Some creations from Prailiu Weavers Collective.

Sarah Hobgen was born in Australia and has lived in Sumba since 2008. She came to research about erosion and sedimentation in Sumba as part of her PhD with Charles Darwin University. This stint led her to learning about the social, environmental and economic systems of life in Sumba and meeting her husband too! In 2011, Sarah married Umbu Ndjurumanna and became a member of Prailiu Village.

Together with her new family, Sarah led Prailiu Weavers Collective to ensure the continuation of traditional knowledge by enabling weavers to sell their cloth at fair prices and encouraging young weavers to learn the processes step by step being paid fair wages for their work.

In this episode of aNERDspective (our NERD talk show where we converse with amazing friends about their textile journey and perspectives), we talked to Sarah about her involvement in the new family with strong weaving culture and being a movie star! Enjoy the interview and let us know which East Sumba tenun ikat cloth catch your eyes.

Note: Full video is available on IG TV and this transcript has been edited for reading format.

 

Tony Sugiarta (TS): Welcome Sarah to aNERDspective and we will start with an introduction of who Sarah is and your journey in landing in Sumba and starting Prailiu Weavers.

Sarah Hobgen (SH):  My name is Sarah Hobgen. I was born in Australia, originally from Australia, and I came to Sumba for the first time in 2008, as a volunteer for a local non-government organisation that works in the environment. I was working with them for 4 years on a tourism project. During that year, I met my husband. I went home because I thought I was crazy and I can’t marry a Prince on a deserted island. That’s ridiculous!

So I went home to Australia, but then I realised actually there is so much to love about Sumba. I decided that I would come back, I married my husband and made Sumba a home. We got married in 2011 and my husband’s village is in Prailiu Village, in Indonesia is known as Kampung Raja Prailiu. In Prailiu, we do lot of weaving, so my job as a daughter-in-law in the village is to learn to weave, but I’m not really patient and so I thought that I would help out in other ways.

When I came here, I started to realise that a lot of the weavers were doing their weaving business, but then they were also sitting for hours telling the tourists. There was no consistency in the prices and often people were selling things for a lot less than they were worth because people didn’t understand the value of the cloth. They didn’t understand the process. They didn’t understand the value of the tradition.

So, working with my husband and my mother-in-law particularly, we sat to think: how can we start to get people to understand a bit more about the cloth. If people can understand the whole process and understand the values behind it, then they can understand the price of the cloth and the real value about the thing they were purchasing. Hence, we created Prailiu Weavers.

The other thing that we noticed was that the price of Sumba cloth outside is really high. There was some middlemen who were making a lot of money that wasn’t going to the weavers. The weavers were doing a lot of work for a little bit of wage, and then other people in the middle were making a little money out of that. We thought initially that we tried with just a group approach, but then we realised actually these businesses have been going really well. If we can just make a fair business model, then that makes it a lot easier for us to move forward, which means we have clear rules of the game.

There was no consistency in the prices and often people were selling things for a lot less than they were worth because people didn’t understand the value of the cloth. They didn’t understand the process.

We have two different kinds of cloth now – we have the cloth that the weavers actually designed and make using all of the traditional motifs and using their creativity. They do that from start to finish and then we help with the sales. The other model is that we designed things that we think will appeal to a broader market, a lower value, higher volume products. The aim of that is to be able to consistently sell the pieces so that we can employ particularly the younger weavers. They are more worried about having a go because they (think that the cloth) needs to be of high value and it needs to be really good quality to get good prices. They are worried about making a mistake and messing up a cloth. For cloths that are of a lower value and to have a pattern rather than a picture approach, they are really good for making things like cushions or bed covers – things that have a broader appeal, and really that has come out for us to in the pandemic.

We have been trying to shift more to online sales and there is a small market of people who have been to Sumba, who really want to buy a really traditional cloth. There’s actually a market of people who want to support sustainable and traditional arts, but they don’t necessarily want crocodiles and turtles on their wall, crocodiles particularly. They’re not so many people love those. I was very happy to see that (ed.: pointing to the decoration on our background). The crocodile is the title or the symbols of the King’s village in our village as well. So, it’s a good choice of cloth.

