A photo essay
Rangga Purbaya
The Silent Survivors is a historical research project that examines the experiences of individuals who endured the 1965–66 anti-communist purges in Indonesia. Drawing on a unique assemblage of primary sources—photographic portraits and personal documents recovered from a flea-market stall in Central Java—this study reconstructs the lives of ex-political prisoners whose affiliations with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and other leftist movements led to their incarceration, disenfranchisement, and erasure from official narratives.
The material evidence, marked by humidity damage and the wear of neglect, provides an unusually direct window into a period whose archival record remains fragmentary. Weathered photographs such as those depicted here, capture visages long omitted from public memory, while accompanying letters, identification papers, and personal artefacts illuminate the quotidian dimensions of endurance, survival strategies, and acts of resistance. Together, they form a corporeal archive through which silenced voices can be heard once more.
By situating these recovered documents within broader socio-political and historiographical frameworks, The Silent Survivors contributes to ongoing debates on memory, trauma, and state-sponsored violence. It foregrounds the methodological challenges of working with non-institutional archives and underscores the ethical imperative to restore agency to those whom official histories have rendered invisible.
Rangga Purbaya is an artist who works on the history, narratives, collective memory and archiving of the 1965 mass killings in Indonesia.
