13

After recognition: Decolonial re-affect outside/within the museum

Brigitta Isabella

Introduction

The more ubiquitous the word ‘decolonisation’ becomes, the more it triggers disquiet and suspicion. When established institutions such as schools, universities and museums adopt the word ‘decolonisation’, we must ask what motivations and political logic underlie these decisions. Institutional decolonisation is generally presented by way of official apologies to acknowledge dark histories or inclusion programs for subjects who are recognised as victims of the past. Here, performances of the politics of recognition have a central role in symbolically producing historical breaks. This politics has a problematic linear temporal logic because it assumes that the history of colonialism can be separated from structures of coloniality that still dominate our lives today (see Chapter 1 of this volume). As a result, many activists and researchers believe that we must be wary of the foundational assumptions of a model of institutional decolonisation that invites us to recognise past problems only to soon forget them to move into the future.

Ethnographic museums, which until now have functioned as a bourgeois public sphere to promote the epistemology underlying nationalism and European imperialism, have become a most productive site to contest the basis of the politics of recognition. In the past two decades, museologists, inspired by postcolonial critiques and decolonial activism, have developed repertoires of recognition practices to include ‘source communities’,¹ engage in dialogues on processes of historical reconciliation and position the museum as a site for the redemption of history.² Museologist Mary Stevens even imagines that ethnographic museums can be ‘authorities of recognition’, which will contribute to the settlement of colonial debts.³ Ethnographic museums have attempted to redefine themselves, supported by theories associated with ‘the reflective turn’ in the discipline of anthropology. In critical museum studies that developed in academia since the 1980s, ethnographic museums have been theorised as ‘contact zones’⁴ and democratic sites for contesting the ownership of cultural heritage. Parallel developments have taken place in modern art museums with the emergence of discourses about the simultaneity and coevalness of history, which have dismantled barriers and temporal hierarchies between the art categories ‘primitive’, ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’.⁵ Both the tearing down of this temporal hierarchy and the reflective turn in scholarship have opened new doors and encouraged encounters between critical ethnographic discourses and contemporary art. One such encounter is the phenomenon of contemporary artists from formerly colonised nations being invited to create interventions in the colonial order of ethnographic museums. For instance, Walter Mignolo has convincingly argued for the ‘decolonial option’ in his analysis of works by the Black artist Fred Wilson in the exhibition ‘Mining the Museum’ (1992), which used museum collections from the Maryland Historical Society to challenge widely held beliefs about history and race politics in the United States of America.⁶

Nevertheless, the presence of this increasingly trendy ethical practice raises valid concerns from practitioners who are positioned as subjects to be included and recognised by museum authorities. ‘Will I become a “native informant”? A shaman to exorcise feelings of guilt carried by the ethnographic museum? Will I become a neoliberal art cheerleader to add value to the museum’s brand?’ asked contemporary artist Rajkamal Kahlon, who held a residency at Weltmuseum Wien (World Museum Vienna) in 2016.⁷ ‘The museum will not be decolonised’, declared curator Sumaya Kassim, who rejects instant reconciliation programs that merely provide space for practitioners of colour, non-Western practitioners and those from formerly colonised countries to participate in the colonial structures of museums.⁸ Having had similar experiences and been in a critical position similar to Kahlon and Kassim, I find this concern is not one of nihilistic pessimism but, rather, offers a healthy scepticism and radical hope that demand structural change. Recognition should not necessarily be assumed to automatically erase power imbalances in present-day colonial relations. On the contrary, recognition can even be a colonial tool to reproduce power imbalances, especially when it is created with terms and conditions that merely reconcile the guilt and complicity of the coloniser in contemporary colonial structures.

