 |
Bugis Houses, Celebes. By Ursula Schulz-Dornburg.
 |
Photographs by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg
“Like floating boats on a yellow-green sea of paddies, the houses stand motionless between heaven and earth… Facing the main road that runs along the west coast of South Sulawesi, they stand frozen in time.”
— Sirtijo Koolhof
I first went to Indonesia in 1992, where I lived in a small bungalow in Pengosekan, surrounded by rice paddies owned by the royal family of Agung Rai. Pengosekan is a village outside Ubud and Monkey Forest in Southcentral Bali, well-known for both painting and having some of the best gamelan musicians on the island. I was there on a study abroad program researching Balinese Hinduism and gamelan (the bronze percussion orchestras unique to Bali and Java). As part of my coursework, I remember a particular seminar on theoretical architecture in Bali, about domestic architecture as an expression of Hindu philosophy.
In traditionally designed Bali domestic architecture, the base measurement of a dwelling isn’t calculated in inches or meters, but rather by the wingspan of the domicile’s patriarch. He will be measured from fingertip to fingertip, arms stretched to the longest point, and this distance will be used to calculate the perimeters of the walls, the height of the roof, and even the dimensions of the compound. In doing so, the life of the family is embedded in the architecture, literally and symbolically.
 |
The new book by Ursula Schulz-Dornburg, Bugis Houses, Celebes, was photographed in Sulawesi (or at one time the Celebes) in 1983. Schulz-Dorburg went to Indonesia with two anthropologists to photograph the Torajo, a people of Central Sulawesi famous for residential dwellings designed to imitate the spacecrafts that first left them on the island, according to local mythology. While returning to Makassar, the capital of Sulawesi, to leave for Europe, she stopped to photograph houses she saw on the outskirts of the city, a part of Sulawesi occupied by the Bugis — yet another people in the remarkable, unique array of linguistic and ethnic complexity that constitute Indonesia.
Already familiar with The Land in Between, I understood the incredible rigor and sensitivity Schulz-Dornburg brings to her world travels and commitment to architectural photography. Given my own background in Indonesia, I was excited to see her newest publication about the Bugis. With my first viewing, I’ll confess, I was surprised, maybe even disappointed. These pictures do not have the technical and conceptual rigor of The Land in Between — the pictures in Bugis Houses look overexposed (easy to do in that relentless Indonesian sun), and the colors off balance accordingly. Now that I’ve really studied it more closely, I find it a delight, and quickly fell in love with this simple, little book.
Similar in size to a novel, only 64 pages, and with a cover that feels like finely coated linen, the book is a pleasure to hold. The reproductions are small, and all feature closely cropped houses built on stilts, with just enough of the landscape revealed around the dwellings to let us know this is a sparsely populated community dependent on rice and other agricultural products, with little to no modern technology to help them live with the harsh but rich tropical landscape. With just a couple of exceptions, there are no people in the pictures, and when we see them, they are easy to miss. While I was originally put off by the color and exposure of the film, I know to see them as an appropriate expression of the tropical sun. The small reproductions help articulate the humility of the homes they document and help control the limitations of the original photographs.
 |
 |
In an afterward written by Dutch anthropologist Sirtijo Koolhof (an Indonesianist, a specialist in Bugis culture), we do learn something about the construction of the houses and how they correspond to a specific cosmology. They have a clear relationship to the bodies they hold: “From a horizontal perspective, the Bugis house resembles a body, head, foot, and a navel.” Unlike Bali, Sulawesi converted to Islam centuries ago, but Koolhof lets the viewer understand that the Bugis practice a form of Islam that still allows for their earlier animistic beliefs: “For their well-being, people staying in the house should always lay down with their head pointing in the opposite direction of the foot side of the door. In a private section, behind the central wall, the house’s main post is located, the ‘naval’ of the house, where the family presents offerings to the spirits of the house and to their ancestors.” Koolhof’s contribution helps substantiate what the photographs document — a deceptively simple life, but one full of complex and challenging relationships with the landscape and cosmos, and like any home, an essential refuge for supporting the families they shelter.
The types of houses Schulz-Dornburg documented can still be founded in Sulawesi but are largely a thing of the past, having finally given way to more solid structures built from brick and mortar. She must have recognized the changing times, and thus seized upon the necessity of recording these lives they represented. The Land in Between represents 30 years of work, though the pictures in Bugis Houses, represent an idea generated much more quickly, photographed in just a matter of days or hours before she left Sulawesi. Nevertheless, the book presents as a clear idea, modest in its production values, but bold in recording the lives embodied by such simple residential architecture.
Purchase Book
Read More Book Reviews
 |
 |
