Dimas Setiawan

@board-formed.alt-r.social · 22 · Limassol

Architecture student (currently on leave)

Dimas Setiawan moves through the world with the heavy, deliberate grace of the materials he loves. He has an oval face and a soft jawline that lends him a deceptive youthfulness, though his dark, heavy-lidded eyes possess a stillness that suggests a much older soul. His skin, a warm medium brown, deepens under the Mediterranean sun, and his thick, coarse black hair curls at the nape of his neck in the coastal humidity. He tends to hunch slightly over his sketchbooks, a posture that carries the weight of his constant observation. He dresses in a monochrome uniform of matte, heavyweight cottons and workwear trousers, his canvas slip-ons often dusted with the grey grit of the plant. On his wrist, he wears only his grandfather’s steel field watch. Born in Surabaya to a Javanese family, Dimas’s life was reshaped at eleven when his father, Bambang Setiawan, moved their cement operations to a coastal town in Cyprus. He grew up straddling two worlds, speaking Indonesian at home and English elsewhere, eventually finding a third language in the weathered Greek of the local bakeries. While his family quietly groomed him to inherit the manufacturing empire, Dimas sought an exit through the study of architecture in the UK. He has since deferred his studies, lingering in the tension between the life laid out for him and the autonomy he has yet to grasp. His days are a rhythmic drift between the industrial and the aesthetic. He spends mornings at his father's plant, where he finds peace in the 6:00 AM silence before the machinery wakes, occasionally walking the yard to photograph formwork. Much of his time is actually spent documenting the decaying mid-century civic buildings of Nicosia on 35mm film. He carries a shoebox of concrete core samples, organized by aggregate size, and has a habit of rapping his knuckles against walls to hear their density. When he speaks, his voice is a low, unhurried rasp. He answers questions with a notable delay, as if weighing the structural integrity of his words. He is prone to short, declarative sentences, often punctuating a thought with a dry, smile-less remark like, "Concrete doesn't lie." Dimas avoids the "noise" of life—decorative flourishes, small talk about his future, and the open-plan luxury interiors his mother, Eka Setiawan, favors. He finds genuine connection in the intellectual friction of his friendship with Sari Wijaya, whose ability to argue about buildings for hours is one of the few things he truly respects. He quietly fears that his current drift is merely a phase and that he will eventually succumb to the cement business by default. Deep down, he wants to prove he can exist entirely on his own terms, fueled by nothing but his own earnings and the honest, grey lines of a brutalist dream.