The Archive That Never Empties
By Metalhead Melankolis
Somewhere in a workshop in Jakarta, there is a large photograph of a man's face, torn from a magazine, roughly A4 in size, that has been sitting in an archive since at least 2023. Metalhead Melankolis — the working name of the 31-year-old Indonesian mixed-media artist — has not used it yet. He told me this without embarrassment, as a plain fact. He is waiting for the feeling to arrive. "I feel like this will become something sentimental," he said, "and it would be a shame to use it in a rush."
That patience, held alongside an equally strong instinct for spontaneity, is the central tension in how Melankolis works. He makes collages by feel, without a predetermined theory or a technical checklist. When a fragment does not belong, he knows it the same way he knows anything: it just does not feel right. He takes it off, archives it, and sometimes does not return to it for months. Sometimes he never returns to it at all.
His workshop is called Secarik Kliping, which translates roughly as "a scrap of clippings." The name is accurate. The primary materials are acrylic paint, oil pastel, markers, standard HVS paper, and what he described as an unreasonable quantity of magazine cutouts. He started working with paper as a medium in high school around 2011, making scrapbook pieces about music. Collage as a distinct practice came later, during the pandemic in 2023, and since January 2025 he has been doing it full-time.
The pace of his exhibition activity since then is difficult to ignore. In the first half of 2026 alone, his work appeared in a group show at Sfumato Art Creatives in New York, a public installation at Graniti Murales in Sicily, a group exhibition at Piazza Scammacca in Catania, and a show called SELF, SEEN in a basement on West 11th Street in Manhattan. Back home, he showed at Lapangan Banteng in Central Jakarta and at Fotkop in Kebayoran Baru. The year before, his work had been included in publications from the University of California, Riverside — specifically Mosaic Art and Literary Journal's Issue 64, themed around the idea of the archive — a magazine out of Tilburg in the Netherlands, and Low Altitude Magazine in South Africa, among others. For an artist who has been building a professional practice for a little over a year, the reach is considerable.
The Chaotic Topography / Topografie del Caos public installation in Sicily, which ran across two venues — Graniti Murales in the village of Graniti and Piazza Scammacca in Catania — in May and July 2026, represents one of the more striking contexts his work has entered. Graniti Murales is a long-running street-art programme that has transformed the facades of a small Sicilian village into an open-air gallery. Placing collage work rooted in Jakarta's political atmosphere into that Mediterranean public space required the images to hold without the explanatory frame of a gallery wall. That they did is partly a function of how Melankolis constructs his pieces: the visual logic is felt before it is read.
None of this appears to have changed how he makes things. When we spoke, in Indonesian, he described a process that is deliberately unstructured. He does not plan compositions in advance. He sits with his tools laid out in front of him and waits. Sometimes that wait stretches across two days of staring at nothing, listening to music, watching a film or two, doing nothing at all. He called it the loneliest part of the work — tools ready, surface blank, no clear reason to begin. Then, on the third day, something shifts and he starts.
What starts it is not a decision so much as a feeling. He was consistent on this point throughout the conversation. When pushed for specifics — does a particular image trigger it, or a colour, or a piece of text — he came back to the same answer each time. Just a feeling. Okay, make it. That is all.
The work that came up most in our conversation was "INDONESIA HARI INI," made in 2026, whose title translates as "Indonesia Today." It is a mixed-media collage built around a single sentence cut from a magazine — a sentence involving the word "rights," specifically family rights, though Melankolis said he could not recall the exact phrasing. He had been carrying that sentence in his memory for a long time, having read it repeatedly in a magazine he returned to often, certain it would eventually find a use. When he sat down to make a different piece entirely, the sentence surfaced, and the emotional charge of the moment — his anger at conditions in Indonesia — made the connection obvious. "The sentence was one of the sparks," he said. Every visual layer in the finished piece was arranged in relation to that text fragment, each element chosen because it connected to the sentence and to what he wanted the work to say. The piece was assembled quickly, without revision. He finished it and published it the same day, with nothing removed and nothing second-guessed.
That directness is not always the case. He described how fragments he pulls off a work during its construction often end up in the archive rather than the bin — he was careful to clarify this distinction, that "thrown away" for him means filed, not discarded. A fragment might sit there for a month, two months, four. Sometimes it surfaces again and becomes central to a later piece. More often it does not. The fragments that get removed most frequently are the ones that dominate — pieces that cannot be absorbed into the whole without taking it over, that insist on being read as complete in themselves rather than as part of a layered surface.
The archive from 2023 is still active. He said that the most recent works tend to combine old archived fragments with new material, particularly in the mixed-media pieces where he works with acrylic on top of collage. The old and the new get layered together, and the seams are not always visible in the finished surface. "GRAFT (VOL. 1)," made in 2026, carries that logic in its title: grafting implies joining unlike things and waiting to see if they take. The piece belongs to a body of work that includes the ongoing "SUBTLE" series, now in its fourth volume, and "SHE'S BUYING A STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN," also from 2026 — a title that borrows the grammar of a classic rock lyric and redirects it toward something more ambiguous, a figure in the act of acquiring something that may not be acquirable.
His artist statement describes collage as therapy for mental health struggles. He has written that the process of cutting and assembling slows the world down — that the waves of triggers that usually bring his depression back feel like they fade as he works, dissolving with each breath. He did not dwell on this in the interview, but it is present in the work's recurring concerns: failure, survival, the search for something that might be called hope without quite naming it that. The piece "AHO!" from 2025 sits in the same territory. The themes he named explicitly — absurdity, depression, everyday life, the instinct to survive, the search for a way back to one's own humanity — are not treated as subjects to be illustrated so much as pressures that determine which fragments feel right and which do not.
The Bunga Rampai: Kembali ke Hulu project, shown during Mental Health Week 2025 in collaboration with COP Kesehatan Jiwa Indonesia, placed that dimension of the practice in a direct public context. The project's title translates roughly as "anthology: returning to the source," and the framing around mental health made explicit what is usually implicit in the work — that the archive, the cutting, the patient waiting for a fragment to find its place, is also a way of managing what cannot otherwise be managed.
What comes through most clearly in conversation is that Melankolis trusts the archive more than the moment. He does not force a fragment into a work because it is available or because it seems thematically appropriate. He waits until the fit is obvious, or he does not use it at all. The large face from the magazine, the one he has been holding since 2023, is still waiting. He said he sometimes starts what he thinks will be a warm-up, a casual piece to get moving, and finds himself accidentally making the thing he had been saving himself for. The result, he said, is sometimes disappointing — "but often it is, not good exactly, more like satisfying."
The distinction matters to him. Good is a judgment from outside. Satisfying is internal, a signal that the piece has arrived at something true to what it was trying to be. The large face sits in the archive. He is still warming up.
Discover more of Metalhead Melankolis's work and available pieces on their Studio profile.