Nuraini Juliastuti
Nuraini Juliastuti is a trans-local practicing researcher and writer, focusing on art organisations, activism, illegality, alternative cultural production, and vernacular archiving.
In 1999, Nuraini co-founded Kunci Study Forum & Collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. During its first decade, Kunci published Newsletter Kunci and a mailing list, two open forums dedicated to discussing contemporary cultural issues in post-1998 Indonesia. Since 2016, Kunci has established the long-term project School of Improper Education.
Nuraini’s individual and collective works have been presented and published in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, Asia Cultural Centre, Para Site, Afterall, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Sternberg Press, Valiz, Parse and Critical Times. Kunci curated Made in Commons, which was exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam in 2013. In 2016, Kunci and Para Site published an anthology of migrant workers’ writings titled Afterwork Readings. Outside within the Colonial Theatre: An Audio Guide was presented during a research residency in Tropenmuseum in 2017. Letters: The Classroom is Burning, Let’s Dream about a School of Improper Education is a chapbook, which was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2020.
Nuraini develops Domestic Notes, a publication-based project that takes domestic and migrant spaces as sites to discuss everyday politics, the organisation of makeshift support systems, and alternative cultural production. With her family, Nuraini runs a small press, Reading Sideways Press, which publishes works and translations on arts, sports, and literature.
In 2020, Juliastuti took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Amsterdam. In this role, she worked as part of the project Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation at the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis. Her recent research Commons Museums: Infrastructure for Engineering Intellectual Activism, Alternative Pedagogies, and Community Economies narrates the development of commons museums - a multimodal and long-term platform dedicated to design alternative schooling, methods for archiving, and mechanisms for surviving together.