Paras Website
After three years of leisurely ongoing archiving process, Paras website is finally online. Some words of wisdom below:
Paras shared information in Bahasa Indonesia and broken English which is put together based on hard facts with little or no opinion attached to them; they are based on data and information, in a variety of formats, gathered from various eras and sources.
Paras was previously only on Instagram, and all information was posted in quite a spontaneous way — you know, whenever we feel inspired, we put it online. A proper website is planned to launch in 2020, but we did the website very slowly until we were happy with the result parasparas.com, launched at Titik Dua gallery in Ubud.
The website is designed by Krisna Sudharma, formerly the Creative Director of Potato Head and the founder of Kharma Studio and Nonfrasa Gallery. The structure of the website is self-explanatory except the ‘Shop’ section that is left empty until we release a book of the same name, Paras, in 2024.
Similar to its website, Paras book has been in development since 2020 and took its early form as a compilation of archival notes and writings — a digital scrapbook on Medium. A publisher read these notes and invited us to elaborate on them more properly and put them in a book.
Paras book will chronicle 100 years of Bali hospitality and hotel architecture, counting this from 1924, when Koninklijke Paketvaart-Maatschappij (Dutch for Royal Packet Navigation Company) established a weekly steamship route between Bali and Batavia (Jakarta), Singapore, Semarang, Surabaya, and Makassar. This weekly visit effectively brought more people to Bali in the context of tourist trade; KPM eventually opened the first international hotel in Denpasar, Bali, in 1928: the Bali Hotel.