MET Glodok

Remembrance begins on a Friday in December 2025 — the day before MET Glodok opens its doors. No visitors yet, the space is being readied, the café prepared, programs arranged. The team moves through the neighborhood: walking the alleys, talking to neighbors, tending to the things that need tending. MET Glodok is an independent cultural space rooted in the heart of Jakarta’s historic Chinatown, founded and run by a fourth generation local resident who grew up and chose to stay there. On...

Before we shape Translating Glodok, we find ourselves asking one question: What if the way we understand Glodok is only one among many? What we see shapes how we understand, but understanding asks for more than observation alone. It requires a sensitivity to acknowledge that each perspective carries its own truth, shaped by different experiences, distances, and ways of being in the neighborhood. Through the first volume, we invited participants to encounter the area not simply as a place to...

This year, we choose to go home. To record, cherish, and honor the neighborhood we belong to and the people who continue to shape it. Restoring Legacy is one of the ways we attempt to do so. In Glodok, we continuously admire those who carry on their craft with care and consistency, even as the neighborhood shifts around them. Yet we also recognize a pressing reality: time does not wait. Many are growing older, and with them, the stories and practices they hold risk fading away. When we speak...