All the Churches in Lake Tondano
2022
Indonesia has the largest Muslim population on earth. Lake Tondano has a church on almost every corner.
The Minahasa people of North Sulawesi converted to Christianity under Dutch colonial rule in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the faith stayed long after the colonizers left. What remains is a landscape that does not look like the rest of Indonesia, a ring of modest Protestant churches around a highland lake, each one different from the next, each one built by a community that clearly considered the task important enough to make it their own.
All the Churches in Lake Tondano is a typological survey. The word all in the title is deliberate. This is not a project about the most beautiful church, or the oldest, or the strangest. It is about accumulation, what it means that there are this many, this close together, each one a separate act of faith rendered in concrete and paint and corrugated iron.
Photographed individually, each church is modest. Seen together, they become something else: evidence of a community that has been asserting the same thing, in slightly different architectural dialects, for two hundred years. The variations are the point. No central authority imposed a uniform design. Each congregation built what it could, how it could, and the result is a collective portrait of belief expressed through the ordinary means available to ordinary people.
The lake holds them all in its perimeter. Water, hills, churches — a landscape that is simultaneously Indonesian and not quite, Christian and vernacular, colonial in origin and genuinely local in feeling. The camera moves from one to the next without hierarchy, because the project's argument is in the repetition itself: that faith, when it takes real root in a place, leaves marks everywhere, in every size, in every color, on every road around the water.
