Born in 1984, Meicy Sitorus graduated in Industrial Design in the Arts and Design Faculty, ITB. She has a consuming interest in photography, is involved in photography workshops and has staged several photography exhibitions.

Her photographs focus on personal matters, usually associated with memory, time and history. For Meicy, photography is not just a medium of work and a documentation tool; it is one of the ways to establish communication with her surroundings. It is also a tool to help her in researching and simple mapping to s upport the process, which is influenced by her background in design.

Meicy is currently working as a freelance photographer and a graphic designer. In 2013, she founded a duo called ‘Tetangga Pak Gesang’ with Arum Tresnaningtyas Dayuputri and has been actively performing around Indonesia ever since, as a sideline project alongside her main passion, photography.

Are these our future cities? The city is all about mobility; it has to keep moving to be alive for itself and the people in it. In the earlier stages of the pandemic, we saw that big cities around the world were deserted; streets and public spaces were empty, with no sign of mobility. The city and its elements stopped because we believed mobility and crowds brought danger to ourselves. So the city became a vacuumed space. 

Almost every aspect shifted during the pandemic, whether the lifestyle or how we perceive the place we live in. We are forced to adapt to the situation, where we spend more time indoors with less social activity and face-to-face interaction. As we already know, a human is a social being and we are longing for the connection between each other. During the pandemic, we replace physical activity mostly with text or image sharing through screens.

The vacuumed space and our need to connect lead to a new perspective of future cities. I occupy, or in a way ‘paint’ the city with words. I choose to ‘paint’ a specific area in Bandung, which is my daily route from home to the studio. My daily route during the normal times was busy and was even considered as highly congested. The city with its existing elements becomes a medium of messages, the act of ‘painting’ is to provoke discussion and help us connect. With all the bombardment of bad news during this pandemic, sometimes using small words of hope or jokes on the situation help us to process our relentless age of anxiety and also works as a reminder for our future.