Tilas Waktu: at ARTJOG 2026: ‘ARS LONGA – GENERATIO’
Alexander Sebastianusʼ artistic practice exists at the intersection of ritual, material anthropology, speculative archaeology and phenomenology. Through material reverence, sacralizing archive/data, lithifcation of gathered belongings, and ritualizing reconstruction of material forms, his work investigates how human existence becomes sedimented within objects, landscapes, and geological matter. Tilas Waktu, expands this inquiry through the creation of megalithic stone-like sculptures composed from bodily residues, ancestral textiles and inherited garments, literature deconstructed into pulp, cremated domestic furnishings, archival photographs, fractured ceramic sediment, displaced soils gathered from former homelands, volcanic-geological matter collected through pilgrimage, and composted organic residue. These forms resemble fossils, monoliths, ritual stones, ruins, and archaeological artifacts, yet they are fundamentally accumulations of lived existence sedimented into matter.
The title Tilas Waktu may be understood as “traces of time,ˮ “temporal residue,ˮ or “lingering duration.ˮ In Javanese, tilas refers not merely to a mark or remnant, but to an existential afterimage — something whose presence continues to linger after disappearance. Waktu, meaning time or duration, introduces temporality as geological condition. The title, therefore, proposes time not as an abstraction, but as material sediment. Memory, ritual, grief, lineage, intimacy, and labor become compressed into lithic bodies. These sculptures are not representations of stones; they are anthropogenic geological formations — speculative megaliths composed from human residue and material inheritance.
The installation constructs what may be called a “lithic phenomenology of belonging.ˮ Here, belonging is not understood socially or psychologically, but materially and cosmologically. The work asks how humans belong to landscapes, how memory inhabits matter, and whether existence itself can fossilize. Through processes of decay, deconstruction, cremation, sedimentation, and coalescence, Sebastianus transforms domestic material into geological presence. The sculptures become temporal containers — bodies through which human duration is preserved, ritualized, and monumentalized.
Situated between shrine, excavation, archive, monument, and speculative ruin, Tilas Waktu destabilizes distinctions between archaeology and fiction, geology and memory, ritual and museology. Influenced by encounters with megalithic sites such as Gunung Padang, the installation reconstructs the phenomenological uncertainty produced by ancient lithic landscapes: the inability to fully determine whether one stands before artifact, cosmological instrument, sacred technology, or future ruin. Through this ambiguity, the work proposes that stone is not inert matter but a living repository of human existence.
