Drawn From Conversation

For the second volume of Translating Glodok, we shifted from photography to sketching as a way of engaging with the neighborhood. Across three different sketch walks, we learned that a sketch is never really finished by the hand alone. It is completed by conversation.

Nugraha shared how his years of exploring Glodok, along with conversations with its locals, have shaped the way he sees and translates the neighborhood through sketches that tell its stories. The sketch that followed carried more than a temple's facade. It also carried his stories that had been passed on to participants, who now had their own way of seeing the neighborhood.

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Glodok feels like unfamiliar ground for Deby, yet it is precisely this unfamiliarity that gives her room to play. Working with oil pastels, drawing became less about careful observation and more about returning to a time when things felt much simpler, when curiosity could be reason enough to stop, pick something up, and look again. Through the objects they chose and the drawings they made, participants found their own way to connect with Glodok.

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From a different vantage point, Angga shared his observations. Glodok and Kota Tua unfolded below not only as streets to walk, but a landscape to understand. Structure met sentiment up there, and the neighborhood changed, from something only to preserve to something we could imagine forward. What Angga shared became a way for participants to look beyond what was immediately in front of them. Their sketches began to map not only what Glodok looks like, but the relationships and possibilities that shape what it could become.

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None of it happened instantly, and maybe that was the point. Rather than simply recording what is there, sketching allowed our encounters with a place to shape how we understand and represent it. Through sketching, we gave ourselves something that is increasingly difficult to make room for: time to look, time to process, and time to create.