 Thank you so much Melinda also for bringing me back here. I had a wonderful time here in June and July and therefore somewhat closer to finishing that book. Thank you. I'm not sure it's forthcoming with Duke yet. That's still to be addressed. But anyway, thank you so much all for coming. First thing this morning. So the day on which the former authoritarian leader of Indonesia Suharto made his momentous decision to step down from the presidency after more than 32 years in power and his formal announcement of this decision early the following morning on May 21st, 1998 coincided with no less than two national holidays. The first was National Awakening Day, commemorating the birth in 1908 of the student national movements dedicated to achieving independence from Dutch colonial rule. The second, though much less widely recognized, was the ascension of Jesus Christ that in 1998 fell on May 21st. I only became aware of the second holiday as I began to write the introduction of the book on which this presentation partly draws. But in light of much that follows, it is hard not to discern some poetic truth in the concurrence of the regime's collapse and the assent of Jesus Christ. Now in the early 2000s at the far end of Indonesia, in the islands once renowned as a source of fragrant spices like nutmeg and cloves, Jesus appeared again and again rising out of the ruins of the war-torn central Malaccan city of Ambon. During a brief visit to the provincial capital in 2003, still then under emergency conditions, my curiosity was piqued by the immense faces of Jesus and Christian scenes that whizzed by the car in which I rode with colleagues from a local university as it navigated the city's complicated zoning and religiously marked neighborhoods. As I came to know Ambon in its new post-war circumstances, I encountered a city crowded with such pictures. Along highways and important crossroads or facing outwards from the gateways of Christian neighborhoods, huge Jesus faces towered over the passersby and traffic moving below, while murals showing Christian martyrdom or emblems snatched from Christmas cards like Santa Claus and bells formed brightly colored backdrops to the urban congestion of bed shock, petty cabs, motorbikes, pedestrians, minibuses and Toyota Kijang vans. Returning to Ambon in 2005, I began my fieldwork there by pursuing the pictures, following them to different locations around the city, up into the hills where many Christians live and into churches where arresting and unprecedented figures of Jesus had recently appeared behind some Protestant church altars. Over time, I discovered more new pictures tucked away in Christian homes whose well-to-do owners had commissioned small painted rooms set aside for prayer or Christian themed walls and most unexpectedly an immense triptych prophesizing the apocalypse hidden out of sight in a warehouse only a short drive outside of Ambon. During the years in which I visited and carried out fieldwork in the city, the magnitude number and heterogeneity of the street images never ceased to amaze me. From the tormented Jesus face with a crown of thorns and huge dark eyes upturned to heaven on a billboard along the highway from the airport into Ambon or another brilliantly blue eyed billboard Christ about which many of the city's Christians never failed to comment, to scenes of Jesus surrounded by Roman soldiers stretching out on public walls or his head hovering above an urban battlefield where tiny white clad jihadis and national army soldiers engaged each other in fighting. Some stood out even more than others. A few indigenous Christs, but also the cameo Jesus portraits with painted serrated edges that due to their cut out appearance recalled state ID photographs. There were also more regal Christ dating from a later moment emanating authority and protection from behind altars in Ambon's Protestant churches, others elsewhere on the island or on neighboring ones. I begin today with the image asking what it is about the image and specifically here the image of Christ that moves at center stage and monumentalizes it publicly at this historical and politically fraught moment in Indonesia. What was the affective charge of these images such that their presence in Ambon was capable of offering some solace to the city's Christians who launched the new medium during the conflict that from mid January 1998, 1999 engulfed the city in intermittent violence for more than three long years. The conflict left the city divided into Muslim and Christian territories up to 10,000 persons killed and close to 700,000 displaced with ongoing tension and occasional outbreaks long thereafter. Beyond any signification in Ambon's war or its aftermath, these pictures in the first place were something to be seen. Admired and gazed out by Christians, catching the eye, approving or otherwise of passersby, interrupting the flow of traffic or marshalled as a backdrop for photographs of young Christian men, brandishing weapons or other poses caught on camera. Potent material presences standing on sidewalks and along streets in the wartime and post-war urban environment. These images had the capacity to move beyond any specific context. Even something as dire and encompassing as a profound uncertainties and violence of war. If any image