A Bite of Berlin: Digesting the City in Print

During her stay at SAVVY with in the REFLEKT residency programme, Sukma Smita explored the city as a living archive of print culture. Through posters, flyers, stickers, and public notices, she examined how ideas, aspirations, and ideologies circulate across urban spaces, and how multiple actors – from government bodies to grassroots groups – often co-opt the same messages in overlapping and sometimes contradictory ways.

Drawing from her work with Krack Studio, Sukma positions print not only as an artistic medium but as a civic technology: a tool for communities to communicate, contest, and imagine alternative futures. In Berlin, Sukma observed how printed matter moves beyond information, interacting with gestures, routines, and everyday encounters – shaping how the city is read, remembered, and experienced.

For her final presentation, “A Bite of Berlin: Digesting the City in Print", Sukma invites you to an afternoon gathering that merges reading, reflection, and the act of digestion. Guests will hear excerpts from her field notes and observations while sharing cakes and biscuits printed with fragments of the city’s print culture. This interplay of reading and tasting transforms urban observation into a sensorial, participatory experience. The session concludes with an “aftertaste” discussion, encouraging reflection on how visual, vernacular, and ephemeral messages circulate through cities and everyday life.

Through "A Bite of Berlin: Digesting the City in Print", Sukma’s work invites us to pause, notice, and consider the city not only as a space of images and texts, but as a shared, embodied experience where ideas are absorbed, contested, and tasted in small, everyday gestures.

Sukma Smita  is a cultural worker and arts manager based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Drawing from her own position within the cultural sector, her research focuses on the working conditions of art labor and the moral economy that underpins artistic production, particularly in festival, institutional, and collective settings. She is the co-founder and program director of Krack Studio, a printmaking collective that engages with political print culture, publishing, and collaborative production across the Asia-Pacific region. Together with Krack, Sukma explores how print functions not only as an artistic medium, but also as a civic technology that is circulating aspirations, everyday ideologies, and counter-narratives through vernacular forms such as flyers, posters, stickers, and grassroots publications. Her current inquiry considers printed matter as a lens through which to read urban change, informal diplomacy, and visual expressions of resistance in everyday life across shifting cultural landscapes.