Sangiang Not For Sale

Across the Indonesian archipelago, land grabbing routinely weaponizes formal legality to displace Indigenous communities. Pulau Sangiang in the Sunda Strait reflects this crisis. Generations of islanders stewarded this land long before the modern state existed. Yet today, state conservation zoning and corporate eco-tourism concessions have recast these original custodians as illegal squatters.

Created in collaboration with my wife, Teresia May, this documentary project is an act of visual advocacy. While the state enforces a deliberate silence against Sangiang’s residents, the concession holder, PT PKP, escalates the conflict through ecological intimidation—intentionally releasing wild boars, squirrels, and cobras into the island to destroy communal crops and terrorize families into leaving.

Through intimate portraiture, generational domesticity, and the jarring intrusions of corporate violence, our cameras document the residents’ resilience. Moving beyond detached observation, this series confronts the hypocrisy of “conservation”: declaring an ancient homeland a pristine wilderness by actively terrorizing and erasing the very people whose care kept it alive.