The rife deforestation in South Kalimantan is brought to bear in Maryanto’s black and white paintings. When The Trees Fall (2023) captures the now quotidian moment of the area. A master of the scratching technique and widely respected amongst the artist community in Yogyakarta, Maryanto undermines the romantic language of traditional landscape painting to examine socio-political structures in the physical spaces that he depicts. They act as a subversive reference on historical books published during the colonial period, where the Dutch Indies had used the natural landscapes to promote the beauty of Indonesia as propaganda.

During Maryanto’s time in South Kalimantan, he also learned of the illegal logging operations taking place. He encountered a group of loggers from the local community there, who shared the constant perils of timber theft. While it has not reached the customary forests of the indigenous people, it remains a potential threat that they have to mitigate. Locals are actively fighting for the recognition of these forests in order to gain legal protection for them. When The Trees Fall (2023) inevitably raises the philosophical thought around the unobserved phenomenon: ‘If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?’ Though the dredging of forests in Kalimantan is discernibly felt and experienced by the locals on a daily basis, it occurs without the scrutiny of the rest of the world.