04.

Regenerative Design

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Wearing our stories is how Indonesians express and preserve cultural identity. Through the 1830 Project, Tulisan reimagines the Java War (1825–1830) as a shared global story, reflecting on how colonialism disrupted indigenous culture. By reconstructing fragments of 19th-century lithographs and layering them with minimal geometric patterns, we practise visual activism of “transforming the colonial gaze”—challenging dominant narratives while offering a Javanese platform for storytelling. This regenerative design process not only reassembles the past but transforms it into contemporary dialogue. Each piece in the 1830 Collection features a QR code that links to a bilingual online journal (English–Indonesian). This “phygital” experience turns wearable objects into performative agents of cross-generational knowledge transmission, bridging personal memory with collective history. In doing so, craft becomes a regenerative practice, reframing history for today’s global audiences.