necessarily establishes its own force field, my book examines at length the various forces that coalesced around and animated the specific pictures. One such force is the sheer materiality and assertiveness of the place they occupy in the city, itself a kind of place making in the sense of a place taking or an aggressive seizure of place. Another is what I call the work of appearances of which these images form an intrinsic and intimate part. Now as the title of this presentation intimates, I situate figuration in direct of complicated relation to processes of disfiguration. From the outset, I understand the production deployment of the Christian images, my main example today of figuration, within the more diffuse crisis in appearances or disfiguring momentum that took hold of Ambun during the conflict and that more generally describes a relatively unstudied if long acknowledged aspect of war. Already in the early decades of the 19th century, the Prussian general and military theorist Karl von Klausowicz captured the uncertainty and challenged a perception posed by warfare. Noting how quote, all action takes place so to speak in a kind of twilight. Which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are. With respect to Ambun, it's crucial to realize how indebted the city's images were to a situation of acute crisis where the world as ordinarily apprehended not only seemed to change its appearance but even more disturbingly began to relinquish some of the aesthetic forms and visible outward appearances that it hitherto held it in place, making it imaginable and livable. Trust in appearances on which much of social life relies and the taken for grantedness that leaves aesthetic forms broadly conceived largely unnoticed in everyday circumstances declined dramatically. It was in response to this crisis that what I call the work on appearances aimed to bestow shape upon a nervous city and profound disarray or more graphically a place in the grips of disfiguration. For the Protestant Ambunis who produced the street pictures these offered I propose, among many other things, a new visible medium through which to figure their own place in precarious times. Through them they aim to secure the presence of God as the guarantor of their longstanding prominent position in the city is quite an elite group these Protestants, a claim to recognition and even a right to existence and futurity in Indonesia after Suharto. Prior to Ambun's war, God's previously limited or even largely invisible presence suffused the highly contested if still Christian dominated city, sufficing as a tacit assurance that he watched over the congregation of the Protestant Church of the Malakas, the Gay Payem or the direct descendant of the Dutch colonial Calvinist one. In the midst of the nationwide crises accompanying the Suharto regime's collapse and their various ramifications across the archipelago, a pressing uncertainty had arisen in its place. Seen in this light, as I have argued elsewhere, the Christian pictures might also be understood as a case of protesting too much. Now orphan landscapes, the title of the book and also of this presentation serves as a gloss for the larger predicament of uncertainty, crisis and rupture or the orphaned landscapes had issued in the wake of the Suharto regime's collapse and the withdrawal of a leader who styled himself the father of the nation, Indonesia by extension as one big family and addressed even his cabinet ministers as children. Across the country, great uncertainty accompanied the longstanding dictator's departure and the downfall of his regime. Writing about the capital of Jakarta, one author, Aberdeen Kusno, describes the profound sense of a looseness at the center, afflicting city residents and the feelings of insecurity, vulnerability and general disorientation that went with it. With the evacuation of power at the nation's center, he writes, it is if a central support that has stabilized the island of Java for ages has been removed, a sense of restlessness prevails among the inhabitants. Now in the book I tack back and forth between several dimensions of the pervasive national predicament characterizing this initial period after Suharto's withdrawal. From the nation's orphaning or precarity of citizen subjects bereft of the paternal force that had previously authorized their place, granted them recognition and orchestrated everyday national appearances to the painted urban gallery of Jesus faces and Christian scenes altered by Protestants affiliated with Ambon's gay PM church. Leaving at risk in the ravaged city and increasingly altered country, it is no exaggeration to say that many among the gay PM's congregation felt both figuratively and literally orphaned in relation to their own context of production and activity. Highly ambivalent works, the city's Christian pictures are in some respects just pictures, as good Protestant Ambonese would not surprisingly often insist. Or landscapes in the European, more traditional sense of stabilizing a view and offering a perspective on things. But beyond such stability they may themselves be seen as orphaned landscapes or act effectively charged aesthetic presences shot through with a desire to be seen and they're in safeguarded as well as haunted by the doubt as to whether