Departing from critiques of the politics of recognition,⁹ the first and second parts of this chapter argue that recognition alone is not sufficient to transform colonial relations in museums. So, what can be offered after recognition? I offer re-affect: a relational practice based on a nonlinear temporal logic that mediates decolonial subjects’ claims to self-recognition to create new narratives, contacts and relationships outside and within museums. This proposition departs from the observation that artists occupy a unique position as guests of ethnographic museums, because they reflect on their complex position outside/within the museum that subverts the one-way processes of a politics of recognition.¹⁰

To demonstrate the artistic side of re-affect work, I will examine case studies of two art and research collectives from Yogyakarta, Indonesia, Kunci and Lifepatch, who accepted invitations to ‘decolonise’ ethnographic museums in Europe in 2017. Kunci, a collective of which I am a member, held a residency at the Tropenmuseum (Museum of the Tropics) in Amsterdam and created an audio guide titled Outside Within Colonial Theater to redistribute counter-positions and create new affective routes for the museum’s permanent collection. Lifepatch, in their solo exhibition ‘The Tiger and the Lion’ at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp, within the performance framework of Europalia Indonesia in Belgium, attempted to build a contact zone by interweaving colonial artefacts and oral stories about the Batak War in Belgium, the Netherlands and Tanah Batak (the land of the Batak peoples) in North Sumatra. By examining these two artistic research projects, I will offer some thoughts about re-affect work as a process outside and within the museum that dismantles colonial binarism in the politics of recognition and seeks to facilitate decolonial aspirations for social justice activism that goes beyond the walls of the museum.

Theorising recognition

For Hegel there is reciprocity [in the master–slave dialectic]; here the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work.¹¹

—Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

The roots of theories of recognition can be traced to the thinking of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who developed the idea of a ‘struggle for recognition’ in Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). To answer the philosophical question of human consciousness, Hegel argues that recognition constitutes a central requirement for the formation of subjectivity and, further, that this process is inherently intersubjective. His most famous premise is ‘self-consciousness exists in itself and for itself, in that and by the fact that it exists for another self-consciousness; that is to say, it is only by being acknowledged or recognised’.¹² In contrast with previous classical liberal thought, Hegel’s theory considers self-consciousness as something born not from the introspection of individual moral consciousness but instead through its mediation with the consciousness of other people.

Hegel’s theory grew into a normative political theory and an institutional practice among twentieth-century human rights movements, which claimed differences based on ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexuality or gender minority status, with the fundamental assumption that recognition and institutional accommodation on the basis of difference would have implications for the improvement of social justice.¹³ State institutions were expected to become the mediators of intersubjective relationships and guarantee the liberties of all parties so that mutual recognition could form. This paradigm was also central to postcolonial activism that construed history as the site of political contestation, with demands for recognition as the starting point for processes of historical reconciliation.

At the same time as this approach’s popularity, multiple critiques emerged and presented a serious challenge to the motivation and orientation of the politics of recognition. Decolonial perspectives that successfully show the limitations of a Hegelian politics of recognition commonly cite the thinking of anticolonial activist Frantz Fanon, who developed his critique in Black Skin, White Masks (1952). If neo-Hegelian thinkers assume that misrecognition is always a problem and recognition is always a solution, Fanon argues that in the context of colonial relations recognition in fact can have a negative effect on the colonised subject. For Fanon, normative Hegelian recognition can never become a source of freedom and self-worth for the colonised. Conversely, recognition reproduces the domination of the coloniser over the colonised and creates dependency as, ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’.¹⁴ Fanon situates race relations within Hegel’s master–slave dialectic; however, in contrast to Hegel, for Fanon, the self-consciousness of the White master needs to recognise the Black slave so that he can acquire his moral status as a good human being.

Thinking through Fanon’s critique, recognition from the White master causes the Black slave to be in a position that must always undertake emotional work, by thanking the master and even latently making his self-consciousness dependent on the kindness of the master. This dependency creates relations of colonial recognition wherein the moral position of the White master is superior and the Black slave is subordinate because the slave is in danger of being trapped in an inferior mentality.¹⁵ These are the colonial relations that mean that ‘the master laughs at the consciousness of the slave’.¹⁶

Fanon’s critique is evidently very valuable for contemporary decolonial thinkers, especially in an era in which we witness the politics of recognition as a common response of state institutions to the demands of decolonial activists. Elizabeth Povinelli argues that recognition from the state has the potential to depoliticise the critical consciousness of the colonial subject because it is always conditional, with the goal of assimilating the colonial subject into the dominant culture of the coloniser instead of fundamentally changing colonial relations.¹⁷ Glen Coulthard elaborates on Fanon’s critique as the radical conclusion to fully reject a politics of recognition. For Coulthard, contemporary recognition in the form of affirmative politics and institutional accommodation of the Other is ‘the field of power through which colonial relations are produced and maintained’.¹⁸ Consequently, even if demands for recognition are met by dominant institutions, this will only bring about symbolic change that accrues the moral capital of those who provide the recognition, instead of structurally changing relations of power.