TS: What is the scope of you coming (to Sumba), is it to work with weavers directly or was it for a another project? 

SH: I came in just as a volunteer, as a member of the village, rather than as a member of an NGO. Initially we started with some English language lessons and to enable people to sell and explain things a bit better. In actuality, it requires quite complex language to be able to explain the whole process which is, as you know, has the basic 14-step process, but if you include all the little bits, it’s more like 40 steps. So, it’s actually quite a lot to explain. We started to work on how can we have static displays and other ways to do it. My work here was just as a volunteer.

We have the Collective set up as a business, but I don’t take any money from that. There are a lot of people who really truly live on really low wages. So as a leader in the village, my husband is one of the people who help people if they need money for education and other things. This is one way where we can help people out with money, but they do some work for it. It is a lot more sustainable. It is not just about us giving people things, but it is about creating a bigger business and where people can be empowered.

TS: How many weavers are there in this organisation?

SH: There are twenty who are really in it all the time. There are actually about 50 weavers who do different parts of the weaving when it comes to actually weaving the cloth. Usually we have a lot more people because each piece of cloth takes a week or so to weave. The other stages of the cloth from the ikat process, a lot of those you’re doing 10 pieces of cloth at a time because many processes (are done) in one batch. So when you’re doing 10 pieces of a time, obviously the same person does that process. Once we get to the weaving stage, there’s a lot more people involved.

TS:  Are you getting the raw materials, like cotton and the dyes, locally as well?

SH: The dyes were done locally. I tried for the first time this year to make my own blue dye. I won’t show you the results because it is not as pretty as this one. So we do all of the weaving, all of the red dyes and the blue dyes are done here in the village. The cotton, we started to source some cotton that’s straight from the cotton plants. We have started to plant some indigo and the combo for the red dyes, so that we have a bit more of a sustainable supply. Obviously as demand increases, that doesn’t mean that the number of trees that are producing these things increase. Most of the plain cotton threads come from a factory in Indonesia, but we’re trying to source more organic cotton threads so that we can make an entirely organic product. At the moment, the threads are not organic and we are still trying to change that.

TS: Do you attempt to dye indigo & weave yourself?

SH: I am learning, but it’s a long process and the weaving is like the last possible part of the process. It takes some of the longest, so I am trying to learn some of the other processes first. Slowly, but I also think sometimes: when I’m retired, I will have time to learn these things.

TS: You mentioned earlier that you married your husband who is part of the local community. Were you required to be able to weave?

SH: In the past, you should be able to weave your own piece of cloth to give to your husband when you get married. Obviously I wasn’t able to do that yet. Many other people my age aren’t necessarily able to do that, but we certainly noticed the resurgence of younger people, particularly, young mothers studying to learn the processes. They can make some income on the side when they have small children at home. It works really well with their household responsibilities. Many men don’t have to go outside of the home (ed.: Sumba) to work. Wages can be competitive compared to the other works they can get.

Sumba cloth is actually used in all of the marriages. So when we got married, my husband’s family bought 11 horses and 4 buffalo for my family. In respond, the reciprocal gift to that is a piece of cloth. I also bought pieces of cloth with me to my new home. There is a strong role of the cloth in the marriage adat, or ceremonies. When somebody dies, the body will be wrapped in cloth and people who come to attend the funeral, they also bring a piece of cloth and put that on the coffin. It’s a very strong part of village life, still.

TS: So the cloth are actually part of the betrothal gifts from both sides, is that right? Is there a particular motif?

SH: The motifs are mostly related to the different castes. In the past, there were Maramba, Kabisu and Ata castes. Different pictures, different motifs were for different castes. The crocodile and the turtle were their motifs for the kings. The lobster that you sometimes see in cloth is also generally associated with the King’s caste. On other people’s cloth, you would often see the smaller kind of motifs, horses, chickens, ducks. The chicken and the duck are the pairing match of the crocodile and the turtle. The chicken and the duck show that it is the King’s responsibility to his people, like a mother duck to her ducklings, like a rooster protects the chicks. It shows the Kings are all in protecting people and bringing people together. Those different motifs are reflected in the different cloths.