indeed this is the case. Now while it is important to recall how inflected circumstances in Ambon were by the larger national circumstances I just sketched for you, I hone in here on three examples of more localized registers of placemaking. The figures of territory and landscape embedded in place through the street paintings and the performances of their young male motorbike taxi supporters. The enclaving of place exemplified by a private Christian prayer room and the carving out of a place for the protoplasmic creaturely potential of the nation that's from McTausig and there in Indonesia's Futurity in public service announcements that depicted children on television who spoke out against violence amidst images of war's ruins. In all three examples of placemaking I foreground the relationship between images and the environments in which these emerge with an eye towards problematizing and complicating a connection that all too often is disregarded or understood complacently. Now all images necessarily enjoy a certain autonomy and excess with respect to their surroundings and in the words of the marvelous Chris Pinney cannot just be plucked in any simplistic way and sutured with the sociological and political reality of any particular historical moment or with what as it were presents itself as the most compelling context around. To be sure the immense energy with which the Christian pictures surfaced in Ambon City and clamored to be seen had everything to do with a devastating conflict in which they came to be. Yet even as there are crucial connections to be made the pictures neither reflect nor are merely expressive of the war carried out in religion's name or its multiple enabling circumstances nor can they be reduced to or systematically embedded in any significant circumscribed setting. For that matter war's twilight or the cloak of fog that Klausawitz von Klausawitz saw as one of its constituting conditions is itself an enabling context for violence that needs to be understood as generated rather than merely assumed. Relatedly with respect to images the inherently transitory fragile nature of the associations between any given social reality and the image world to which it somehow provisionally is conjoined must be recognized as such that is as provisional and as something therefore requiring explanation. Now in the anxious rapidly changing circumstances of Ambon's war many of the taken for granted appearances of the everyday urgently and repeatedly called attention to themselves revealing the inevitable transience and difficulty of keeping in place the forms that hitherto had characterized the city its inhabitants and the fabric of its complicated urban every day. Regarding specifically the images conventionally deployed by Christians until the war that is from small scale posters and wall calendars to scenes of the Last Supper inlaid with the Maloccan islands lustrous mother of Pearl and restricted for the most part to Christian interiors. These began to fall short visually of what was expected of them as a consequence the long familiar props of Ambonese Christian homes and stores so familiar that largely they could be taken for granted and pretty much overlooked appeared newly out of place. Put otherwise from the perspective of many among this privileged Protestant segment of the urban population in these extraordinary times the world had itself begun to lose the image that they had long held of it. Those are some of them. Now situations of crisis it is often claimed that the need for art and novel forms of expression becomes enhanced. Elias Kauri the Lebanese novelist and prominent public intellectual writes of Beirut's crisis in a way that exposes how the present comes to defy the aesthetic forms of an earlier pre-crisis moment and I quote him. The present has to be written about he says not contextualized in historical terms. The present is mute. It cannot be evoked in yesterday's language. Repeatedly he continues in our interviews we heard about changes in art and language during and after the civil war. Now although little was said about art during my field work in Ambon it is possible to paraphrase Kauri's words in a manner that makes them resonate powerfully with this other troubled city at a far removed in most respects from Beirut. Along these lines I propose in the book that the present of warfare and rampant uncertainty was blind in Ambon in close so to speak in a kind of twilight such that made it impossible to evoke through yesterday's pictures. In their stead huge scaled up public images refigured in ways that in some poignant sense spoke to the predicament of Ambon's Christians were made to suffice or at least I argue this was part of the impulse behind them. From this perspective it becomes possible to understand Ambon's new pictures littered among war's wreckage around the city as a response of sorts to the significant mutual orphaning of image and world. The Protestant pictures aiming anxiously to address and shape the world around them and the world perceived as morphing out of the pre-crisis forms and appearances through which it was previously known. Now to set the scene for placemaking beyond the usurpation of place by the pictures themselves I offer a brief impression of this world or the war torn urban environment