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