INDONESIA (2019)
The community in Gili Air did not need an outsider to tell them what their plants were worth. They asked Molly to help them write it down for themselves.
Gili Air is a small island off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. Molly spent a month there embedded in the community, documenting indigenous medicinal and culinary plant knowledge that had been passed down through local practice but never formally recorded.
Working with local warung chef Sunny and community members, she used linguistic training, folk classification methods, and careful interview practice to transcribe plant names, uses, and the cultural knowledge surrounding them. The record she created was left with the community. It does not belong to anyone else.
That principle, that knowledge belongs to its keepers, is the ethical foundation the work returns to everywhere. The process matters as much as the output. Molly has returned to Lombok regularly since 2019.