in which the street pictures arose and to which in certain important respects they opened up. This was a city dramatically and palpably transformed the presence of ruins, the no-go areas, divisions and new obstacles in urban space. The myriad symptoms of crisis, things like faces flitting across chapel walls, blood coursing out of faucets, pineapple jelly congealing into blood, crystals possessed by Muslim spirits and other very disturbing events, not to mention the conflict itself and its many implications. All of these radically reshaped and continued to reshape the appearances that had made Ambon hither to what it was. Already in the early days of the conflict barricades sprung up in Ambon streets and the habitats set up postcode or communication and command posts at the edges of their neighborhoods. Bullets guard buildings replaced the shiny facades of fish restaurants, coffee houses, gold and souvenir shops that had once lined the city's main arteries, now increasingly littered with a debris of battle and garbage that remained uncollected. In the wake of the destruction of Ambon's main market at the onset of the war, the very first days, smaller religiously segregated markets that were literally shocked into existence emerged in their stead, obstructing sidewalks and cluttering streets where the itinerant five-footed vendors of satay, yellow rice, hot tea and the like began to sell articles previously available only in the city's shopping mall and fancier stores like clothing. For most of its inhabitants, the space of the city shrunk as they became more and more confined to one or another of its increasingly religiously marked areas. Like some monstrous checkerboard, Ambon morphed rapidly into a vast patchwork of Christian red and Muslim white issuing in a highly segregated every day with red market, white market, red and white speedboat case, red and white petty cabs, red and white mini buses, red and white banks and so on. At the same time, the city was unmoored in unprecedented ways. Much of its population was on the move, beginning with the forced exodus of the derogatively named Bebe M, short for Bhutanese, Bhutanese and Makassarese, all Muslim migrants in the first days of the war and the multiple displacements occasioned by the fighting, the destruction and torching of homes and buildings, the refugees fleeing from one part of the city to another, as well as into and out of Ambon from other areas that were affected by conflict as well. As a population dwindled from a pre-war count of around 300,000 to almost half of that towards the end of the war, all kinds of new people also began to arrive to the city, battalions dispatched by Jakarta to quell the violence, journalists and other media practitioners, NGO activists and humanitarian workers, but also some 2,000 jihadis from Java a good year after the conflict began. Over time, what one priest called new categories of mobility emerged. These comprised, for instance, petty cab drivers and easily mobile others who as the war dragged on and the city became increasingly rent began to traffic between the protagonist of the conflict, supplying Muslims, for instance, with vegetables from the city's traditionally Christian hills and Christians with fish from the largely Muslim controlled coastal areas. Relevant to are the motorbike taxi drivers whose numbers increased exponentially in the early to mid 2000s since they could navigate the difficult segregated terrain of the city more easily than mini buses or any cars. It is to this uncertain, tumultuous and danger-ridden world that the images I speak of today opened up. But not only as a sense of their advent to public urban space and the adamant publicity they sought in the city's wartime and post-war physical environment, moving from the interior spaces of Amrani's Protestant homes and stores and dramatically increasing in size had several implications. First, it meant that the cannon from which the street pictures tended to be quite faithfully drawn became more directly infused with the concerns of the larger world around them, specifically those of the young Christian men who put them up. But also the members of the Christian neighborhoods who backed the pictures production and took generally pride in the results as well as more diffusely, many other especially Protestant Christians in the city. As a result, the Christian cannon and the images of which it is composed quite literally opened up an ombun to embody new things, changing not only in scale and location but iconographically as well in ways that inflicted the desires, contingencies of place and immense investment in the taken for granted consensus, taken for granted contours and privileges of a Christian life world on the Wayne. Secondly, opening the images also meant that many of these same Protestants but also for better or for worse, others in the city opened or were forced to open themselves to these images, whether these were experienced as comforting or soothing terms used by some of these Christians or alternatively violent and offensive terms by some Muslims. Whereas these implications pertain to ombun and its religiously mixed population in particular, a third implication relates to the changing nature of public space in Indonesia generally after Suharto and its highly