Volcanic Book Launch! The Pulse of the Earth & Berita Gunung Berapi


'Berita Gunung Berapi' is a expanded republication of 'Volcanic News', first issued in Indonesia in 1952. With its unique blend of poetry and profiles of scientists, along with gas measurements and reports of trembling grounds, it was a surprising appearance in the fledgling republic, then riven by revolutionary factions.


This version from Reading Sideways Press adds new contributors and considers what it meant to publish the first 'Berita', and what it means to publish the 'Berita' now. It situates volcanoes and science in broader conversations about the relationship between politics, the earth, and its interior in a time of unstable geologies, catastrophes and postcolonial futures.


Adam Bobbette, a contributor to the new 'Berita', is also the author of 'The Pulse of the Earth: Political Geology in Java,' from Duke University Press, which tells the story of how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesia’s volcanoes.
Bobbette follows Javanese knowledge traditions, colonial geologists, volcanologists, mystics, Theosophists, orientalists, and revolutionaries to show how the earth sciences originate from a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology. He explores how Indonesian Islam shaped the theory of plate tectonics, how Dutch colonial volcanologists learned to see the earth in new ways from Javanese spiritual traditions, and how new scientific technologies radically recast notions of the human body, distance, and the earth.

Adam Bobbette will be joined by Alexander Supartono, art historian, curator and educator. A founding member of Taring Padi collective of artists in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Alexander currently lectures at Edinburgh Napier University.