Forevermore

Images and declarations can make a political collective visible while claiming the authority to speak for it. *Forevermore* examines that double power in Bandung’s public image. I rework press photographs and a quotation from Sukarno’s address to ask how solidarity is represented, whose histories it gathers, and what it leaves unresolved. At the 1955 Bandung Conference, Asian and African delegates asserted a collective voice amid the Cold War. I reshoot press photographs through a hand-manipulated inverted lens, drawing their figures into shifting, unstable motion. The soundtrack uses reversed, digitally manipulated gamelan sounds. Its Morse-code score carries the words “a cry / a voice / and a word / that shall echo,” from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem *Paul Revere’s Ride*, which Sukarno quoted in his opening address. A custom algorithm recombines the sounds and moving images, so the composition changes with each viewing and can continue almost indefinitely. The words had already crossed from an American poem about revolutionary struggle into an Indonesian call for anticolonial cooperation. In *Forevermore*, they travel again, encoded in sound that carries them without making them readily intelligible. The photographs, too, resist settling into a single historical image. Through these shifts, the work asks what a call for solidarity carries forward, what becomes obscured in its retelling, and who is able to speak in its name.