contested open-ended character described by the Indonesian cultural activist Intan Paramadita as crowded with a visibility contest. Even before the war, albeit in a more muted fashion, some of ombun's inhabitants, notably those whose place in the city was most precarious, armed themselves visually against the potential misdeeds and ill intentions of their neighbors. An anthropologist working in one of ombun's most impoverished, cramped and largely illegally settled neighborhoods, according to some illegally, registered a surplus of protective amulets tacked above the doorways of especially migrant Muslim homes, dried seahorses, magical files, and other potent substances. The proliferation of such overt signs of animosity and suspicion or an expression he wrote, and it's David Mearns, who's an Australian anthropologist, and proliferation of these signs of animosity and suspicion or an expression he wrote, of quote, the dangers of living so close by those who were strangers in significant cultural and social terms. It is not stretching it too much, I believe, to see a strong resonance between this kind of magical gating and the religious gating of Christian neighborhoods via the huge billboards and murals set up at their entrances. These sites, which today accommodate the motorbike taxi stands, were places during the war where the neighborhood watch was based, trumpet sounded before battle, and Christians set off bearing images of Christ and mass ambulance prayer sessions that filled Ambon streets. Looming over this terrain, Jesus' gigantic glossy face with its adjacent murals simultaneously gated the community and branded it as decidedly Christian. God was her only weapon, and Christians would sometimes say, well, they spoke to me about the pictures. Much like an amulet, the material presence of God's image seemed to serve the community as a protective, if also quite aggressive shield. As such, these pictures also posited a direct relationship between the core symbols of the Ambonese Christian community and physical territory, at the same time that they also facilitated an identificatory relay between the martyred male Jesus and the young men who gathered around his images and threw them a connection to the suffering of the wider community, or at least neighborhood, for which these men and their particular location stood. Now, while the specific designation of these locations as motorbike taxi stands dates from the war where the bikes flourished, as I said, as substitutes for minibuses and cars, such sites generally enjoy a long history in the archipelago, one that dates at least to Dutch colonial times, in the form of neighborhood guardhouses where young men customarily hang. At these potent sites in Ambon, highly territorial versions of community became articulated at the same time as the very idea of community in relation to territoriality became the site of creative exploration and experimentation. Put otherwise, the assertive strategically placed pictures themselves seemed to depict and perform the larger drama of detoritorialization and social displacement suffered by the city's traditionally privileged Protestants according to themselves, of course. That's what I was saying. While Jesus' portrait consistently graces the street pictures, the backdrops to his face very widely in terms of the orphaned landscapes into which the Christian God is inserted and which he Christianizes by virtue of his presence. The backdrops are highly heterogeneous, displaying a myriad of otherworldly and thisworldly landscapes of possible future Christian habitation from familiar topi like at Semeny and Jerusalem to Christ in situ in Ambon. So there you see the kind of reproduction of a Dutch Christmas card in the back there. That's another site. That's a prayer niche in a house and I'll get to that soon. So these are some of the different backdrops. This is Christ, obviously, overlooking the Malakas. Christ overlooking the city in flames and exploding. Christ overlooking not Jerusalem, but Ambon from the spot in the city which is said to be the best place to get the best view of Ambon on tourist brochures. When I asked one of the city's most prolific painters and his supporters what drove them to make these pictures, they replied they did so because they knew he was here. God in situ watching over Ambon. An insistence that I suggest elsewhere covers a doubt. Christ's gigantic face interchangeable with or a figuration of the phrase he is here claims territory for the self displaces and he faces the Muslim other. And like the graffiti also sprayed on city walls, the insults of Jesus and the Prophet Muhammad, references to Muslim power or Muslim pigs, bears within it highly charged figures of territory. Now taken together the figures of territory and of landscape built into an arising at these defensive neighborhood locations, fed on and were energized by the symbolically charged dense sociality that converges on the borders, demarcating the city's Christian neighborhoods from the city and the country around them. Nowhere more so than via the young men identified with these places and with their protection and with masculine performances in which the motorbike figures as a crucial accessory. During the war they sometimes wore t-shirts with Christ's face on