With A Model Like This, Imagine The Building!

With a Model Like This tells a minor history of P.T Hongky’s Miniatur Jaya, a husband and wife led architectural model making business, exploring the way the story of their business intersects with the last 30 years of Indonesian national history. This period includes the latter years of late Indonesian dictator Suharto’s development program, the 1997 Asian financial crisis that provoked Suharto’s fall and Indonesia’s subsequent transition to democracy, and the present period of rescaled neoliberal urbanism and national development programs as Indonesia’s major corporate developers have recovered and foreign investment is again playing a major role in the shaping of the country’s capital, Jakarta.
Major Indonesian corporate developers visit Hongky’s humble workshop in a small hillside town three hours’ drive from Jakarta, because Hongky’s has a well-founded reputation for making the finest, most detailed and most spectacular models. These models will be exhibited in Jakarta marketing galleries carefully designed as immersive aesthetic experiences, where prospective buyers can imagine and indeed experience their new housing futures.
The films narrative comes from an interview with Pak and Bu Hongky in their model making studio, while the visuals are compiled from hundreds of youtube videos - real estate advertisements, vlogs, archival footage, live streams of online gameplay, tied to the narrative by more or less literal associations with the words and sentences being said as Hongky tells the story of his business. This use of found footage referenced the endless borrowing that the real estate developments use in constructing an identity - the names of famous districts in Japan, the US, or europe, the irreverant mashing together of classical and hyper modern architectural styles from around the world, to create compelling product that picks up popular registers of beauty and success.
This film dramatises the issue of housing in Indonesia and specifically Jakarta, and describes the performative power of aesthetic technologies like models and architectural renderings for producing the future.