The Architecture 2 Gallery (A2G) at the U of M presented Life Behind the Ride on Oct. 8, exhibiting photographs that depict the challenges and risks faced by Indonesia’s delivery and rideshare drivers, but also their resourcefulness as they navigate the gig economy.
Sheri Gibbings is one of the anthropologists behind the project. The team worked from 2014 to 2025, according to the exhibition text, and Gibbings spent a month and half in Indonesia conducting interviews.
“Part of this research is looking at the ride-hailing industry in Indonesia [and] the changing [street] culture in Indonesia,” she explained.
Gibbings said this research was done to understand “how the drivers are surviving, their strategies of driving and making ends meet.”
The photos follow a chronological narrative, starting with photos from the 1990s when motorbikes became accessible and started to flood the streets of Indonesia. Then, online rideshare platforms such as Gojek and Grab entered the market, transforming the urban landscape with billboard advertisements and motorcycle drivers donning brightly coloured uniforms.
However, there is no cap on how much money the companies can take from the drivers, and there were eventually hundreds of labour protests on unfair wages, said the anthropologist. The situation reached a breaking point when a police tactical vehicle ran over and killed a 21-year-old driver during a protest in 2025.
“[The] last series is these large-scale protests where drivers themselves [were] like, ‘I’ve had enough. Let’s burn down the police station. Something needs to be done,’” Gibbings commented.
During her fieldwork, Gibbings was struck by the difficulty that women, especially single mothers, faced as drivers. Cases of harassment are common, and Gibbings also described scenes of women strapping their newborn babies on themselves and driving for hours.
“This is hard. This is not an easy life,” she said.
“Single women are looked down upon […] But then single women on the street are also doubly looked down upon because they’re almost seen as ‘street women’ […] which is like a prostitute. And so women are constantly trying to assert their morality [by thinking] ‘I’m like a self-sacrificing mother,’ etc. to protect [their] identity.”
For the drivers, the path ahead is not straightforward. Drivers can spend a quarter of their income paying for gas due to rising prices, according to Gibbings. Food and motorbike maintenance costs are increasing as well, but wages are not catching up.
“They’re being squeezed,” she said. “A lot of the drivers are working about 12, 14 hours a day, and they’re making about 100,000 rupiah, which is about $10.”
Nonetheless, Gibbings described the drivers as resilient. Despite the challenges, they are innovative, using tricks such as staying on the app for 24 hours to “reset” it and get more orders, and switching accounts with other drivers so everyone gets rides. Drivers also construct informal basecamps across the city where they can rest and connect, while others sell raincoats and collect bottles for extra income.
“The social [aspect] is key here. The social relations that people have with each other actually [make] the app work, and I think apps don’t really recognize it,” she said. “They’re able to be viable in Indonesia because of all this informal labour.”
Life Behind the Ride is on view at the A2G (215 Architecture 2 building) until Nov. 13.