it and Christian Bling in the form of large gaudy gold crosses that grew to immense sizes around motorbikers necks. Suffice it to say here that there are many such groups of young men around the city that they compete with each other in a generally convivial way and that some of them document and photographs the before and after of their embellished motorbike stands along with scenes of male camaraderie like young men performing motorbike stunts in front of the billboards and murals. And you can see some of them doing stunts here and there. And these pictures from the mid 2000s, male bodies merged with the Christian landscape behind them as in one this remarkable image in which the erect bike supported by its owner attired in his Christmas best, it was Christmas day aligns perfectly with the crucified Christ behind. In these carefully preserved photographs, bikes, Bling and backdrops work as prostheses of male bodies in public space, enabling a masculine assertion of public Christianity and an aggressive Christianization of territory in circumstances where many gay-paying Christians but also other Christians felt themselves not only under siege but also increasingly bereft of a place in the city and even perhaps in Indonesia itself. It is in light of these general conditions that the commissioning in the aftermath of war by some of the city's more well-to-do Christians of prayer rooms or Christian themed walls as special places set off from the rest of the home should be understood. One example will suffice. Tucked away in a Christian neighborhood in the hills overlooking the city, the miniscule prayer room in a Protestant minister's home is painted entirely from floor to ceiling. Forming a single unbroken surface, it envelops those who enter the room to pray within a miniature Gethsemane garden. On the far wall that is the room's immediate focus when one enters, Jesus Christ prays in profile against a shiny green background. Although lavishly sprinkled with flowers and boasting luxuriant vegetation in Congress rock formations and occasional palm or olive tree and a few stiff glossy sheep, the remaining three walls in the room are predominantly green. Not a single spot has been overlooked. Even the door to the room has been painted over to resemble a cave. Now, since the room's decor is also minimal, there's little to distract one's eyes from the painted surroundings so that these tend to gravitate towards the quiet, silhouetted Jesus bent in prayer. This directionality, along with the shiny seamlessness of the space, may be one reason why the sense of closeness and of being physically held in Christ's hands is one of the room's celebrated effects. The moment we enter the special room, the minister explained, it's as if we are in his hands. There are olive trees painted there and there's a painting of Jesus praying. And if we open the window, I planted some green trees outside. So if we pray with the windows open, one feels as if one is praying in his hands. It happened that in the magazine Gloria, there is a photo of the Garden of Gethsemane with those olive trees. I said, please paint like this. I want a picture for the atmosphere of Gethsemane. Now to enter this special room is to leave one world behind and be enclosed in another. A Christian elsewhere that bears only an oblique, tenuous connection to the first. The existence and circulation of such Christian elsewhere's and sacred sites or differently those of other religious traditions like Islam is not in itself remarkable. Adam Becker, religious studies person, observes for instance how, quote, scripture and Jewish and Christian traditions carry with them a certain geography. And it is natural for Jews and Christians to employ this geography when they occupy those regions it describes. Close quote. Along with this inbuilt portable geography, the religious universality of Christian holy places like Rome or Jerusalem, along with affect-laden sites such as Gethsemane is one that pushes them beyond any linguistic or geographical particularity, making it difficult for them to be circumscribed with an entirely regional, not to mention national geographies. And that's a quote from Faisal Devji. Now notwithstanding such mobility, what strikes one here is actually the careful hedging of such circulation, the carving out of a cave-like enclosure and the creation of a miniature Christian enclave cut off from the world outside. In my use of the phrase Christian enclave, I draw in Christiane Abrosis' understanding of a visually induced space or what she calls an enclave gaze that imports images and perspectives from various ecologies of circulation. Generating imagined colonies that nest like spaceships on in her example, the foreign planet India. Now notable in her definition is not only the enclaving gesture, but also the complete incongruity with the larger world outside, like spaceships indeed arriving to wholly distinct surroundings. Like spaceships too, at least in their common portrayal in popular media, also available in Ambon, such enclaves often signal an attack or at the very least a defensive stance towards the foreign environment around them. Now to a large extent, the defensive attitude exemplified by the miniature Christian enclave is an extension of the experience of war and the