TS: Talking about the motifs and you were mentioning, there’s some which are very full of pictures like an artwork. And also there’s another one that are more pattern-based that is for applications such as cushion covers or bed covers. When we are dealing adat (ed.: traditional custom) how are the local weavers are taking creativity or innovation? How open are they when introduced to this idea that you can create any patterns or motifs. 

SH: We definitely didn’t start that. That started a long time before the collective. There has been a really long history of creativity and creating new kinds of cloths. From the early 1980s, men started to get involved in cloth when before that it was just women’s business. Some of the biggest Chinese traders has started to get cloth made and they started to introduce a little innovation then.

These patterns behind us are more recent. In the past, you would have a lot more repetitive patterns or single motifs, but these kinds of pictures that are telling the stories are more recent things.

Also, with the patterns, we didn’t choose and we didn’t make up new patterns. We chose usually in the middle of men’s cloth. A hinggi is about 3.2 to 3.5 meters long and when it’s folded and the men wears it, the picture is standing up. In the bit that goes around the men’s waist, that usually has patterns rather than pictures. We use the patterns that come from the middle part of their hinggi normally, and we just made them into, into a whole cloth. It’s not a new thing, we just do a small variation on what people were already doing. For most people, they just kind of look boring. Actually, these cloth in Sumba are quite hard to sell because they look boring compared to the others.

If you’re thinking about a cushion on your sofa, you’re not thinking about is this the best piece of Sumba cloth for me to take home with me. You are thinking about what will look nice on my sofa. That’s a very different market. The weavers are very responsive to having consistent work and particularly during COVID. A lot of the workers dropped away because most of our market is tourists. Tourists come to our village, they buy a piece of cloth and they take that home with them. When you try to sell that same cloth online, it really is quite difficult. Whereas at the start of COVID, there was quite a room in homewares and people wanting to make their homes nice, I guess, as they were spending more time there.

I think that’s sort of changed a little bit now but orienting to the the online market has been a challenge. We think we understand better what people want. We’re getting there. It’s all a process, right?

TS: Yes, it is an iterative process, right? So it just keeps on improving and meeting the demands of the market.

SH: Yes, we are working on to protect the tradition and also to ensure that the quality is maintained. We have a gallery that’s actually going to be cultural centre that’s under construction. The purpose of that is to educate people about the process of the cloth, interactive displays where they can start, where they can have a go (ed.: around the village) and understand just how much work it is to create one piece of cloth. They can learn about the history of the village, the history of cloth, the meaning of motifs, those things in one village, in one building.

That also helps us because we live in a traditional village, but we don’t live in a museum. We are still modern people. How do we maintain our traditions without saying: there was the past and then the present, but keeping them as a continuous traditions. That means obviously things are going to change with time and they have been changing with time since forever. Maintaining the culture and keeping it as a living culture, I think, is the most important thing for us right now.

TS: Cool! Nice! Is the museum in Prailiu?

SH: Yes, the culture centre is actually right in the middle of, in the heart of the village. At the moment, it is just a roof and a basic building is there, but we ran out of funding. We initially applied for a funding for a much smaller building and then everybody was like, you know, we should make it bigger, we should dream big. This is great, you can dream big, but we didn’t know the pandemic (ed.: is coming). We probably would have gotten a bit further, but we are patient, the village has been here for thousands of years. There’s no hurry to get things done this year.

TS: You mentioned that you set up an enterprise to help these weavers in terms of fair pricing and stuff. Would you be able to share some of the programs that you have.

SH: We operate as a collective of weavers from this village. We are now working with some other friends from a group called Kayaka Humba. That is an initiative that was started by a group of people from Waingapu, who also have a lot more and stronger connections to Jakarta. Kayaka was started as a gateway, as a platform for selling cloth in this difficult time on a volunteer kind of basis. Not just from our village, it is from a number of villages. It has been really amazing.

We noticed over the last few years, as more and more tourists were coming to Sumba, there was competition developing between the villages. That is really sad because we should be working together. Competition should be at a much higher level, like with batik or other tenun, not competition between villages. That (ed.: Kayaka Humba initiative) has been really good as bringing people together and opening conversations between people who kind of have been in competition.

