MaMA 

Palm oil moves through the world with a strange clarity. We encounter it in lipstick, instant noodles, biofuel, soap. Its presence is so ubiquitous it becomes invisible. It coats our skin in the shower, fuels the truck delivering groceries, thickens the sauce we eat without thinking. Yet the routes it travels to reach us remain deliberately obscured.

On Indonesian plantations, women spray pesticides, harvest crops, and perform the labor that sustains entire industries, such as that of the palm oil industry. They do not appear on payrolls. They have no employment records. In company audits, they often do not exist. Hariati Sinaga, a feminist researcher on women’s labour relations, calls them “buruh siluman”, or ghost laborers.(1) These are not workers who have been overlooked, but workers whose invisibility is structurally produced. The plantations thrive precisely because these women remain off the books, allowing companies to evade legal responsibility while extracting maximum value from bodies that officially are not there.

This invisibility carries material consequences. In 2015, Indonesian NGO Sawit Watch interviewed women workers across plantations in Riau, finding workers who spent hours each day spraying fertilisers, pesticides, and herbicides.(2) The chemical mist settles on skin, in lungs. Vision blurs. Breathing becomes labored. In 2019, Sawit Watch documented five women in Central Kalimantan who experienced miscarriages in their first trimester, their pregnancies lost to workloads their bodies could not sustain.(3) That same year, a female preacher working at an Indonesian estate was sexually assaulted by two workers and strangled. In 2020, a 16-year-old girl in Sumatra reported being raped by her boss, who then put an axe to her throat and threatened her silence. These cases, documented by the Associated Press, revealed patterns of sexual violence across plantations by foremen.(4)

In Dutch colonial archives, I found photographs of the first palm oil plantation in Sumatra, Indonesia. Group portraits staged on plantation grounds: administrators in white linen seated at center, Javanese workers arranged around them and three women wedged in-between. The photographs document the plantation order, and how women were always central to how plantations functioned.

Under colonial rule, Dutch plantation managers could not bring wives from Europe. Instead, they took Indonesian women as concubines, called “nyai”, who performed domestic labour, social functions, and sexual services.(5/6)

When formal concubinage was abolished in the early twentieth century, the women did not leave. They were absorbed into the plantation workforce, their labour reclassified but their position unchanged. The dual role persisted: women worked the fields and sustained the social reproduction of plantation life. This pattern continues. Today, companies recruit workers as families, offering housing in exchange for collective labour. Contracts may be signed in the father’s name, but mothers and children work alongside him. The family becomes the unit of extraction. And sexual violence, embedded in the plantation system from its origins, persists. Women navigate the same terrain the nyai once did, where labour and sexual availability remain entangled, where saying no risks eviction, where the body is never fully one’s own.

Sinaga argues that the ghost of the nyai haunts the present lives of Indonesian women through an ongoing process of racialisation, creating an image of the exotic and disposable person.(7) Dutch extractive practices laid the foundation for what became a cornerstone of Indonesia’s economy. The palm oil industry today generates billions in revenue, built on systems that trace directly back to colonial structures. Indonesia exports primarily to India, China, Pakistan, the United States, and the European Union. The Netherlands, Italy, Spain. The former coloniser remains a major importer. What lingers is not just the infrastructure but the logic: extract maximum value from the land, extract maximum value from the women who work it. Mother nature and mothers both, depleted in the service of global capital.

To trace the elemental and infrastructural components of resource circulation, as this exhibition proposes, requires attending to what is deliberately hidden. The word siluman carries another meaning in Indonesian: spirits, shapeshifters, beings that exist between worlds. To call these workers ghost laborers is not only to name their structural invisibility but to acknowledge their persistent presence, what scholar Avery Gordon calls the way “the ghost makes itself known through haunting and pulls us affectively into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience as a recognition.”(8) They are there, even when the records say otherwise.

In my work for this exhibition, jasmine disperses. In Indonesian tradition, jasmine appears at both weddings and funerals. Media outlets reporting sexual violence call victims Melati, meaning jasmine, rather than print their real names. The scent moves through the space, carrying what the ledgers will not name.

Ghost labour reminds us that erasure is never complete. Something lingers in the chemical residue that won’t wash out. In the bodies that bear what the balance sheets will not. In the scent marking what cannot be spoken. Shaping the world we inherit.

Reference list

1) Hariati Sinaga, "Buruh Siluman: The Making and Maintaining of Cheap and Disciplined Labour on
Oil Palm Plantations in Indonesia," in Bioeconomy and Global Inequalities, eds. Maria Backhouse
et al. (Springer, 2021), 175–193.
2) Sinaga, "Buruh Siluman," 181–185.
3) Ibid
4) Margie Mason and Robin McDowell, "Rape, abuses in palm oil fields linked to top beauty brands,"
Associated Press, 18 November 2020.
5) Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule,
2nd ed. (University of California Press, 2010)., "Buruh Siluman," 181–185.
6) Terence H. Hull, “From Concubines to Prostitutes: A Partial History of Trade in Sexual Services
in Indonedia," Moussons 29 (2017): 65–89.
7) Sinaga, "Buruh Siluman," 189.
8) Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 63.