In Sicovecas’ work, the object placed in the exhibition space functions not merely as an installation element, but as a material body bearing layers of spatial memory. An old car, positioned at the center of the installation, is presented in a state far removed from its original function of mobility. Its faded paint, its form stripped of its utilitarian context, and the harvested paddy filling its bed suggest an object undergoing a profound semantic shift. It no longer moves; rather, it halts as an artifact containing the sedimented traces of lived experience and spatial memory.


The title of the work, Ode to the Landlessness, provides a crucial lens for this reading. According to the artist’s reflections, the work departs from the spatial memory of the Pogung area—a district once defined by rice paddies and open spaces, now steadily consumed by dense urbanization. For Sicovecas, this landscape is not a mere geographical backdrop, but an integral part of a lived experience that has shaped the body’s relationship to space since childhood. Memories of pedaling a bicycle through the fields, mapping every narrow alleyway, and eventually returning to a site rendered unrecognizable, form a mnemonic cartography that underpins this work.

Within this framework, the car in the gallery becomes a symbol of this very landscape transformation. A modern object typically associated with urban mobility now serves as a vessel for agrarian materiality. The hay filling its bed creates a stark friction between two distinct spatial regimes. On one hand, the car represents the logic of modernity—vehicular infrastructure and the hyper-mobility of the city. On the other hand, the hay evokes agricultural cycles: the harvest, the soil, and the decelerated rhythm of rural life. The convergence of these two elements yields a hybrid landscape, revealing how agrarian memory persists amidst aggressive urban restructuring.

The visual gestures etched across the object’s surface further amplify the relationship between the artist’s body and the chosen materials. These marks do not function as symbolic imagery meant to be decoded, but rather as indexical traces of action upon the object’s skin. In this regard, Sicovecas sustains the foundational logic of street art—a praxis that treats the city’s surfaces as a living canvas; a site where visual gestures emerge, fade, and resurface over time. Yet, upon being displaced into the gallery space, these gestures transform. The surface, typically found on an urban wall, is now mapped onto the body of an object carrying its own material history. The car functions as a surrogate for the street wall, while simultaneously generating new layers of meaning concerning spatial memory and the shifting urban landscape.


Through this configuration, Sicovecas’s work speaks not only to the act of marking surfaces but also to the intricate entanglement of the body, the land, and spatial memory. The immobilized car, the encroaching hay, and the accumulation of visual gestures converge to illustrate how urban development invariably leaves a residue of loss: the dispossession of land, the erasure of historical landscapes, and the vanishing of the ways of life once tethered to those spaces.
This stratification of memory is further materialized through a long canvas that extends outward from the car window. Bordered on three sides with sewn lace, it mimics a tablecloth draped across the gallery space. However, as it nears its end, the lace remains unstitched; sections of the canvas are left blank, with the needle and thread abandoned in the fabric. This deliberate incompletion evokes a sense of suspended labor—as if a process initiated in the past continues into the present, its final trajectory left radically uncertain.

The trailing thread is then pulled toward a table near the steering wheel, wound around a cigarette pack—an unassuming motif of working-class daily life—and left resting on a brown glass plate, the kind of ubiquitous freebie given away at a local shop. These objects ground the installation in the tactile reality of the everyday while unlocking the artist’s personal memories of a warung (food stall) that once occupied this very site. During his university years, Sicovecas frequented this spot, where a residential terrace had been converted into a modest eatery called Zupparella. This seemingly mundane experience anchors a persistent spatial memory that endures today, outlasting the physical architecture that once housed it.

Meanwhile, a sprawling painting spans the gallery wall. While seemingly abstract at first glance, it is designed to unveil fragmented landscapes read sequentially from left to right. On the far left, the linework references Merapi volcano, the enduring geographical and visual anchor of the Yogyakarta region. Moving toward the center, these forms dissolve into doodles of rice paddies, houses, and doors. Interspersed among them are representations of BPN (National Land Agency) boundary markers, ubiquitous fixtures in agrarian plots. Yet, as the painting progresses to the right, these rigid pegs subtly metamorphose into flowers adorning a front yard. This visual progression traces a trajectory from the expansive natural landscape into the enclosed, intimate sphere of domesticity.

Through this constellation of elements, Sicovecas offers more than a meditation on the physical dispossession of land; he examines the gradual mutation of spatial memory in tandem with urban flux. The car, the harvested rice, the unfinished canvas, and the wall painting oscillating between Merapi Volcano and a suburban yard collectively construct a visual narrative of a space in perpetual transition—moving from the expanses of an agrarian past into the increasingly fragmented domesticity of contemporary urban life.

written by Donna Carolina