Alana and curator Wonu Veys in the Museum Volkenkunde stores. Copyright Ali Clark.

In this blog post Alana Jelinek discusses her work on the Pacific Presence Project to date:

I have argued that art practice can be knowledge-forming, just as anthropology or the sciences are knowledge-forming. Art can be knowledge-forming even when it doesn’t set out to create knowledge. Often, though, it isn’t. Often contemporary art practice is about design, the illustration of other ideas or simply building a career and making money, but sometimes art does something more, something in addition. In my case, having proposed this idea, I start out with that ambition. Of course, it is possible that I will fail just as anyone who attempts to create (new) knowledge will sometimes fail. Artists in general don’t have ‘methods’ in the same sense as anthropologists have methods but I am aware of this concept since working with visual anthropologist Ulrike Folie on this project and so I will describe my method. (Artists like me, whose work has its roots in conceptual art, instead, have rules through which a particular artwork is made.)

Choosing objects. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

The project’s working title is ‘Knowing’ and I have invited a range of people from various backgrounds to talk about objects in the collection of Volkenkunde, Leiden, Netherlands, one of our partners in ‘Pacific Presences’. My aim originally was to explore the politics of occupation and colonialism through the objects from Papua, inviting people from Papua, from Java and of Dutch origin to talk about the objects in the collection, including objects from their own cultures. Stories about objects, some familiar, some chosen by other people, and some chosen by the participants themselves, are recorded on an audio recorder. The interaction with the objects is also filmed with only the hands and the objects in the frame. I believe that 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’, my participants, no faces are shown.

Participants and a fish trap. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

Originally, I wanted to invite people from both Java and Sulawesi in addition to Papuan people because the majority of ‘transmigrants’ to Papua are from those two Indonesian islands. The term transmigration describes the movement of people from the Western islands of Indonesia to Papua. This is understood, by some, to be a political move in anticipation of a referendum on Papuan independence promised by the Indonesian government, which is based in Java, far to the west of the island group. In the early 1960s, Papua was promised independence from its then colonial rulers, the Dutch, who had also colonised the rest of what is now known as Indonesia. Dutch colonial rule came to an end after World War 2 with a bloody war against Indonesian independence that the Indonesians won. The Dutch retained Papua, to which some of the colonial Dutch fled after independence. Just as with so much of global geopolitics in the 1960s, the fate of Papua was written through the trope of Cold War. Fearing Indonesia would go the way of Korea, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, the US government pressured the Dutch into leaving early and handing over Papua (an extraordinarily rich part of the world in material and mining terms) to capitalist Indonesia. There was a ceremony at the time to create the fiction that Papuans wanted to be part of Indonesia which is to be redressed with a new democratic referendum in the future. Some believe transmigration is a policy to alter the population demographics of Papua in favour of those who are likely to vote to stay as part of Indonesia. In the end, I only found people from Java to participate, which is lucky because Sulawesi has a very different culture from Java and all these differences might have been difficult to navigate in the film. That said, I now understand how culturally diverse is Java in the first place and this is before I get to the famously diverse (in terms of language, ethnicity, culture, etc) of Papua.

Participants and a kris knife. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

Originally I also mistakenly assumed that the ‘colonised’ would be able to talk knowledgeably of their own culture and also that of the coloniser and that this would contrast with the ‘coloniser’, who would know little or nothing about the colonised. Having filmed a variety of participants, it is clear that, to some extent, the anticipated disparity of knowledge was manifested but it is far more complex than that. For example, some Dutch people knew almost nothing of the ‘clog’ but could speak knowledgeably about objects from both Java and Papua and some Papuan people knew little of both Dutch and Javanese cultures except for those technologies they had also adopted or for which they had equivalents. In the end it is likely that this idea, or theme, will be buried under many other, much more interesting ones that have emerged since recording.

Participants and an object. Copyright Ulrike Folie.

Now the real work begins, in the editing suite, bringing out the stories through juxtaposition while doing justice to all the participants’ points of view and weaving together an artwork that makes sense as an artwork.

Alana Jelinek

On November 5th and 6th Pacific Presences hosted museum professionals from around the UK, mainland Europe and the US for a two day workshop on the theme Museum as Method. One of the participants Rachel Barclay from Durham University Oriental Museum reflects on the main themes and outcomes of the workshop:

It was a real pleasure to participate in the ‘Museum as Method’ workshop hosted by the Pacific Presences project and the MAA. It was great to have the opening session of the workshop in the museum galleries surrounded by the wonderful collections but there was no risk of being distracted by the displays as Nick Thomas gave the sort of thoughtful, and thought-provoking, introduction to the workshop that anyone who has heard him speak or read his work would expect.  Nick built on the themes he outlined in his 2010 article in Museum Anthropology entitled ‘The Museum as Method’ but widened his thoughts beyond anthropology collections to consider museums, and particularly university museums, more broadly.  Nick asked us to reflect on two key areas over the course of the workshop:

• What kinds of research do collections empower? What is distinctive about museum-based research and what does it add to other forms of enquiry?  Are there methods empowered uniquely by museums?  What is their potential and how can it be fostered?
• What contributions do university museums make to research and is there scope for university museums to be more ambitious in shaping, supporting and collaborating in research?

The workshop group included participants from museums in the UK, Europe and USA and Nick’s introduction sparked a lively discussion on the topic of the museum as laboratory – a space for experimentation and risk taking.  The group was quite divided on the positive vs negative connotations that the concept of a lab might have when applied to the museum, but this became a recurring theme over the two days.

Day one, Nick introduces the workshop.

The second day began with two presentations that addressed the question of what kind of research collections empower.  Two strongly contrasting case studies were put forward.  One a small exhibition in the MAA’s micro gallery, the other a $1million, decade long project at UCLA, involving loans from more than 40 institutions and private collections worldwide.  While few of us will ever have the luxury of the kind of budget and time available for the UCLA project, both projects clearly demonstrated the potential for museum collections make unexpected connections and as a natural home for cross-disciplinary working.

The exhibition as a site for knowledge creation, a place for research to be undertaken as much as communicated, resurfaced in the second session.  The two case studies – the development of the anthropology galleries in the new Moesgaard Museum in Aarhus and the plans to develop Kelvin Hall in Glasgow to create storage, teaching and research spaces for the Hunterian Museum collections – both demonstrated very clearly just how ambitious university museums can be.  They also highlighted the importance of having a distinct offer that will attract funders and visitors as well as the need for risk-taking and experimentation – the museum as laboratory again.

The final session of the day focused on connections and collaborations emphasising the positives and negatives of the climate in which university museums in the UK exist, particularly with regard to funding.  Limited core funding has pushed many of us into a constant cycle of applying for project funding.  This leaves us with many masters to please, all with widely varying demands, and little chance of pleasing them all.

The whole workshop was very thought provoking and I do hope that plans for a larger conference go ahead.  I would certainly attend.  We are all struggling with the same questions of how to most effectively realise the research potential of our collections and how we contribute something distinctive to our universities.  Sharing thoughts and experiences with colleagues in university museums of widely varying size, type and location provides a wonderful opportunity to be inspired to take a risk and experiment. Museum as laboratory?

Rachel Barclay, Oriental Museum, Durham University.