nernada


Nabila Ernada is an Indonesian design researcher and media artist based in Rotterdam. Traditionally trained as a communications specialist and social strategist in Indonesia, she has a background in Media Studies and Social Design from Universitas Indonesia and Design Academy Eindhoven. Her work explores the in-between zones of surveillance and resistance, tracing how media and technology infrastructures govern visibility, legality, and the body. 

She has been a resident at Fabrica Research Centre and V2_ Lab for Unstable Media, and has exhibited at MaMA Rotterdam, CBK Zuidoost, Brutus, Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam, the Van Abbemuseum, and design weeks in Eindhoven, Vienna, and Milan. Currently, Nabila is a PhD candidate exploring Indonesian voices within Dutch colonial radio infrastructures at the University of Amsterdam.



Contact
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Purchase Out of Sight through Limestone Books or here.


                                                       


Exhibitions and projects
Lecture performance: Unearthing, Uprooting
Stroom Den Haag
The Hague, NL
Mar 2026

Teach in: Nurturing the Fire of Our Militant Witches
Plaatsmaken
Arnhem, NL
Feb 2026

Group exhibition: Shadow Circuits
MaMA
Rotterdam, NL
Feb 2026

Jordan, jordan Édition; Sharjah Art Foundation: Focalpoint Art Book Fair
Sharjah
Dec 2025

Museumnacht Amsterdam
CBK Zuidoost
Amsterdam, NL
Nov 2025

DAE Graduation Show
Dutch Design Week
Microstad
Eindhoven, NL
Nov 2025

Group exhibition: it smells like sweat and jasmine
CBK Zuidoost
Amsterdam, NL
Sept 2025

I’m never doing this again, in collaboration with Yara Veloso, Sophie Allerding, Anna Bierler, Mila Broomberg, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Isabel Legate and Colette Aliman
Rotterdam, NL
Sept 2025

Brutus Wild Art of Summer, in collaboration with Linda Ucilniece
Brutus
Rotterdam, NL
Jul 2025

Research presentation: Haunting the Network: Gendered Surveillance and Media Memory. How can visibility become a trap?
varia
Rotterdam, NL
Jul 2025

(Re)defining Kartini
Verzetsmuseum
Amsterdam, NL
Apr 2025

Bacchanalia: Absorbs the night
Van Abbemusem
Eindhoven, NL
Mar 2025

Schmiede Workshau (part of V2_ Summer Sessions)
Hallein, AT
Sept 2024

Kiosk t-w
Vienna Design Week, supported by Stadterbeit Social Design Prize
Vienna, AT
Sept 2024

Elevator Radio @ BASE Milano
Milan Design Week
Milan, IT
Apr 2024

Figures by Figure
Jakarta, ID
Jun 2023

here becomes elsewhere
Fabrica Research Centre
Treviso, IT
Mar 2023
Awards and fundsBest Thesis, Social Design
Design Academy Eindhoven
2025

Stadterbeit Social Design Prize
Vienna Design Week
2024

Stimulerings, Salone de Mobile
Milan Design Week
2024

AcademicPhD candidate
History of the Indonesian Programme of Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep 1945-1965 University of Amsterdam
2026-ongoing

MA Social Design
Design Academy Eindhoven
2023-2025

BA Media Studies
Universitas Indonesia/Deakin University
2014-2018



selected work


                  


publication
Out of Sight: On Subverting Gendered Surveillance
Self-published
93 pages, risoprint

Out of Sight examines how reproductive autonomy in Indonesia is shaped by visibility, erasure, and media control. Tracing lineage from colonial governance to the New Order and today’s digital infrastructures, it explores how gendered surveillance and moral policing persists across pulp, print and algorithmic media. Through feminist counter-archives and hidden networks, the work reveals how resistance endures through invisibility, misdirection, and coded care. 




archival footage collage
16mm/digital film projection
carved wooden room divider
repurposed satellite antennas with exciters
3-channel sound
 PALAPPPPPA
2025
Microstad, Dutch Design Week, Eindhoven

PALAPPPPPA (each additional 'P' signals 'perempuan', Indonesian for women) is a film and sound installation examining how Indonesia's state-controlled media under Suharto's New Order (1966–1998) cultivated self-surveillance as a tool for control. Named after Indonesia's first communications satellite, Palapa, it focuses on the 1965 military-backed purge that targeted the feminist movement Gerwani through propaganda, the work reflects on media's role in entrenching ideological control.

A film collage of archival footage, legal texts, historical magazines and livestream aesthetics is projected onto a carved room divider evoking Gerwani dancers' dressing rooms in 1960s Bali. Feminist subtitles challenge official narratives and historical erasure. Repurposed satellite dishes transmit soundscapes by Bali-based designer Agha Praditya Yogaswara — recorded at symbolic sites including markets, daycare centers, and community spaces — creating overlapping audio streams that make active listening a political and restorative act.

