Knowing (2015)
a film available on Vimeo
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Participants (in alphabetical order): Oridek Ap Martin Derey Marie-Christine Engels Fin Maya Hay Insos Ireeuw Max Ireeuw Betty Ireeuw-Kaisiëpo Gershon M. Kaigere Oriana Pentury Silvy Puntowati Annette Schmidt Margriet Siu-Lan Ireeuw Ignatius Supriyanto Niek Van Rijswijk Eric Venbrux Peter Waal Benny Wenda |
| ‘knowing’ was a project with Volkenkunde, Leiden.
In 2014 I invited a range of people from various backgrounds to talk about objects in the collection of Volkenkunde, Leiden, Netherlands, one of the partners in ‘Pacific Presences’, a research project led by anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas. My aim was to explore the politics of occupation and colonialism through the historical objects from Papua in the Volkenkunde collection. The region now called Papua or West Papua has also been called Irian Jaya and Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea reflecting the colonial past and present of the region.
By inviting people from Papua, from Java and of Dutch origin to talk about the objects in the collection, including objects from their own cultures, the project collected stories about objects, some familiar, some chosen by other people, and always including some chosen by the participants themselves. Stories and knowledge were recorded on an audio recorder. The interaction with the objects was also filmed with only the hands and the objects in the frame. The reason for filiming hands and objects only is because most people become self-conscious when their face is filmed and so, because I wanted to keep people feeling safe and open, filming was of hands and objects only. The other main reason for the choice centres on the final film. I believe we make assumptions about a person, and therefore what they’re saying, based on their face. In order to increase parity of reception about the different stories, knowledge, across my ‘informants’, the participants, no faces are shown.
The film was edited by Marianne Holm Hansen and Alana Jelinek. Twenty two hours of footage was edited down to 48minutes.
Knowing was launched at the Centre for Material Research, Volkenkunde, Leiden in 2015 and can be seen currently in the Volkenkunde in the Oceania galleries. It was launched on 25 Oct 2015 in the UK at an event called ‘Knowing West Papua’ at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge. It has been shown at Decad, Berlin, and various other anthropological and art venues.
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