The Mentawai Revival Project

Published: 21 March, 2011 - Featured in Skin Deep 192, November, 2010

Last summer, the Indonesian artist Durga was working for the very first time at the Amsterdam Tattoo Convention. His studio is located in Jakarta but three times a year he visits the Indonesian island of Siberut not far from Sumatra where he stays with the Mentawai to study the tattoo culture of this tribe. His goal? To prevent this culture from disappearing.

Aman Durga Sipatiti tattoos with traditional tools. We first met during the Amsterdam Tattoo Convention while I watched his assistant stretch the skin of a customer and it came to me that the ti-ti-ti rhythm that echoes while he is working could refer to the Mentawai name for tattoo: titi.

When I visited Durga some days after the convention on a “living boat” on the river Amstel, I hear this rhythm again from the outside, just like the traditional music and singing of the Mentawai. Durga himself is not a Mentawai but a mix of different Indonesian races. He grew up in Jakarta, studied design and communication in Yogyakarta and lived through the nineties in Germany where he worked in the graphic industry. It was only later, while living in Los Angeles that he began tattooing.
These days, he has his own studio in Jakarta. “The only place in Indonesia where you can run a tattoo shop is Jakarta. In smaller towns, it’s not possible,” he says. “I tattoo for sixty percent of the time in the Mentawai tradition but I also tattoo designs from other Indonesian islands - from the Dayak of Borneo, from Sumatra, Java, Bali, Sulawesi, Sunda & Nias Islands and Papua New Guinea. I am also influenced by animistic and polytheïstic religions from Indonesia, by Hinduism, Buddhism and Sjamanism.”

Durga himself has some Mentawai tattoos. “Especially on my legs,” he says. “Not too many though because I started with tattoos early - a little bit too early. I was different then, I have other tattoos, so I have no more space for the Mentawai tattoos, but what I do have, I designed myself.”

In L.A., Durga was an apprentice of Sua Sulu’ape Freewind who taught him the hand-tapping technique just as it’s done in Polynesia and Borneo. Another teacher was Seymour Kahiliaulani Kaniho from the Black Wave Tattoo studio in Hawaii.

On the boat in Amsterdam, Durga tattoos a curly design on another tattoo artist from Hawaii who also worked at the Amsterdam Convention. An assistant stretches the skin again: “This is necessary because the tattooing takes a really long time. Tattooing with traditional tools is a spiritual process. It can be very exhausting. The pain a customer has is very different to when you work with a tattoo machine.”

I recall the woman he tattooed on the chest during the Amsterdam Convention. She seemed to be in another world.

“It’s about experience, it almost like you go to the past in a time machine. You go to a different world. It’s a totally different sensation than when you are tattooed with a machine.

On that woman, I tattooed a Mentawai motif. It’s called Jaraik and is an image of a Mentawai fetish panel, normally hung inside the Uma, (a traditional Mentawai house). It’s based on a symbol from the animistic religion of the Mentawai that’s called Arat Sabulungan. Arat means custom and Sabulungan represents the leaf from a tree. In the religious concept of Arat Sabulungan there exist three rulers of nature: Taikamua, ruler of the sky; Taikaleleu, ruler of the wood and Taikokoat, ruler of the water. The symbol prevents against the evil spirits and tries to invite the good spirits.”

Right now though, Durga is tattooing a motif on the hand of the artist from Hawaii that’s called Gagai: “This tattoo motif is the same for men and women,” he says. “The lines and the curls around the lines, represent one of the most sacred flowers from the Mentawai - the Osap. Usually the Sikerei, a Mentawai shaman, uses the flower against evil spirits who are afraid of the flower. The designs originate from the coast of Siberut - the only island in the Mentawai archipel where tattooing still exists. On the other islands like Sipora and North and South Pagai the tattoo culture has totally disappeared.”

Durga started his research on Mentaiwai tattoos two years ago and three times a year, he stays with different Sikerei on Siberut: “They became like a family,” he says. “But there are not many sipatiti - that’s the name for tattooers on Siberut. I try to collect the motifs and find out how different the motifs of the sub-tribes of the Mentawai are. The problem is that a lot of it has vanished, it’s a mystery.

It’s not like the tattoos of Borneo, because there is a lot known about the tattoos of the Iban. So I started the Mentawai Revival Project - I get help from friends from Indonesia who are interested in maintaining the Mentawai culture and their tattoo tradition. It’s a low-budget project, I spend my own money on it."

Durga is currently searching for written sources in museums in Holland. “Indonesia was a Dutch colony. Dutch anthropologists did some research on the Mentawai culture, so I try to collect information for example, from the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. I work hard to collect information, but this will take years. I will continue to go to Siberut and to live there with the aim to stimulate and to develop the tattoo tradition of the Mentawai.”