The song we chose to convey our idea is about the feeling of not belonging to one's community, and how one might want to leave everything behind. That sentiment is quite dynamic and energetic, creating this desire to move like the singer has, while also representing his anger and resentfulness.

While family bonds and one's regional background are quite important to many people in Germany, these ties and bonds are not as strong as they are for Indonesians, who have developed and named this cultural value merantau and mudik.

Merantau, which roughly translates ‘to wander’, is when a person moves to another location that is usually far away from their place of origin to seek new experience, find a job, or just to live their life to the fullest. Mudik on the other hand ( which roughly translates to ‘Homecoming / Going home’), is when a person visits their hometown during a major holiday such as Ied al-Fitr.

Casper - Im Ascheregen
»Dies ist kein ABSCHIED
Denn ich war NIE willkomm’n
Will AUF und DAVON
und nicht wiederkomm’n
Kein LEBEWOHL, will euch nicht kenn’n
Die Stadt muss BRENN’N (brenn’n, brenn’n, brenn’n)«

»This is not a FAREWELL
For I was NEVER welcome
Want to UP and LEAVE
and not come back
No GOODBYE, don’t want to know you
The city must BURN (burn, burn, burn)«

»Ini bukanlah ucapan selamat tinggal
Karena aku tidak pernah diterima
ingin bangkit dan pergi
lalu tidak akan kembali lagi
Takkan ada kata perpisahan, aku tak ingin mengenalmu
Kota ini harus hangus terbakar (bakar, bakar, bakar)«

The animation looks similar in both sections with subtle differences here and there because even though we're from different backgrounds, in the end, we're still human and we can understand and feel the hurt by being rejected and not accepted. It's not a shame to acknowledge the emotion that you're feeling.

With that being said though, Indonesians usually keep their feelings to themselves without actually vocalizing them, at least more so than Germans do, especially in the context of music.

But generally, in Central Javanese culture (where Sebelas Maret University is located), they tend to keep their emotions to themselves, they usually do that to prevent conflict and to avoid making other people feel uncomfortable.

The Indonesian Archipelago is quite large though, and this sentiment doesn’t represent the Indonesian culture as a whole, since there are many cultures that vocalize their feelings more, for example, the Bataknese culture.

If your situation doesn’t work out for you, there’s no shame in expressing your feelings about it and starting anew.

Now, expressing one’s feelings doesn’t strike anyone to be a particularly precarious topic, but in Indonesia, a lot of songs that criticize something or are intended to express anger about something are usually written in a way so that people need to double-check what the meaning is, or they just plainly spout profanities without going into detail about what the true message is actually about.

Germans on the other hand don’t seem to focus on lyrics all that much. Most listeners just give the impression of simply enjoying the music for what it is, without bothering too much with underlying meaning. There are of course exceptions to the rule with sensitive topics like Germany's dark past often being deliberately provocative and aimed at stirring up conversation.

We want to create a typographical animation capturing the meaning, feelings and underlying messages of the song we chose to animate: Im Ascheregen by Casper.

In addition to that, we chose to emphasize the feeling of hope and therefore changed the original music to a slower and more upbeat track. In order to find the slower timing of the lyrics and match it to the new song, we spent some time singing along ;)

Given the context of the “intercultural workshop” and the original lyrics being in German, we arrived at the idea of translating the quote to Bahasa Indonesian and animating both quotes.

All this has developed into quite an engaging project, and while we have learned much about our two cultures, there surely is plenty more to discover.