Post-Memory and Resistance Among a New Generation After 20 Years: The Lapindo Disaster

On 29 May 2006, an ecological disaster occurred in Porong, Sidoarjo, East Java, where a violent eruption of toxic sludge burst from a gas well drilling site operated by PT Lapindo Brantas. The eruption submerged a dozen villages and displaced more than 40,000 residents. In the early post-disaster stages, the Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono government (2004–2014) treated it as a technical issue with unclear causes but formed an investigation and response team. Meanwhile, Indonesia’s main legal aid non-profit (YLBHI) filed a civil lawsuit against the government and PT Lapindo Brantas. The suit alleged that the defendants had failed to protect and fulfill the rights of the mudflow victims.

Across successive presidential administrations, institutional responses were bureaucratic and administrative. The Yudhoyono government created Badan Penanganan Lumpur Sidoarjo (BPLS) to manage compensation, seemingly shifting PT Lapindo Brantas’ liability into the state budget. Under Joko Widodo (2014–24), the administration dissolved BPLS in 2017 and transferred disaster management duties to the Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (PUPR) by allocating a bailout fund. However, this paved the way for regency-level authorities to formally revoke the administrative status of submerged villages through various regulations. Even now, no government authority at any level has fully restored the administrative identity of or provided restorative justice to the Lapindo survivors.

Worse, some have reframed the physical site as a “dark tourism” destination, repackaging environmental trauma into a cheap spectacle. The Widodo government’s plans to develop a geopark has faced criticism since 2018. However, these attempts to ‘forget’ face an unexpected obstacle: the active imagination of a younger generation who have never seen their ancestral hometowns. These youth can be seen as the “ghost children” of Porong: individuals haunting a landscape from which they have been evicted, yet remaining anchored to it through inherited trauma.

During a community art session organised by a community of survivors and activists to commemorate the recent twentieth anniversary of the disaster, this transmission of memory was manifested by a girl who produced a striking illustration of a house sinking into hot mud, captioned “di sini ada perlawanan” (“there is resistance here”). A boy, during the sambang buyut ritual (a commemorative practice where survivors ascend the 15-metre containment dyke to look out over their buried lands), when asked what the disaster was about, said that Lapindo Bakri had been drilling for oil when a mudflood erupted. His mother came from Siring, a village entirely erased by the sludge. Though the boy has never walked on Siring’s streets, he could describe its landscape, having reconstructed an internal map from his mother’s stories.

The dynamics observed in these children represent a socio-cultural phenomenon that scholar Marianne Hirsch conceptualised as “post-memory”, where inherited narratives are transmitted so deeply and affectively in the domestic sphere that they can function as a generation’s own memories.

In Sidoarjo, the physical landscape reinforces this post-memory. The Lapindo mud is a colossal monument that has reshaped daily life in Porong. Children grow up inhaling toxic pungent air, witnessing their families struggle with contaminated well water and absorbing the heavy silences that fall when elders recount their lost ones. These youth navigate a dual geography: the reality of their current homes and the lost hometowns of their parents’ past. In this context, parental storytelling functions as an act of spatial restoration, transferring an emotional map of a home that these children can never touch.

This sharp historical consciousness echoes an established lineage of creative resistance and environmental justice activism in areas of East Java. After the disaster, local children used art to confront corporate malpractice, famously constructing giant puppets of the ‘Monster Bakri’, a caricature of tycoon Aburizal Bakrie from the Bakrie Group (Lapindo’s holding company). By projecting corporate accountability onto these figures, the youth rejected the state-sponsored narrative which frames the disaster as a “natural” disaster.

Even now, no government authority at any level has fully restored the administrative identity of or provided restorative justice to the Lapindo survivors.

The aesthetics of resistance have outlived the physical villages, crystallising into a broader cultural ethos inherited by new generations through vernacular storytelling. This obstinate memory contrasts with amnesia practiced by the state. Disaster survivors continue to contest the state’s narrative. Across several districts, residents whose homes were affected by the mudflow were forced to move to new residences, including Kahuripan Nirwana Village (Sidoarjo), Renojoyo (Porong) and Panggreh (Jabon). In their resettlement clusters, parents reinforce oral histories by showing their children documentary photographs and guiding them to the dykes, to prove that their heritage is grounded in reality.

In Indonesia, where extractive industries have expanded from the forests of Papua to the investment zones of Rempang, public amnesia serves as an asset for state-backed development. The formula deployed in Sidoarjo twenty years ago – manipulating scientific data, arbitrary zoning to fracture solidarity and invoking development goals – is still used across the archipelago today. The state’s discussions on agrarian conflicts have tended to reduce them to issues of land administration and legality. Substantive justice for citizens (including the restoration of rights and recognition of their experiences) remain outside the scope of the resolution process.

The societal costs of ‘erasing’ similar tragedies are serious, including generational trauma and the erosion of restorative justice. If the post-Lapindo tragedy generation forgets, the disaster would cease to be a cautionary tale; it could become a licence for future environmental destruction in Indonesia. For Porong’s youth, inheriting memories of the disaster is a form of radical political literacy. They are supported by other survivors’ communities, local activists and environmental non-governmental organisations. As these local struggles resonate with environmental solidarity movements across Indonesia and as this generation enters the workforce and the voting booth, they would understand who bears the cost of economic progress.

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