00:07Our lease on a part of, very important, of the estate of Colin McPhee, Matei Wijaya,
00:12which is now Taman Bebek, comes to an end of the 15th of July and someone else is started.
00:20This should not mean that the property should be destroyed and make way for another building.
00:25It's not about whose ownership it is. It's about the collective memory and the collective meaning that the property has.
00:37And it shouldn't matter whose ownership it is.
00:40If we can sit down and discuss this through between the different parts, we should be able to reach an
00:45agreement
00:45where the property can hopefully last another hundred years and actually enhance its values
00:52and enhance everything that it has to offer.
00:56Taman Bebek is not just Matei Wijaya's favorite place on the island and its place to host all his celebrity
01:02friends who were coming and whatnot.
01:03Taman Bebek is also a historical property that was initially created by Colin McPhee and Jane Bellow in the 1930s.
01:19Colin McPhee was a Canadian ethnomusicologist, right? He arrived here with his wife, Jane Bellow, who was a visual anthropologist,
01:26or she was an early visual anthropologist.
01:27Together they lived here from 1930, 1931 until 1939. They leased the land where we're sitting now in 1931 for
01:3610 years and they built a house.
01:38He was still contacted after he left during the 50s and 60s by the families of Bali as an ambassador
01:44of Bali.
01:45And so he really kept a close relationship with Bali and he died of sorrow. He never came back.
01:52He passed away in sorrow, sadness and alcohol in the 60s in New York.
02:01This is a typical Matei Wijaya kind of game that he would do.
02:04He would use very bright colors in the interiors because sometimes at the rich properties here in Cyan, it can
02:10get very dark at night and it can get very kind of gloomy.
02:12So he used to like to contrast sort of the quiet and the darkness of the outside with bright colors
02:20in the inside.
02:21So he would, you know, very Matei Wijaya, he would have this game.
02:24This is actually the bedroom of Colin McPhee and Jane Bellow. And this is where Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson,
02:32who were the anthropologists who came in Bali,
02:34they would stay here when not in Shambuhan, they would stay here. These rooms are kind of the architectural experiments
02:40of back in the days.
02:47Madei Wijaya, originally Michael White, arrived to Bali from Australia in his late 20s, right?
02:53This is where, now we're talking about the 70s. So he arrives here.
02:56Madei Wijaya was always with his cameraman, his rider.
02:59Guerrilla style.
03:00More, more Dogma 95 or whatever, like guerrilla style. He would go with his camera.
03:05Madei Wijaya was an empirical, if you want, anthropologist, architect, a landscape designer.
03:12A journalist, photographer. Really, you would define him like a Renaissance man, you know, a man of all trades.
03:18He could do all these different things. And fortunately, he was also very neat about his archive.
03:24So he also had an archivist vein. So that archive also sits nowadays with Taman Bebek, right?
03:33So Taman Bebek, as a property, connects two periods of history that were well documented and well archived.
03:40When Jeffrey Bawa came to design the Hyatt Hotel, Madei Wijaya, Michael White, back then, he got his first landscaping
03:49gig, the big one.
03:50And he created the gardens. And by creating the gardens, he not only got influenced architecturally by Jeffrey Bawa, but
03:57he really created a new style of tropical landscape design.
04:02He started creating a re-invention of the Balinese garden into something that was come to known as tropical landscape
04:10design.
04:18This pool was made by Madei Wijaya, and the grounds were worked on the property following the original plans of
04:23Colin McPhee that were designed by Walter Spies.
04:26So the layout is very flowy and is as much about the gardens as it is about the villas.
04:40This is the weekend house of Madei Wijaya. He originally built it in the late 1970s as his weekend getaway.
04:48This is a place that has, you know, if the walls could speak, I mean, I guess it could tell
04:53you a lot of stories.
04:54A lot of the antiques that we have in this room and across the whole property are some of the
04:59first antiques that he started buying and collecting.
05:02So there's a lot of different islands of Indonesia. He was traveling around the archipelago at the time and sort
05:10of putting pieces together here.
05:18I remember Madei telling me that, you know, this is, and not only remember, I still get messages from a
05:24lot of the people that he worked with.
