The Politics of Remembering: Reconfiguring the Diorama of Monas As Augmented Living Document

This paper examines the Monas diorama as a central apparatus in Indonesia’s politics of remembering, whose narrative consolidation during the New Order rendered it a state-authored monument of national memory. Drawing on Foucault’s distinction between monument and document, Ferraris’s ontology of documentality, and Perret’s concept of document design as projective epistemology, the study reframes the diorama as a documentary assemblage shaped by inscription, power, and institutionalized forgetting. Through diachronic, synchronic, comparative, and experimental analyses, the paper diagnoses failures across the physical, social, and cognitive dimensions of Monas as a document, revealing narrative authoritarianism, representational rigidity, and the absence of plural historical voices. Building on this diagnosis, the paper proposes a conceptual redesign of the diorama as an augmented living document through AR/VR-enabled re-inscription. This proposal is not an account of an existing implementation but a design-driven intervention aimed at reopening the multiplicity of suppressed traces, particularly those surrounding Reformasi and alternative civic memories. By positioning AR/VR as a medium of democratic re-documentation, the study argues that national monuments can transition from instruments of state pedagogy into dialogic platforms where collective memory becomes participatory, interpretive, and critically negotiated.