsewhere on the archipelago between 2014-2021: in particular, through new interests in environmental and decolonial trajectories of thinking in/about Eastern Indonesia.

Taken together, this paper argues that these trajectories are part of a wave of projects that take a distinctly post-regional perspective. Terminology for the ‘post-regional’, here, is understood as neither wholly regional (daerah) nor regionalist (Southeast Asian) in focus. Instead, it has sought to imagine fluid between-spaces that relate inter-island contexts to an international sphere, primarily through new media; generating new kinds of relations through climate, geography, and culture.

Note this paper was originally titled: Highways, Lines, and Rings of Fire: A Post-Regional Narration for Indonesian Art?