In the Indonesian language, Angan Angan means “a kind of reverie full of hope”. Harsa means “joy”. These feelings carried Farid Renais Ghimas when he returned to his native Indonesia in the summer of 2022 to carry out his photographic project there. “Angan-Angan Harsa, the words I chose for the title, evoke this joy that I felt on a daily basis when making these images, this energy that the people I photographed gave me”, tells us the young artist, now based in London.
He left Jakarta, where he lived, to study fashion photography at Leeds Arts University in 2018. Then he deepened his learning in 2022 with a master’s degree at the prestigious Central Saint Martins in London, one of the best art schools in the world. “I was just beginning to know what I wanted to do as a photographer, and this school offered me the opportunity to meet professionals who helped me mature my vision, he explains. I knew the work of several photographers who had come out of it, and I felt that this context would perhaps one day allow me to acquire even half of their talent. »
Continue in master of arts was also for him the only possibility of remaining in the United Kingdom, thanks to the student visa. “London is an ideal city for a beginner photographer, the opportunities are numerous and the artistic community has welcomed me very well”, he remembers.
“All the people I could meet”
Throughout his studies, he returned each year to his native country to visit his family, without considering taking photographs there. But the Covid-19 pandemic is changing that. It falls on the world while it is in the middle of an Indonesian journey. The United Kingdom closes: he is stuck in the country for six months. “I then set out to travel to my grandmother’s village, a six-hour drive from Jakarta, and I began to document my life, my family. Thus was born my passionate desire to share the reality of my native country. »
Back in London at Central Saint Martins, he takes a step back and begins to conceptualize his project: “I proposed to my tutor, Adam Murray, to return for a summer to the region where I grew up, to Bengkulu, on the southwest coast of the island of Sumatra. I told him about a two-week project. I did not understand then that the process would be much slower. » And very different from what he had originally imagined.
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