A network of images drawn from the archive of Torajan videographer, Victor, collide to paint a journal-like portrait of both his community and personal life, its grief and its joy.

Victor Konda has had trouble with his vision since he was a child, which created his infatuation with the moving image and the camera. He now works as a videographer in the highlands of Tana Toraja, Indonesia, documenting and broadcasting social events, ceremonies and rituals across the region with his company Delta Sangalla’ TV (DSTV).

Images of Toraja are abundant – the region is globally renowned for its distinctive funeral ceremonies that galvanise entire communities – but DSTVs footage captures events that reveal a life in Toraja rarely shown.

A grandmother’s lifeless body being washed by her caring family, a community raising the foundations for an ancestral home, a village mourning the loss of a young man; Victor has recorded every aspect of life in Toraja since receiving his first camera in 2005, filming his own private life with the same assiduity.

The DSTV archive serves as a network of images that not only provide an account of Toraja’s recent history and transformation, but also of the singular Torajan approach to death, grief, and to living.

Combining footage from the DSTV archive with our own images of Victor, ‘A River in the Middle of the Sky' interweaves multiple narrative threads to create a journal-like portrait of a cameraman.

His vital contributions to the construction of a collective memory point to the innate impulse of the cameraperson; for one’s experiences to outlive our physical bodies and surpass the fragility of memory.