Syafiatudina ~ Contact as Passage and Transaction beyond Contract

After the hangout session ends, they will go home to their own individual places, except for my friend. He stays in the house, because he lives there. But because of my friend’s daily effort to take care of the house, it became a convenient space to work together for the collective. So the collective is “numpang” on my friend’s effort to take care the house. In here, numpang become a moment of dependency. Something depends on another thing in order for a certain thing to exist. In numpang situations, living together is not based on contract like we might find in a renting agreement. Each person who is involved in a numpang situation, as a guest or host, will form their rights and responsibility in iterations of daily habit. The rights and responsibility are mutually formed and shared. Yet this process is also creating a passage where public/private interests, personal/collective space collide and create a shared space. A shared space where the individuals obtain autonomy collectively. It might involve the feeling of insecurity, but through iteration, negotiation, and trust, the relations grows as the space grows. This is a situation which can’t be facilitated through contract-based relations. In this presentation and departing from numpang situations and Radio KUNCI’s project (http://radio.kunci.or.id), I would like to elaborate on the moments of inhabiting thresholds between private/public (make it a shared space managed by a community of users), crossing boundaries of otherness (guest/host), and use the uncertainty towards the future as room to grow through the dependencies of/with each other, the overlapping of things and people."

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