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Kritika Kultura

Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-5680-0687 https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9799-624X

Abstract

Indonesia is a maritime nation, consisting of 17,500 islands—one-third of its geographical area is ocean. Thus, Indonesia declares its identity as an archipelagic nation and actively promotes the geographical facts mentioned above as maritime nationalism. However, the sea remains “secondary” compared to the land and it is frequently misrepresented in Indonesian popular visual culture. This article offers an analysis on how the sea is constructed across three popular visual texts, namely Wonderland Indonesia, a music video series produced by Alffy Rev; the film Budi Pekerti (2023); and The Bajau, a documentary, produced by Watchdoc. The analysis draws on Stuart Hall’s constructionist theory of representation. The article argues that Indonesian popular visual culture pictures or imagines the sea as spectacle, tourist commodity—perspectives of the sea from the point of view of the land. This reflects how Indonesia still focuses on its way of looking at the sea not with a maritime set of thinking (maritime consciousness) but with the “land” set of mind (land-oriented paradigms). The Bajau, however, offers a different representation: the sea as a political space, since it exposes the state’s maritime ambitions to exploit the sea to serve the land-based interests, sacrificing the communities living on the coast. This article contributes a critical analysis of oceanic representation in Indonesian popular visual culture, revealing a fundamental gap between state-promoted maritime nationalism and the terrestrially-biased visual constructions that actually circulates in popular media.

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