05:26Annie Kelly and Thames Street Porter, the photographer, and they say this is their very favorite table in the world
05:32where they sit for coffee here.
05:33Yoko Ono used to love the downstairs floor as well. She used to be also, when she came to Bali,
05:38she stayed here up in the mountain in Sayan.
05:41Francis Ford Coppola, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, all of them spent time at Tamandebek and got influenced by Balinese culture
05:51through Madei Wijaya and other hosts that were at the time introducing them to the cultures.
05:59One day, when we had moved to Bali, we had been looking for a house, and so that night I
06:04went back home and I told Rita, like, I think I found a place.
06:07This is, there's...
06:07I was like, what did you mean?
06:09And then I found the house, and it was like, wow, it's like Jeffrey Bauhaus.
06:13And so we eventually ended up calling Madei, and we said we really, really, really love Tamandebek, and we would
06:22love to, you know, kind of leave attention and love, and we would love to do that if you allow
06:29us, right?
06:31But at some point, and very advanced as we were starting, Madei found out that he was ill, and he
06:39had to start going and spending much more time in Australia.
06:41So, at that time, he asked us if, should anything happen, if, you know, we would consider taking care of
06:49Tamandebek.
06:54This is Villa Malai.
06:55This is actually inspired on the Malayu houses that are lifted from the ground, you know, for flooding reasons.
07:00There was also, happens to be also the favorite villa, Francis Ford Coppola, who used to stay here often.
07:06And he commissioned Madei Wijaya to create a hotel in Belize called the Turtles Inn.
07:10Inspired precisely on this villa, and just the surrounding of all the greenery throughout all the windows.
07:21This tree is only 40 years old.
07:23You can get an idea of how things grow in Bali, my age.
07:26And his father, the father of this tree, was this giant tree that got fed a bicycle, the Bible, a
07:32Koran, and everything had just, like, gone up.
07:35And so you had, like, this Dutch bicycle on the top and whatnot.
07:39Anyway, this is my favorite spot here in the property.
07:42This is the original kitchen from Colin McPhee times, and this has been on since.
07:47And this is where we get our food out.
07:49This is where we do our dinners under the tree.
07:52And, yeah, I think this is the spot that has all the secret ingredients.
07:55I think this is, like, the heart and soul of the property.
08:05In a way, I think what's happening in Taman Bebek at the moment really, it's a symbol, if you may,
08:10or somehow captures what's really going on on the island on a larger scale.
08:14It's around that time, post-pandemic, that we found out that someone had put an offer on one of the
08:19leases that was...
08:21We were still negotiating at the time. We had been negotiating for a couple of years.
08:24And it's a lease that is very inconveniently located in the back of our property, is landlocked.
08:30And so, therefore, we took our time to negotiate and come to a nice agreement with the landowners.
08:37However, someone who is committed or completely decided to build his villa on top has managed his way to work
08:46out to acquire that lease.
08:53What that means is that within a very short period of time, I'm talking about a couple of weeks less,
08:58this will have to be taken down and the land will have to be given in order to make way
09:04for a villa to be built.
09:08It's a sad ending to something that's been happening for a hundred years,
09:12that could happen for another hundred years if we've managed to save this property jointly with all stakeholders,
09:19with all the people involved, right?
09:20It will take a lot of will from all parts to actually understand what is the value of Taman Bebek.
09:26And it's not just another little property in Sayan.
09:29It's a place that, you know, weaves the stories through a hundred years.
09:34Now, more than 1,000 people that have signed the petition can agree on.
09:38It's not about whose ownership it is.
09:41It's about the collective memory and the collective meaning that the property has for Balinese,
09:47Indonesias, long-time residents on the island and internationally as well.
10:16I'm sure, dearμ₯λ, to the matter,
10:17But the hang of them grow up here in the air if it returns wouldn't even my Puis outerians gets
10:17into your building.
10:17I am going to be a situation that everybody getsbar done as well,
10:18I am still spending time for the rich and tartare,
10:18I'm going to lose time a little more quickly after diving festival 215 009 And I tell you we can't
10:24always find yourself
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