Also, there has been a couple of films that were filmed in Sumba, including parts in our village.The producers of those films, like Mira Lesmana, they helped with advertising for that (ed.: Sumba). So it meant that we were able to reach audience that otherwise we would not have been able to reach otherwise. So that is really great. Just from our village, we have sold over 35 million Rupiah worth of cloth.

We are also now looking at how to make that into more of a social enterprise, not just volunteer. If it is just volunteer, it is hard to sustain. How do we employ someone to really drive that? So, the Prailiu Weavers will be more about producing the cloth, but for things like producing pillows, and other the products that you can make from the cloth, that will be Kayaka’s role.

TS: So, you worked with Kayaka for the distribution. Am I right?

SH: Yeah. That would be about product development and distribution. A lot of the marketing, but we certainly will function as their supplier. They will be one of our purchasers. Until we finished the cultural centre, at the moment, some of the profits from these cloths are going into building the cultural centre. The plan after that is to put the profits into a joint fund that parents can draw upon when they want to send their kids to university.

One of the biggest expenses that people have over time is university fees for students and the cultural ceremonies. Some of them make it really hard to save money. So if you can save money in a place where you can’t use it for anything else, then it makes it easy for you to make that decision to not use it for something else. There is a lot of cultural pressure on people to give whatever they can and to do as much as they can. If it (ed.: the fund) is somewhere, they are kind of protected by the rules of the game, then it means that they don’t feel pressured to use the money that they have saved for university.

TS: So, most of the time, they have to go out of the village, or out of the city, to get further education.

SH: We have a university here, a small university that has different study programs. But one of the purposes of going to the university is to broaden your mindset and to broaden your vision of the world and your understanding of things. The challenge if you go to school in Sumba, then you are just going with a whole heap of other Sumba kids, probably the same people you went to high school with. You don’t get that full experience of being independent and exploring a new place and really getting to understand how other people see the world. That is one of the advantages of going outside for university.

Obviously, it’s a lot more expensive because if you’re hearing somebody, usually you can find a family to stay with, so it is just the university fees. Recently, a lot more people have stayed here because of the uncertainty with everything. But certainly it is our preference, for students from university outside Sumba, who have the drive to really succeed. They can go outside somewhere and then they can bring something new and different big ideas back. So we think that is the preferable way to bring Sumba forward into the future. 

TS: One of the thing that I commonly hear is that once they leave the village is that they seldom come back. How’s the situation in Sumba?

SH: It depends on the villages. We are a village in town so we have electricity, TV and all of those kinds modern expectations. If you are living in a village that you are far from town, there is no work, there are no other kinds of modern conveniences, it is hard to have any kind of business because everybody around you has low income and you can’t kind of create, for example, a food stall because people don’t have money to buy pre-prepared food. It is hard to start something new and that kind of really challenging economic state.

Here in our village, we have a lot of people come back, but certainly for the rest of Sumba there is a bit challenge. That is one of the reasons that we started the other business. For the Prailiu Weavers, we do it on a volunteer basis, but we have another business that’s building with bamboo. The reason for starting with the building with bamboo is to try and to create a local business that could employ people without them having to go outside of Sumba or, once they come back from outside of Sumba, they get a bit more experience and they want to come back here somewhere they can work.

TS: Definitely, there is an ecosystem that attract them to come back.

SH: Definitely and to provide good and interesting work. There is work where they feel they can really think of something that’s positive and it is moving forward.

It is our preference, for students from university outside Sumba, who have the drive to really succeed. They can go outside somewhere and then they can bring something new and different big ideas back.

TS: Other than funding and human resources, what are some of the challenges that the organisation have?

SH: One of our biggest challenges is that it takes six months to make a piece of cloth. There are not many people who wants to order anything that takes six months. It takes six months if you are really motivated and you are not busy doing other things, distracted by adat and all kinds of things. Now, with COVID time, people are less busy with things but other times, it is easy for things to get in the way. Trying to mesh Western timelines with Sumbanese cultural norms is really difficult. We have actually stop taking orders for things. We are listening to what people are saying, but we cannot actually take order and say we are gonna produce you 20 of this by when. It is better not to promise something that you can’t deliver.