  Image Credit: ©Alexander Formgren



research presentation Haunting the network: Gendered Surveillance and Media Memory
How can visibility become a trap?
2025
varia
This presentation focused on postcolonial surveillance, feminist resistance, and the architectures of visibility in Indonesia, from the weaponised image of Gerwani (a feminist group violently disbanded in the 1960s) to contemporary forms of algorithmic control.

Through film, sound, and writing, Nabila traces how media infrastructures, from state television to satellites to social platforms, have been used to monitor, shame, and erase women’s choices. She examines how propaganda has morphed into digital policing, and how resistance moves not through confrontation but through disappearance, glitch, and refusal. In these works, subversion is not loud. It is encrypted, scattered, and misaligned, a feminist strategy of survival beyond visibility.

https://varia.zone/en/haunting-the-network.html




archival footage collage
multimedia and scent installation
(Re)tracing Buruh Siluman
2024-2026
shown at: it smells like sweat and jasmine, CBK Zuidoost Amsterdam; (Re)defining Kartini, Verzetsmuseum Amsterdam

This work explores the unsettling reality of buruh siluman—the invisible labourers within Indonesia’s palm oil plantations. Drawing on the research of Dr. Hariati Sinaga, it traces how women’s labour has long been hidden, exploited, and erased, while making visible the ghosts that continue to haunt these landscapes.

The exploration of the archive reveals longstanding practices of labour exploitation in Indonesia, the cost of colonial expansion borne through the dehumanisation of plantation workers. It also traces the intersections of gendered and economic exploitation that emerged with the rise of colonial industry. As a homage to the lost and invisible women conscripted into specific tasks and classifications of labour, this work highlights both those working in the fields and those confined to colonists’ homes. On these plantations, women served as physical labourers, picking palm fruit for meagre (and at times nonexistent) wages, but also as nyais (indentured housekeepers) subjected to sexual exploitation by their “employers.”

The images, sourced from the KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies) archive, are re-edited and combined with contemporary visualisations, making visible how colonial records themselves often erased these women. The ghosts they left behind continue to haunt the palm oil fields today, where the same systems of labour still exploit women workers.

The Melati flower, or jasmine, carries a dual meaning: its fragrance evokes otherworldly spirits, echoing the spectral existence of the buruh siluman, while its use as a pseudonym for sexual assault victims in media underscores the vulnerabilities hidden within these plantations.

    Image Credit (left): ©CBKZO it smells of sweat and jasmine




interactive installation
The ATM / Ritual of Debt
2024
shown at the Schmiede Workshau 2024 part of V2_ Summer Sessions
in collaboration with Ula Zuhra

The ATM reimagines debt as both a financial and mystical transaction. While society dismisses practices like susuk as superstition, it normalises equally exploitative systems of credit and loans—both binding people into cycles of obligation and submission. By turning finance into ritual, the work blurs the boundaries between technology, mysticism, and economy.

While society shuns black magic like susuk as taboo, it accepts equally exploitative systems like credit and loans. Both forms of debt lock individuals into cycles of obligation, material and spiritual. Debt becomes a tool of submission, exposing deeper truths about dependence and control. 

This speculative ATM playfully envisions a cheeky intersection of technology, mysticism, and economy, transforming a mundane financial transaction into an intimate ritual. As an interactive piece, it invites users to submit something personal in exchange for a return, blending vulnerability with the mechanics of exchange. By acting as a portal where ritual meets finance, it challenges the divide between institutional systems and occult practices, revealing their shared roots in debt and submission. In uncertain economic times, both tools serve as mechanisms of control, feeding the human hunger for immediacy. Donna Haraway’s cyborg—a boundary-blurring figure—resonates here: the susuk ATM reimagines the consumer as a hybrid of desire and debt, navigating the blurred lines between agency, technology, and mysticism.

More: https://v2.nl/works/speculative-rituals-of-debt







interactive game
multimedia installation The Foot Guru
2023-2025
shown at: here becomes elsewhere, Fabrica Research Centre; Bacchanalia: Absorbs the night, Van Abbemuseum

The Foot Guru is a video game and interactive installation that satirises the pursuit of effortless productivity and wellness in post-digital capitalism. Controlled entirely through the visitor’s feet, it stages a surreal consultation journey where spiritual healing collides with technological optimisation.

Developed during my residency at Fabrica Research Centre in Treviso, the work was first exhibited in the 2022/23 exhibition here becomes elsewhere. Fabrica is internationally recognised for bringing together young designers, artists, and researchers from across the world, making this an important platform to test and present experimental practice in dialogue with a global cohort.

