The Magnolia Grows at Night with Terang Press

Join Fransisca Angela for a live reading from The Magnolia Grows at Night, followed by an intimate sharing into its making. Through letters between the artist’s Chinese-Indonesian grandmother and a Dutch nun, the work traces relationships of care across generations, alongside an introduction to Terang Press, an Indonesian publisher.

The Magnolia Grows at Night is drawn from a diary kept during the making of a film of the same title, which will have its festival screening at Alchemy Film & Moving Image Festival in Hawick. The work emerges from a friendship and correspondence between the artist’s grandmother and a Dutch missionary nun in the former Dutch East Indies. A decade after her grandmother’s death, Fransisca traced the address in Maastricht that led her to a convent, where a community of Indonesian nuns care for elderly Dutch nuns. The event will open up spaces to discuss the role of care, and the caregiver.

A large Magnolia tree stood in the convent's garden, witnessing the care duties and devoted lives these women have chosen to live.The artist book combines prose, poetry, archival images, and photograms from the magnolia petals. The work is made in dialogue with the community of Zusters Onder de Bogen.

Fransisca Angela (b. Indonesia) is a visual artist, working with film, photography, publishing, and collective programs. Her practice is informed by lived experiences and shaped by intergenerational perspectives. Through personal narratives, she invites people to experience life’s fragments, allowing them to reimagine a new reality that stands in for what is often overlooked, erased, or forgotten.

Terang Press publishes writing and artistic works that move through the shared terrain of personal memory, and place within diaspora communities, particularly from Asia. Terang, meaning ‘light’ in Bahasa Indonesia is based between Amsterdam and Jakarta.

Our approach in book making is influenced by visual language, where image and text meet, overlap, and illuminate one another. We occasionally publish poems, short stories, pamphlets, and host collective programs.

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