If we try to push people in the villages to “city timelines”, you lose the joy, you lose some of the piece of work. I think it is a challenge everywhere. Now that we are starting to try to make peace with it. It is what it is and we work with what we have. This is not an ideal model until we can get a better system sorted. And people start to get into the idea of doing regular work if they want to be part of it. They need to do it regularly. 

Also, one of the challenges is that I have been doing all of the management for the social media. Our social media is not up to date because there are just too many things going on. So we are super excited that with some assistance from Mira Lesmana and some cloth sales that we made recently, we are now going to hire an assistant or someone to take the lead role within the organisation so that we have someone who has the heart and soul in it, and he’s doing it enough to be paid so that they can do it (ed.: full-time) instead of doing other things. We have had some really great volunteers working with us, but obviously when everyone volunteers and if people are doing other things for their paid work, that’s going to take preference. Once we can pay someone, even just on a part-time basis means that we can really start to move forward.

I am excited about finding out who that person ends up being because I think there are a lot of young people in Sumba who are excited about cloth and they’re keen and interested. I’m very excited about that process and to see how that comes out. Also because I don’t want to be the face of this. I am happy to be in the background and I feel like this needs to be someone from here, someone local to be the face of the brand. If someone else can start to really take the reigns and really excited about it, then the sky’s the limit.

TS: I’m really happy to hear about the younger people are taking interest in the art and trying to promote them and make it bigger. 

SH: We actually found a really interesting kind of disconnect, I guess, due to child labor laws, we cannot advertise that children are working on the cloth. You wouldn’t want children to be forced to work on the cloth, but we are also excited when some of the younger girls ask “can we do this?” or “can we do that?” while adding some money outside school time. They are making some extra money for themselves, whatever they want to use it for. It is not their parents forced them but really their initiative.

It’s really exciting. Also, it is a fine line between when do you say “Oh, yeah, we’ve got kids working on things”, but actually, I guess it’s about promoting that they’re learning about things and they are choosing to make some of their own cloth. What we usually do is if they want to do something we provide them with some threads. If they get to the end and they decide to sell something, we will help them to sell it but we do not pay them per step because we do not want to be paying for child labour, but it’s obviously a complex line to tread.

TS: Are the weavers paid per steps or per piece?

SH: It depends, some people make their own pieces and then we help them to sell it so that we don’t actually buy them. We just help them to sell it and then we take 5% for administrative cost. That helps for phone credit and things for the volunteers.

The other way is that we pay step by step. When they’re working on clothes like these (ed.: pointing to a more complicated hinggi kombu), we pay it step-by-step. If they finish the work this week, then they get paid this week. That works a lot better for a lot of the young moms because if you’re working on a really big complicated piece and it takes six months, you have got a lot of time and money invested in that piece before it sells. If you’re a young mom, kids do not wait till next Tuesday to say “Mama, hungry”. So you need to be able to make that kind of routine work.

For most of those women, we are not replacing the task of making their own cloths. What we are replacing them with is working for other people and getting paid really low, bad wages for that. So it is trying to disrupt the business system, rather than changing the way that they would have done in it the past.

TS: In your website, you actually have complementary programs with the bamboo culture house and with the tourists as well. Perhaps, if you can share some initiatives and how they actually promote the growth of each other?

SH: The two main things that we are working on at the moment are the bamboo and solar energy, and they work together. The cloth, the tourism are what we keep working on at the moment. Also, the cultural centre. We need that cultural centre as a dedicated space to start building more sustainable tourism principles in the village because one of the challenges is how to minimise the impact on people.

As I mentioned before, we live in this village, this is our home. It’s not a place that is closed after dark. It’s a place that needs to be a space that we can live, enjoy and do our cultural ceremonies without the interference from the tourism. Also with the tourism is not interfering in things. So they can work together, but they need to be very clear about what the boundaries are and how that works. In the past that was not a problem because there were not many tourists around, so every tourist was treated as a guest. They were invited into our homes. Once you have more tourists around, that means you have a lot more invasions. Once people do not feel excited to meet guests then it changes the experience for everybody.

