The ceremony 'Masangi Matata' or 'Potong Gigi' is a ceremony generally carried out around the age of sixteen. It's a culmination of ceremonies required in the journey into man or womanhood. Subsequent ceremonies unless you are to become a preist, include weddings and finally, cremation. In some cases the ceremony is held in the privacy of ones home incurring massive cost to the family. The economical way is to become part of a ceremony of far grander scale by joining in the festivities and offerings at the 'Banjar' the balinese equivalent of a local village hall.
The ceremony is said to bring you close to death. You shouldn't close your eyes for fear of passing over. The family crowds in a protective huddle, onlookers observe nervously as their nearest and dearest young teens have their teeth filed flat in order to seperate them from the animal within. The canines suffering the greater loss of calcium in the process... Oh, and I'm also in there having it done....
The end of this reel, the evening shots and the ones showcasing a mass of offerings, are actually a final stage of the burial process, for those for whom the day's after their death did not allow for it to have taken place earlier. It was a day to say congratulations and goodbye, a day of life death and fear, a day of intricate offering..... just another day in the life of a hindu Balinese.
Photography: Heal by Photo & Koming Suryaningsih
Bali's roads are littered with traffic and lined with a never ending sprawl of constructed similarity.
What lay behind those blockades of beauty, we pass without thought or wonder, heading only on A - B journeys that do not allow for the spontaneity required to experience the truly obscure and wonderful. Maybe that's what this array of images speaks to you, maybe it's just a mad frenchman in a backstreet, makeshift steel works having too much fun with a grinder.