siege mentality of many Christians. Besides the gay payam, the charismatic church rock, representative of Christ's kingdom, erected a so-called prayer tower, nonstop praying that went on for 24 hours a day for days on end in what was seen as spiritual warfare waged against the devil. During Lowe's and the violence, rocks, teams ventured out while the rest of the city slept to heal the land, drenching the doorways of gambling dens, karaoke bars, and other sites infected by sin and violence with Christ's purifying blood. Beyond war, the defensive stance on the part of many Christians has also to do with the changing nature and physical transformation of public space in Indonesia. In particular, the enhanced public visibility and publicity of the nation's embattled religious composition from especially the 1990s on, augmented more recently by the intense visibility contest that I mentioned before. Now Ambon's pictures arose also on the ruins of war but also in the midst of what scholars describe as a burgeoning public Islam. In the streets of Ambon and across Indonesia, Islam's indisputable public presence registers visibly and audibly in the many mosques being built, the popularity of Quranic reading sessions and typical Muslim fashions, the rise in the number of Indonesian Muslims performing the Hajj, increasingly also at a younger age, the resurgence of Islamic print media, of Islamic film, the development of new forms of da'wah or proselytizing like cyber and cellular da'wah and the spread of Islamic economic institutions. Or as the gay pay and minister of the home prayer room volunteered in the mid 2000s, characterizing the city's new street paintings as a direct parallel, even a counter to this public Islam. It's the same day, the Muslims don't make pictures much but they wear head scarves as their own kind of special characteristic to show that we are Muslims. Yes, he said that's what stands out. Now that which also stands out and figures as an invisible backdrop to the Christian pictures in Amman's streets, churches and homes is a very fact then of Muslim presence. In the form of the overwhelming numerical dominance of Muslims in Indonesia, some 90% of the total population, in the public prominence of Islam throughout the large majority of the country and in the conviction prevalent during the war among many of Amman's Christians that they were the target of a Muslim driven genocide. Claiming and proclaiming the city as Christian, the pictures perform God's partisan presence in Ambon at the same time as they pictorially effaced the Muslim who hovers at the edge of the frame and charges these public pictures effectively. In an article on the colonial backdrops of photographs, Arjuna Pottawai writes how the backdrop relevant to understanding a given photograph is two fold. The first is the visible backdrop and the second an invisible one, a secondary order that shapes the interpretation of the intended viewers. An immediate post war Ambon against the backdrop of an encroaching public Islam, a religiously inflected war, an urban environment where societal spaces as well as individual bodies continue to be marked by the signs of the recent brutality and where violence remained visible. It took little imagination, I suggest, on the part of those who engage these images, Christians that is, to see as it were the larger invisible backdrop looming behind. Now to pray in the miniature, get so many garden, is to enter into a kind of tet-a-tet that realizes itself through the embodied mimicry of the painted God's gestures on the part of the person praying and can lead to being swept up in this physical exchange by the incredible sensation that one has caught protectively in his hands. Together with the unbroken seamlessness of the space and the impact of its images, this sensation seems to be in effect of being momentarily suspended and hermetically sealed spaceship-like from any outside surroundings. With leafy trees planted immediately outside the prayer rooms, windows, even the city's invisible backdrop can briefly be held at bay. In its place, a delicate and moving closeness comes to the fore that the minister's wife has had a loss of words to describe. One in which the room's painted backdrop forecloses the invisible one pressing in from the outside, thereby allowing those praying in the foreground to merge tenderly with the affectively powerful Christian scene. Now while highly condensed in the prayer room, this is a Christian landscape and sense of place that has spread more diffusely throughout the city, carried by the pictures that have arisen in its streets. It is one in which these Ambronese Christians aim to gather a visual world around themselves, hence the frequent emphasis on the public picture's comforting nature, on the need for their multiple large-scale presence and on their continual reiteration. It's self-a-material image, this landscape is mediated by a Christian print cannon that while formally identified with intimacy and interiority and as such a long-standing conventional feature of the city's more domestic Christian spaces had on the war and thereafter been stood on its head. It is worth considering how the picture's prior exclusive association with the more intimate spaces of the Christian every day may have contributed to