It is really about creating a better experience. Also, making sure that there is a more even experience so everybody gets to understand a bit more about the village, the culture, the ceremonies and everything. Starting with that cultural centre, then they can walk around the village and understand what they’re seeing.

We have a walking tour as well. We have written down in both Indonesian and English so people can walk around and they can read what they are looking at rather than having signboard in the village. Once it (ed.: putting up signboard) is done, it could start to make you feel like it is a tourist attraction rather than a home.

We also have a homestay, a little bit up on the side of the village. The purpose of that is to allow people to be able to interact in the village when they want to, but not live right at the village because it is kind of hectic. Living in the village is kind of hectic which sounds totally different with people think. There are 60 kids for primary school age and under. So you can imagine the kids are running around, playing and different activities going on all the time. The quiet and peaceful life that people might imagine is not often (happening). So, it is not to have an (isolated) place where you can stay. But when you want to go in and when you want play soccer with the kids, you can do that. If you want to go and look at the weavers, you can, but you do not have to be in it all the time.

We also have another big cultural house where people can stay right in the village and that is more for groups. There’s three separate bedrooms, but there’s also a big open space where you can just put mats and mosquito nets out so that people can stay in the village.

We started doing some tours (ed.: outside of the village) which is still on the website. We do that as that is what most people want but we are trying to focus more on the cultural activities within the village rather than outside the village at the moment. We see that as being more urgent, but also a more sustainable way forward. If you spread yourself too thin, it becomes tricky.

We built a house, the cultural house with the big peaked roof from bamboo. The reason that we started to use bamboo is that wood is getting harder to get and it is more expensive. The house has a crazy big roof. It’s a fun place to live. Using treated bamboo, it means that we are reducing the pressure on forest resources, so that not many people kill down trees in the forest to build these kind of big houses.

Also, it is to provide work opportunities for people. When you purchase, it is cheap, but it takes quite a lot of labour to get it to a thing that you can use. That’s fine because in Sumba we have a lot of bamboo and we have a lot of labour. It is still a cheaper option than wood and much more sustainable. There is also a reasonably big demand for building in bamboo from the tourism industry. That’s mostly driven by the Green School in Bali and this kind of a more international movement now – building in bamboo. Having built grand buildings with bamboo, people understand what’s possible, not just limited to a small bungalows and things. So it’s a really exciting space to being in the moment. 

We are doing too many things, but we are focusing a lot more right now just on the cloths and bamboo with the purpose that we need to make small steps and make changes rather than being spread across too many things.

TS: I am tying back to your bio, your PhD, that you were researching on the erosion and sedimentation in Sumba that you encounter the cultural environment and system of life in Sumba?

SH: In the rural villages in Sumba. I actually want to do my PhD on development projects where they work and where they don’t work. My husband worked in the government and a lot of his cousins and sisters are in the NGOs. To do a critical analysis of why those programs don’t work would mean a critical analysis of what my family does that works or doesn’t work.

To my background, my University (degree) before that was much about physical geography, looking at the landscapes and how the landscapes are formed. By taking that approach, it meant that we did a lot of walking around the landscapes with people. It is amazing what people will tell you when you’re not writing anything down, when you’re just walking and listening. When you see a building like an abandoned building like “what is that about?” and they say, “oh, this is a project we had that was serious in this, this, this.” Then you can ask them, “oh, why didn’t it work? They appointed the wrong treasurer and he used the money for some mission. You get a much more candid version of understanding why things work and why they don’t work.

Those really what I gained from my PhD, understanding why things work or not. Not sure how much of that is specific to Sumba, how much of that is a cultural thing. What I actually do really realise is that often in community development, we expect community members to somehow be better people than people in the cities. That they gets along with everybody and everybody has worked out many things together, that is just not true. People are people, wherever they are. People in the villages have been neighbours and families for a thousand years. You can imagine how many grudges they’re holding, right?

