This paper results from research the memory landscape of Buru, a small island in the Moluccas used as a prison for 10.000 political prisoners following the mass killings of an estimated 500.000 to one million a million real or suspected Communists in the mid-1960s in Indonesia. Since then, the state through aggressive propaganda had constructed anti-communist collective memory, leading to the social and political exclusion of the victims. From this time, however, even under the thick layer of lies, the heterogeneous memory is still visible, and manifest in hybrid more-than-human forms.
I take from Sarah Whatmore's study that there is no separation of human and non-human worlds; instead, there is what she described as a 'messy heterogeneity of being-in-the-world'. Using Whatmore's more-than-human hybrid geography, I examine the human and non-human agencies in creating a memory landscape. I take a reversed perspective from more traditional ethnographic approaches that place the human at the centre of the frame for analysis; rather, I assume that the island, as a non-human memory agent, is in the centre, and which adopts non-indigenous elements. I understand non-human in a broad sense, as material objects, and the world of nature, including animals, plants and natural phenomena. All these elements are porous and the borders of their forms are rendered permeable. It means that there are the interconnectedness and permeation of human and non-human subjects and that they combine to create a specific porous memory, where everything human and inhuman permeates. As survivors and witnesses of traumatic events, more-than-human elements have long been preserved in, and even added to, memory landscapes for their representational ability to 'say what is unspeakable'.
