In 1983 Ursula Schulz-Dornburg joined two ethnologists and an architect on a research trip to Tana Toraja, in the highlands of the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. The Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam had commissioned the journey to examine changing patterns of architecture and symbolism among the Sa’dan Toraja. Driving back from Rantepao towards the airport at Ujung Pandang, Schulz-Dornburg passed a different architecture altogether: the houses of the Bugis, or To-Ugiq, raised over the yellow paddy fields.

She photographed them in the short time remaining before her departure, aware that the buildings were unlikely to survive much longer in their traditional form. What she made is not exhaustive documentation but something more provisional and more attentive — pictures taken by a photographer who had one opportunity and had to look hard and quickly.

The houses stand above the ground, and above the water when the rice fields flood, a position that answers the Bugis creation myth, in which the gods of the upper and lower worlds come together to create humanity in the middle world. The farmers she pictures are held in a comparable suspension, between inherited practice and the pressures closing in on it. They work, or they turn towards her camera, and the houses register as both structure and home.

MACK published the work in 2021 as a printed linen hardback of sixty-four pages, 16 x 21.5 cm, with a text by Sirtjo Koolhof. The modest format suits photographs made in passing and made to be looked at closely, one after another. For a collector, the book’s claim lies in how it handles its subject: architecture appears here as evidence of belief and of social change at once, and the sequence keeps returning to a question it does not simplify — what it means to build a home when the terms of home are shifting.