When you have group discussions, there’s all kinds of really complex power structures at play. So people think they’ve come to an agreement and a lot of people sitting in the room who say “yeah, it’s not worth making a fuss about”,  “I don’t agree but it’s not worth making a fuss”. I think it happens in Singapore as well, or everywhere. People will sit back and say they agree and then they go, “I don’t think that’s right, but it’s not gonna worth me making a fuss about here.” 

So, my PhD sounds funny because it is about mapping and soil erosion, but actually it is just about talking, listening and understanding why things are the way they are. Not just what it is, but why it is. Once you start to listen, you realise, actually there’s a couple of common things that go across all of the community development challenges. Even though it wasn’t directly related to what we’re doing, just having the time to listen was really valuable for me.

TS: Yes, when you are working with a community, understanding and listening to the people and getting them involved in every step of the way (is key).

SH: Being able to listen to people without having to record and write it down. Often those things that you do in research that are important is to get people to sign a consent form. As soon as you sign a consent form, people are like “Whoa, what is that? That’s scary.” They don’t see that as the thing protecting them. They see it as the thing that “oh, this is way too official”, so they start to clam up and they’re very careful about what they say. Versus, if you are just having a discussion while you are walking through a landscape to go and get a sample of mud, which was what I did, a lot. Then people are free to talk and they are free to discuss. So it is nice, just being able to talk is so important.

TS: We are almost towards the end of our conversation, what any ongoing projects or what’s next that we can expect from Prailiu? Or if you have any COVID-specific projects?

SH: We actually have some of these new designs that we haven’t actually released yet. We are going to release those, but I am going to wait until I find this person who is going to be the future driver of the company and see what they want to do. I really want to be able to give someone here the opportunity to really take forward what we have got and build on that. So stay tuned, it’s gonna be exciting. It might take a bit of time, but everything is.

TS: Any last concluding remarks, why people need to see Prailiu and Sumba weave cloths?

SH: I think everybody needs to come to Sumba to really appreciate the cloth. You need to come here, sit with the women and be part of the process. Do it and understand the importance of doing things slowly. So often in our lives, we don’t get the time, we don’t feel like we can do things slowly. We have got to get things finished, hurry and get things done. Come into Sumba, you know we live in the modern world, but you really take a step back and realise “ok, so what’s more important?”, “is it really that important that I do all of these busy things” or “is it important that I sit here and spend some time?” and really appreciate these women, the techniques they are using, the way that they’re doing this.

These have been done for hundreds and maybe thousands of years and it is a continuous knowledge. Not something that somebody taught them, not their invention. It is something that they learn from their mothers, from their grandmothers. It is really an unbroken tradition and it is so lovely to be a part of that. I’m really grateful that my son is part of that as well that he gets that opportunity to be part of such a long, unbroken tradition. So, I guess my message is… come to Sumba.

TS: Yeah, I am looking forward when this COVID craziness ends and borders are open. Where else can we find out about you? I guess Instagram, what else? 

SH: At the moment just Instagram. Our website is there but it is not very up to date. We also have a Facebook. That’s it.

TS: One more thing that you mentioned was the movie. What’s the title of the movie?

SH: A movie called Humba Dreams, which is now out on Netflix. That was actually filmed in our village and it is from Mira Lesmana of Miles Studio. They came here to film a blockbuster Indonesian film called Pendekar Tongkat Emas. That had a Javanese storyline and it was really a big hit. They fell in love with Sumba so they want to do a movie that’s for us. That’s about somebody, our storyline and it is really showcasing things here. If you have access to Netflix, get onto it and you can find that I am there for like, maybe, three seconds. But the mother of Martin in the story is actually my mother-in-law. They brought in some actors but most people in the film are from Sumba themselves. So, it’s a really lovely window into Sumba life.

TS: I will definitely check it out on Netflix. Once again, thank you so much Sarah for spending time to chat with us.

SH: Thank you, and I’m so excited to be a part of this because I think your gallery really trying to bring the knowledge along with the artwork is such an important thing. Just seeing the cloth is art and that’s also an important thing. That’s why I was really excited to be invited to do this today. So, thank you!

 

P.S.: We hope you enjoyed this episode of aNERDspective. Check out the previous episode on IGTV and our gallery and store if you would like a piece of Indonesia for your home or wardrobe.