"Manufactured fear" is the phrase your practice keeps returning to. Fear as something built, installed, distributed. Where did you first locate that mechanism, was it in Minahasan history or somewhere more personal?

For me, fear is not only an emotion. It is something that can be produced, organised, repeated, and inherited. It can enter the body as anxiety or trauma, but it also operates through larger structures: family, religion, bureaucracy, militarism, media, and the way communities are taught to imagine danger.

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I first located this mechanism through something personal. There were fears I felt I had inherited before I could even understand where they came from — fears connected to family memory, silence, instability, and the feeling that certain stories had already shaped me before I had language for them. Later, through my research, I began to see that this personal experience was connected to wider histories.

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In Indonesia more broadly, fear has often been used to organise social life. Fear of rebellion, fear of the outsider, fear of disorder, fear of the invisible enemy. These fears are repeated until they become common sense. They decide who is considered dangerous, irrational, primitive, deviant, or disposable.

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The phrase “manufactured fear.” It allows me to ask who produces fear, who benefits from it, and how certain bodies or beings become monstrous through stories, rumours, images, and political narratives. Power often creates fiction and then asks us to live inside it as if it were reality.

Natasha Tontey, The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism

of Disobedient Organs, 2026. Installation view at Ateneo Veneto, Venice, Italy.

Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex.

© 2026 Natasha Tontey.

Photo: Jacopo La Forgia.

Natasha Tontey, The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism

of Disobedient Organs, 2026. Installation view at Ateneo Veneto, Venice, Italy.

Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex.

© 2026 Natasha Tontey.

Photo: Jacopo La Forgia.

Your work takes Minahasan cosmology as a counter-archive, but also pushes back against its own macho, quasi-military tendencies. How do you hold both things at once: the culture as resource and the culture as something that also needs to be argued with?

I hold both by refusing to romanticise culture as something pure. For me, Minahasan cosmology is a counter-archive because it contains forms of memory, ritual, ancestral knowledge, and relation to land and nonhuman beings that are often excluded from national history or institutional archives. It gives me another way to think about history, spirit, survival, and futurity beyond the logic of the nation-state.

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At the same time, I cannot approach Minahasa only as a source of beauty or ancestral wisdom. It is also shaped by patriarchy, machismo, militarised masculinity, conservatism, and respectability. Those tendencies are part of the inheritance too, and I think it is important to argue with them from within, rather than reject the culture entirely or celebrate it uncritically.

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I’m also interested in how Minahasan culture is often misread through the lens of purity, as if indigeneity must always be sacred, authentic, or untouched. For me, Minahasa is much more complicated than that. It is also shaped by assimilation, Christianity, Dutch colonial histories, Americanisation, popular culture, cowboy imagery, karaoke, fashion, and kitsch. These are not external pollutants; they are part of the social texture.

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So my relationship to Minahasa is intimate, but not nostalgic. It is an inheritance that I have to question, mutate, and sometimes betray in order to keep it alive. Culture is both a ground and a conflict. It gives me something to stand on, but also something to wrestle with.

Natasha Tontey, The Phantom Combatants and the Metabolism

of Disobedient Organs, 2026. Installation view at Ateneo Veneto, Venice, Italy.

Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and Amos Rex. © 2026 Natasha Tontey.

Photo: Jacopo La Forgia.

The yaki, the black-crested macaque, is simultaneously endangered, sacred and considered vermin. That triple status is doing a lot of work in your piece. What does it allow you to say about human classification systems that a purely human subject wouldn't?​

The Yaki allows me to speak about classification as a system of contradiction. It is endangered, sacred, and considered vermin at the same time. It can be protected, feared, loved, hunted, mythologised, eaten, blamed, and mourned. That unstable status reveals how human categories are never neutral. They are shaped by fear, desire, economy, conservation, ritual, morality, and power.

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A purely human subject would immediately be read through biography, identity, or politics. The Yaki allows the question to move sideways. Through the animal, I can examine how humans create categories to manage what they cannot fully control: nature, hunger, kinship, contamination, proximity, and the nonhuman. The Yaki becomes a mirror for human anxiety.

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In Minahasa, the relationship with Yaki cannot be reduced to a simple conservation narrative. The consumption of game meat is often framed from the outside as irrational, cruel, or responsible for biodiversity loss. But that perspective can become a form of ecological scapegoating. It overlooks the fact that the forest has long been understood as a shared space of survival, memory, and reciprocity — not simply as private property or an abstract conservation zone.

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There is also a long tradition of eating wild game in Minahasa. People often say that Minahasans eat everything, and historically many kinds of animals, including Yaki, have been part of that culture of hunting and survival. I am not interested in judging that practice through a simple moral framework. Instead, I ask what it means when certain forms of consumption are condemned while other forms of violence remain invisible.

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In the epilogue Primate Visions Macaque Macabre (2024), the Yaki confronts a former Permesta fighter from Battalion Jin Kasuang and asks: why did you never eat Yaki, but speak of eating humans during the war? This scene comes from an interview I conducted with a Permesta veteran. What struck me was not a story of starvation or extreme hardship—there was food available, they have lots of food from the forest and provided by the CIA—but the way violence itself had become normalised during the conflict. The veteran described the brutality of the central government's military operations against the regional autonomy movement, and the idea of eating people emerged not as an act of survival, but as an expression of the Indonesian army's capacity for abuse, sexual abuse and dehumanisation. Whether spoken literally, symbolically, or as a dark provocation, the statement revealed how war can destroy the moral boundaries that separate human from monster.

For me, this is less about cannibalism than about the collapse of ethical categories under conditions of political violence. The Yaki reverses the usual hierarchy between human and animal by questioning the veteran directly. If humans often define themselves as more civilised because they do not behave like beasts, what happens when state violence produces a situation where even the imagination of consuming another human becomes possible? The conversation exposes how power, fear, and conflict can transform the limits of ethics.

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So the Yaki asks: what happens when one being is placed between cosmology, ecology, survival, and guilt? What makes a creature sacred in one context, vermin in another, and endangered within another system of knowledge? For me, the Yaki interrupts the fantasy that classification is rational. Its contradictory status exposes how categories are produced through conflict.