In The Foot Guru, I created both the conceptual framework and the interactive game system, weaving together research on internet subcultures, occult beliefs, and wellness economies. The choice to use the feet as the primary interface was deliberate: to subvert the hierarchy of the body in digital culture, and to force visitors into a more vulnerable, sensorial mode of play. Ultimately, the installation reflects the contradictions of contemporary self-optimization: the desire to heal and be seen refracted through systems of technology and capital. It points to how easily spirituality is commodified, reminding us that wellness, in this world, remains accessible only to those who can afford it. 

https://www.fabrica.it/herebecomeselsewhere/nabila.html

   Image credit: ©gerdastudio



dj set
scultural furniture
sound responsive video Softcore I & II
2025
shown at: Brutus Wild Art of Summer, I’m never doing this again

Softcore is a femme-led installation that reimagines nightlife as a care-driven, interactive system. It listens back, holds you gently, and pulses with collective joy. Sculpted sound stations meet cuddle-ready loveseats, while retro consoles hum with play, somewhere between a lounge, a slow party, and a shared living room. Originally commissioned by Brutus for Wild Art of Summer, the work was created in collaboration with Linda Ucelniece and Zoe Bruhat, continuing Ucelniece's practice with sculptural speaker objects and loveseat furniture.

The sculptural furniture later expanded for i’m never doing this again, a house exhibition curated and produced by Yara Veloso, Sophie Allerding, Nabila Ernada, Mila Broomberg, Lucila Pacheco Dehne, Isabel Legate, Colette Aliman, and Anna Bierler. This iteration featured a DJ set by Kate Takada, live audio-responsive visuals by Isabel Legate projected onto the sculpture, and a star-shaped DJ controller table from the original Softcore series. The performance was inspired by the Queen of the Night cactus (Epiphyllum oxypetalum), a plant that blooms rarely and only for a single night. Less a flower than an event: fleeting, luminous, temporary. The sound curation was moody, lush, and expansive, while visuals were processed through TouchDesigner to react in real-time.

    Image credit: ©Hilde Speet; ©Laura Siliquini




wood
subwoofer
sound Womb, Exit
2024


Womb, Exit is an intimate installation that reimagines underground abortion practices developed in restrictive environments. Inspired by historical massage and magical techniques used to induce abortion, it transforms vibration, compression, and sound into a sensory encounter with the tension between care and control, access and denial.

While abortion is technically permitted under narrow conditions in Indonesia, in practice it remains inaccessible for most women. Bureaucratic delays, stigma from healthcare providers, and the threat of criminalisation force many to seek unsafe, underground methods. Hospitals and clinics often deny care on moral grounds, reducing reproductive rights to a privilege rather than a guarantee. These systemic barriers push reproductive autonomy into the shadows, where survival depends on secrecy, improvisation, and risk.

Womb, Exit channels this hidden history. By drawing on massage and magic-based techniques once used to induce abortion, the work references practices that were both illicit and essential, methods that persisted in plain sight yet were rendered invisible by law and morality. In translating these gestures into vibration, compression, and sound, the installation makes palpable the pressures that restrict women’s choices, while also evoking the ingenuity of underground care. At its core, the piece reflects the paradox of visibility: reproductive rights in Indonesia are not simply erased, but strategically obscured, acknowledged only as criminal, never as healthcare. 




nomadic kitchen and radio

 Kiosk t-w
2024
Vienna Design Week

Nabila Ernada, Nomi Toirkens, Elna Aurand, Violeta Perez Hurtado, Caroline Holper and Phoebe Hotopf, brought their mobile kitchen project, Kiosk t-w, to Vienna Design Week, where it won the tenth Stadtarbeit Social Design Award. The project aimed to both challenge our notions of food waste within industrial food systems by turning discarded ingredients into something not only edible but desirable. The group’s mobile kitchen roamed through Vienna’s third district, transforming rescued ingredients from local businesses into vegetarian dishes while encouraging the public to engage in a dialogue about waste.

The group also collaborated with Design Academy Eindhoven’s student initiative Elevator Radio, using the platform to broadcast conversations about food, design, and sustainability. Discussions touched on the role of communal meals in building social bonds, Vienna’s growing food design scene, and how creative practices can reshape our relationship with food waste. The mobile kitchen itself, adapted from Chmara Rosinke’s Mobile Hospitality project, became both a practical tool and a symbol of the project’s nomadic, community-focused approach.



nomadic radio

 Elevator Radio
 2024
Milan Design Week

Elevator Radio is a radio station operated by students and alumni of Design Academy Eindhoven. With the medium of live broadcasting and audio, it serves as an "urgent publishing" platform, amplifying voices and providing space for experimentation and collaboration within the design community.

During Design Week, on BASE Milano's rooftop, Elevator Radio presents a journey into radical design, redefining reality and imagination. Engage in conversations exploring design's transformative potential, witnessing its borderless pursuit of liberation. Discover voices shaping experimental publishing, delve into humanity's interplay with nature, and confront designers' economic realities. Weaving through weekly conversations is the Watermelon Hour, a daily show dedicated to solidarity for Palestine's collective liberation. Stream here.


soundscape
live meditation Mindspa
2023

A live meditation session under the sun, in response to Tadao Ando’s diagonal landscape at Fabrica, invites visitors to commune with architectural serenity. The soundscape and samples were gathered during the residency. For more information on Fabrica Research Centre, head to www.fabrica.it.