Weaving the Aksara into Knowledge (2024), a collaborative photographic series by Indonesian artist-researcher collectives Lifepatch and Kawan Pustaha, is the final image set in the serial exhibition Overseeding: Botany, Cultural Knowledge and Attribution (May 1 to September 2, 2024). Overseeding is the practice of spreading grass seed for the recolonization of lawns, land that would have had its own botanical communities. Turning the settler practice back on itself, the exhibition seeds over monocultural understandings of the origins of agricultural, botanical and herbal knowledge, returning pre-imperial ideas and diverse authors to the space. Lifepatch and Kawan Pustaha (Friends of Pustaha) overseed the colonial imperative to seize objects and, instead, reroot their communities by directing flows of knowledge.

Over several years, the collectives have been researching pustaha, illuminated manuscripts—handwritten, embellished books authored by the Indigenous Batak men and women who are Datu or the spiritual leaders in North Sumatra, Indonesia. The hard, carved covers contain accordion style pages, made of soft bark, that deal with social structure, religion, esoteric symbols, medicine and other topics passed down through generations. Since the earliest days of European exploration and colonization, practices that we now recognize as biopiracy have involved appropriating ethnobotanical knowledge from Indigenous tropical peoples. This process has brought food, decorative and medicinal plants, as well as profit to the West. During this time and that of the Dutch colonial period in Indonesia (1816 to 1941), thousands of books of knowledge were taken out of the region, despite colonizers being illiterate of the Batak aksara or script. For those seeking to extract information and profit, these acts of cultural erosion, alienating people from generations of their literary works, journals and records, have still yielded little. Despite their failure to profitably uncover the meaning of and applications for pustaha texts, museums across Europe and North America continue to hoard an estimated two thousand manuscripts (as of 1999),11According to Zuzanna Rozwadowska, Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, "Between Mind and Soul – Pustaha Manuscripts in Batak Society. Concerning the collections of Batak manuscripts – part I," published in 2022. with only a handful housed in Indonesian museum collections.

The collectives seek to bring about rematriation. For them, rematriation is carried out by prioritizing the reclamation and return of knowledge, rather than physical objects. This ethos, fore fronted in the title of their working group “Tim Studi Lapangan Arus Balik” or Reverse Flow Field Study Team, guides their fieldwork. Taking place both at home and abroad, where the project includes working with philologists (those that study the history of languages) and museums in Europe, the collectives channel the knowledge back into their communities where rematriation continues through “doing the knowledge.” Led by Kawan Pustaha, Indigenous Batak practices are brought into the day-to-day, accessed and communicated through traditional aksara This takes shapes through formal and informal ways of being with the script, including writing sessions and using recipes for foods and healing practices. Tim Studi Lapangan Arus Balik take their direction from Batak elders who were asked if the goal should be to have Europeans return Batak artifacts. The elders responded that, although the pustaha are overseas, spirit or knowledge can’t be taken, and the knowledge has remained with the Batak.

The artist-researchers also recognize that the continuing existence of the aged manuscripts depends upon museum preservation. As such, pustaha returned to Indonesia would still likely be kept away from their original communities, in institutions where the Batak wouldn’t have easy access. Against the deadening effect of museums, isolating culture in the past, Weaving the Aksara Into Knowledge sets the subjects in the present, through the use of colour photography, referring to the transcendence and survival of cultural wisdom and pustaha. Counter to how museums rarefy knowledge, the artists present us with an image of pustaha making tools, demonstrating fearlessness, generosity and confidence in the rematriation that has been set in motion.

Both collectives are based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Kawan Pustaha is a group of young Batak people, inscribing Batak language and cultural practices in their  lives and sharing through open community sessions. The members of Lifepatch are of mixed Indonesian cultural heritage, in-part trying to understand what it means to be a nation through this research.