“Missing Neighbor” reflects on the silenced histories surrounding the Gedung Sarikat Islam, a once-significant civic space where political, spiritual, and economic currents intersected. In the early to mid-20th century, this building served as a crucial meeting point—where Islamic groups, leftist movements, indigenous traders, and Chinese business owners came together in negotiation, cooperation, and tension under the colonial gaze.

But in 1965, this zone of social and ideological exchange became a site of rupture. Amidst the political coup and state-backed anti-communist purge, entire communities were erased—disappeared through military violence, imprisonment, and mass killings. The nearby villages, once vibrant with collective life and diverse economic activity, fell into silence. People vanished. Memory fractured.

Today, the landscape around the building is transformed—inhabited largely by urban migrants from other regions, disconnected from the place’s historical memory. The atmosphere feels unmoored, as if the cultural and ideological roots that once shaped the neighborhood have been severed.

This work emerges from personal field research—walking the streets, speaking with residents, sitting with absence. It asks: What happens when a community is erased not only physically, but also from shared memory? How does architecture carry the residue of ideological violence? And how do we begin to read a place through what is no longer there?

“Missing Neighbor” invites viewers to reckon with the quiet aftermath of historical trauma—and to consider the invisible lives that still shape the present through their absence.