Throughout her career of 25 years, Chandra has focused on efforts to improve human wellbeing and ecological sustainability, with a special focus on biodiversity conservation. She has worked in various sectors including sustainable agriculture, forestry, chemical pollution reduction and prevention, and finally on transparency and accountability in the oil
and gas Industry.
She has a strong community empowerment background, with a focus on project design and management. Her skills have roots in community, especially with women, exploring new economic pathways for women in agriculture. Early in her career, she set up an NGO named Gita Pertiwi to support women in agriculture through a ‘biodiversity and economic
development approach,’ in 1989. She still sits on the founding board and provides advise to this organization today. Gita Pertiwi is based in Solo, Indonesia and currently supports rural women expand their agriculture-based economic horizon through the production of organic food products, and also in developing hand made woven fabrics and batik using natural dyes. Chandra also sat on the governing board of Yayasan Kehati Indonesia (Indonesian Biodiversity Foundation). Her tenure here ended in December of 2017.
In 2015 she established Yayasan Sekar Kawung, to focus on exploring the nexus between biodiversity and culture, with a special focus on folk art throughout Indonesia, to learn how this can be strengthened to form a strong basis for sustainable development.
For #CArtseCon2020, Chandra will be presenting:
How Facilitating Artisans to Explore their Textile Folk Art Roots in East Sumba, Indonesia Helped Them to Improve Their Art, Their Incomes and Their Environment
This presentation aims to share the experience of how my organization Sekar Kawung Foundation used a participatory research approach to deepen artisans understanding of their cultural roots, especially their traditional “ikat” cloth culture.
The research focused on three elements: the meaning behind the symbols woven into the cloth, and the materials traditionally used to make the cloth, and the value-chain process in the making of the cloth. The aim was to strengthen the local cloth-making culture and to improve the management of the natural resources (plants) used in making the textiles. Ultimately this was aimed at improving the local environment and the local economy.
The research was carried out with two weaving clans, in two villages, in East Sumba, Indonesia, who at the end of the research created this movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTxTcKuyhyI.
The presentation will shortly explain the methodology used in this 18-month long project, the research findings and conclusions and how the knowledge from the research strengthened the faith artisans held in their local traditional textile folk art as well as their faith in themselves as
creative artists.
The knowledge and awareness created from the research was used by the artisans to prepare 50 pieces of cloth for a large “Traditional East Sumba Textile Art Exhibition” to be held in the capital city of Jakarta. For the first time in their lives, 8 local textile designers presented themselves artists, and their beautiful pieces as textile art, to society in the capital city and received high appreciation from textile art lovers in the capital. Their pieces were also ‘auctioned as art’ by Siddhartha Auctioneer, a well known Indonesia Art Auction House.
This helped, the artisans to go back to their village and use their folk art as a basis to build a strong village economy; and to a determination to improve the quality of land management by the artisans to ensure their plant materials would always be available.