Poetics of everyday creativity: The visual articulation on space by the collectives in Bandung, Indonesia

Manuel Castells’ notion of the city in the 1980s as a social product resulted from contradiction of interests and values is getting more evidenced recently. This indicates the need to understand the contemporary urban lives from various area of inquiry, including the everyday life of city dwellers of the so-called creative city like Bandung in West Java, Indonesia. Despite the debates on creative city, the articulation of creativity becomes part of everyday situation in this city, especially in the form of visual expression. This paper derives from the question of how is creativity articulated by Bandung’s city dwellers in their everyday life? This paper focuses on the everyday use of urban space as a dynamic site of struggle. This occurs on the formation and meaning of creative space as exemplified by creative collectives in Bandung, namely “Tobucil & Klabs” and “Kineruku”. By combining digital ethnography and documentary photography, the study gathers information based on ethnographic interviews and photo-documentations. The photographs produced by the researcher from the field, as suggested by Gillian Rose (2016), are analysed with the other data gathered. Informed by Michel de Certeau’s poetics of everyday life, this paper argues that the way in which these creative collectives in Bandung articulate their everyday creativities is to demonstrate the struggle of producing ‘organic spaces’ in the city. As non-industrialised collaborative collectives, they challenge the established spatial formation in this creative city and employ creativity as the very core of their everyday life.