their appeal during the war and aftermath of the war. As these images moved out of houses and stores and grew in size, they did not displace the earlier calendars, posters or embroidered last supper scenes, but merely supplemented them. Given this local trajectory, the pictures may still somewhat retain the promise and buttress the performance of a Christian Ambronese subject as visually construed and familiar, comfortable and essentially interiorized surroundings, even as these surroundings have been stretched in quite formidable new directions. At issue then in some basic sense would be a new acute awareness of the subject's emplacement within a field of vision, but that's another part of this story. Now if the Christian Enclave disclosures of the impulse to figuration as a way of hedging disfiguration or even imagined erasure, a recurrent feature of the public service announcements PSAs aired on television during the war and the occasional documentary on the city's violence was a city in ruins or the portrayal of disfiguration itself. In such production, disfiguration came paired with and was set off by the potent figure of the child, her photographed unfilmed face or drawings from her hand. For instance, the short documentary piece song from 2001 by the Indonesian filmmaker Garanugroho opens with children's drawings successively filling the screen while stills of children's faces come in at the end to frame and literally enclose footage excerpted from national news broadcasts that show Muslim migrants frantically boarding and scaling the sides of deporting boats as these migrants were driven out of Ambon and the destruction of the city's main market both in the very first days of the war. Here the faces are drawings of children, what the anthropologist as I said, McDowsey calls the protoplasmic creaturely potential of the nation serve as a kind of cordon sanitaire that contains violence. Somewhat differently the PSA is commonly carve out miniature child worlds, sort of enclave worlds in heavily disfigured dare I say orphaned urban landscapes from which Muslim and Christian child pairs speak out against violence jointly. Examples include a quite infamous PSA that early on in the war featured the Muslim child Acha and the Christian Obed meeting clandestinely in the empty basement of an abandoned building in war-torn Ambon. There they affirm their blood brotherhood while condemning the adults who allegedly caused the violence. In blaming adults the pair also underscores their symbolic orphaning. Or another PSA aired in the immediate post war years that begins with a panorama of Ambon city and female Muslim and Christian civil servants walking hand in hand. It is followed then by a scene of traditional dance, caption Pela Gandonghe, indexing the central Malacca's famous interreligious blood brother alliances that often provided a model for the city's multiple reconciliation ritual. At the ad's core is the Barist of Scenes, a Muslim girl with a headscarf and a Christian boy stand side by side in a tiny ruined space. Without a word they turn stiffly to each other, shake hands in a gesture that recalls both the long arm of Indonesian state bureaucracy and the numerous handshakes of reconciliation depicted in print and electronic media. Together they unfold and hold up a sign that reads in a faint childish scroll, I, heart, Ambon Manise or sweet Ambon in English. Now powerful figures of redemption, Christ and the child emerged again and again in the ruined disfigured landscapes of Ambon's drawn out war. Christ in Ambon assumed a markedly partisan guise, even if following Christian theology, he is held to have sacrificed himself for the whole of mankind. By contrast the child was inevitably paired in an interreligious Muslim Christian version of we too form a multitude, the multitude authorized and circumscribed by the Indonesian state. But I would like to conclude not with Ambon today, but with a different example from, drawn not from Indonesia, but from Venezuela. An example of an equally desperate turn to figuration amidst rampant crisis and violence. In January 2014 in the capital Caracas and elsewhere in the country, I was amazed to hear former President Hugo Chavez's voice emanating from television screens and radios in bars, government offices, grocery stores and other sites that month as well. That same month he was appointed president for life of the country's ruling party and most uncanningly his disembodied paired eyes were depicted often in multiples against different colored backdrops representing Venezuela's main political parties including that of the opposition on huge billboards along highways in downtown Caracas and in other public places. All of these traces of the Bolivarian leader emerged post-mortem, not even a year after Chavez died. In a world in which images increasingly lead the way in politics and social life, a world increasingly troubled by warfare, violence and rising inequality, it is crucial as I hope to have shown today to think the relationship between projects of figuration and the myriad disfigurations of our current times or more radically even to think the community to come in the absence of any figure that presupposes abounding a totality and the myriad enmities to enable and keep those in place. Thank you.