Reassembly Workshop: Serving Suggestions

In this workshop and community dinner, Indonesian curator Gesyada Siregar and Gapura Philly activate Further Reading (Bandung, Indonesia)’s contribution to Ulises: Reassembly, publication series Serving Suggestion, a magazine that reads culture through food—serving up stories and perspectives on how we connect with what we consume. 

Centered on the Indonesian food landscape in Philadelphia, the program approaches food as a living archive of migration and adaptation. Participants will map stories from our favorite Indonesian food spots across the city and document “auntie-approved” recipes that substitute hard-to-find Indonesian ingredients with locally available ones, reflecting the material and social ways cultural heritage is maintained across borders.

The zine-making workshop will be followed by a “liwetan”—an Indonesian-style communal feast of rice and shared dishes served on long banana leaves—prepared and assembled by Pecel Ndeso and co-hosted by cultural activist Sinta Storms. The dinner becomes a space for conversation, where participants exchange stories and insights while reflecting on the collective research gathered during the session.

Capacity is limited. Please only RSVP if you are committed to attending.

About the Contributors

Further Reading is an Indonesia-based independent, multi-format publishing platform with in-house production and distribution. We seek to engage in discourse around the broader contexts of design practices through various programmed experiences such as printed periodicals, pop-ups, and workshops—on topics relevant to, and within, Southeast Asia, as well as globally.

Gesyada Siregar is an Indonesian curator and educator based in Philadelphia and Jakarta, currently pursuing a Master of Behavioral and Decision Sciences at Penn through the Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education scholarship. A member of Gudskul—an art collective formed by ruangrupa, Serrum, and Grafis Huru Hara in Jakarta—she investigates entropy, friendship and heuristics in cultural ecosystems. She was the contributing writer in How to Pin Down Smoke: ruangrupa since 2000 published by Afterall (2025), AIC(Asian Institutional Critique) by Seunga You (2025), Teleporter Independent Quarterly, published by Marginal Utility / 2C Books (2024-2025), documenta fifteen Majalah lumbung (2022), and researcher in Articulating FIXER 2021: An Appraisal of Indonesian Art Collectives in the Last Decade published by Gudskul (2021).

Gapura is an Indonesian non-profit with a mission to honor traditions, empower the community, and discover dreams within and through the Indonesian-American community in Philadelphia.​ At Gapura, we hope to serve, as our name suggests, a gate to and for the Indonesian community in Philadelphia linking past, present, and future through arts, economic, social, and cultural empowerment. We also hope to bridge the physical distance between Indonesia and the Philadelphia Indonesian community through our programs and initiatives.

Pemuda Gapura (translated to Gapura Youth) is a safe space for Indonesian / Indonesian adjacent youth living in Philadelphia. As Indonesian-American youth who grew up here, we realized there isn't a space where we could come together without any barriers. We know of each other through religious institutions, cultural events, and school, but outside of that there isn't a space for us. We want to create a community while having a space for all of us to grow.

Images courtesy of Further Reading and Gapura Philly

About Ulises: Reassembly

A year after presenting Ulises: Assembly at Tufts University Art Galleries, Ulises revisits the question at the heart of the project—What do you do?—this time asking, How do you do it?

Reassembly brings together three independent art publishers: Can Can Press (Mexico City, Mexico), Further Reading (Bandung, Indonesia), and Ruth van Beek (Koog aan de Zaan, Netherlands), whose contributions to Assembly inspired a closer examination of their practices. This new presentation invites visitors to engage with their work to gain insight into the processes, materials, and concepts that shape each practice. 

Exhibited alongside the cataloged Assembly archive, Reassembly extends an ongoing conversation about the labor and care that shape the field of independent art publishing.

The exhibition considers the material, conceptual, and social dimensions of publishing, and the forms of attention, collaboration, and repetition that define the work behind the work. Reassembly invites new ways of engaging with the publishers’ methods, materials, and research, foregrounding the relationship between what we do and how we do it.

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Host or Publisher Ray Philly