Outdonesia

Outdonesia explores identity and belonging through the experience of growing up in contemporary Indonesia amid international education, Western media, inherited culture, and local social expectations. Combining staged photography, portraiture, still life,

Growing up in South Jakarta in the 2010s, my sense of self was shaped by an internationally oriented education and the constant flow of social media. Attending a private international Christian school while growing up in Indonesia exposed me to cultures and ideas far beyond my immediate surroundings. YouTube and Instagram became windows into other ways of living and seeing, creating a persistent tension between my inherited cultural background, Western influences encountered through media, and the social expectations of the place I grew up.

Outdonesia reflects a search for belonging in a world that feels simultaneously connected and distant. Combining staged collaborations with friends, self-portraits, visual diary documentation, recontextualized domestic objects, and handwritten journal entries, the project explores how media, education, cultural inheritance, and social expectations become entangled in the formation of identity.

From masked faces and constructed bodies to Indonesian cultural objects, digital imagery, and everyday Jakarta environments, the work dwells in a state of in-betweenness. Rather than seeking a fixed definition of identity, Outdonesia considers what it means to negotiate belonging while growing up between different cultural influences in contemporary Indonesia.