After recognition in the museum

In the context of postcolonial relations, European and American ethnographic museums that are haunted by their colonial legacies occupy a central position in the articulation of demands as well as the recognition of histories of colonial subjugation and plunder. For the museologist Mary Stevens, ethnographic museums today have a share in ‘the authority of recognition’ because they have legitimacy as a state apparatus as well as a public sphere to mediate multiple interpretations of history. Stevens’ perspective coheres with an institutional politics of recognition supported by neo-Hegelian thinkers, in so far as she suggests that museums as state institutions have a central role in guaranteeing Hegel’s ideal of reciprocal recognition. Based on the model of recognition of the Holocaust theorised by anthropologist Stephan Feuchtwang, Stevens contends that the experiences of victims who undergo suffering and immense loss because of past colonial violence can be framed as a debt and, by the same token, the recognition of museums is a form of atonement for colonial sins.¹⁹

For Feuchtwang, recognition is a cycle whereby an increasing amount of recognition is given by institutions and is accompanied by an increasing number of interventions and counterclaims from different groups as well as internal rivals within groups. Here Stevens’ opinion deviates from Feuchtwang’s, as she is concerned that this cycle negates the possibility of resolution and closure.²⁰ Notwithstanding this, I think Stevens’ hope for the resolution of historical mass violence within the museum fails to recognise the interwovenness of claims to recognition with the redistribution of power, access and resources within and outside the museum. Framing recognition as a debt implies a transactional process that can be concluded with a payment or settlement. The payment of such a debt, if read through a Fanonian critique, can only accumulate the symbolic capital of the museum as a moral authority and repeats the same old story, reproducing the museum’s position as a paternal figure with a progressive and inclusive face.

In fairness to Stevens, she does not assume that recognition constitutes a method to create instant resolution because, as she states, a museum ‘needs to consider recognition as a multi-stage process, not a singular event’.²¹ However, instead of considering recognition as a cycle (Feuchtwang) or a script for resolution (Stevens), I suggest we can turn to Fanon’s concept of self-recognition as a way out of the unequal binarism in institutional recognition. Indeed, in his critique of a Hegelian model of recognition, Fanon does not abandon the paradigm of recognition entirely. In accordance with Coulthard’s reading of Fanon, he advocated for colonised subjects to direct attention to practices of personal and collective self-recognition to free themselves from the coloniser’s misrecognition of themselves. For Fanon, instead of demanding recognition from the coloniser and tying self-worth to institutional acceptance, the colonised achieve freedom by affirming themselves and recognising fellow colonised people to strengthen one another.²²

Self-recognition contains what Fanon termed ‘psycho-affective elements’ in colonial relations. In the context of museums, many studies have shown that our understanding of colonial heritage is always mediated by affective articulation, such as feelings of suffering, loss, pride, shame, anger and nostalgia.²³ Affect is an important source of knowledge because coloniality regulates not only what we think (the cognitive sphere) but also what we feel (the affective sphere). More than that, affect also contains within it the most intimate resistance of subjectivity and personal and collective agency, or what Ferdiansyah Thajib has called the ‘affective dynamics of agency’.²⁴ In other words, affect is a site of simultaneous control and resistance. Affective agency here is not taken to mean an individual mental consciousness, but rather such agency is relational between two or more individuals and is closely related to the material conditions that encompass it. This relational aspect is important in practices of self-recognition because, as stated by antiracist feminist theorist bell hooks, a project of self-recognition means ceasing to find ‘recognition in the Other’ and choosing to recognise ‘ourselves and make contact with all who would engage us in a constructive manner’.²⁵

In my discussion of the two case studies of Kunci and Lifepatch, I will argue that artistic practices, as they may be adept at articulating feelings, sentiments and embodied experiences, are strategies of personal and collective self-recognition that can be used to forge new relationships, both between museums and communities and between different communities which are regarded as constituents of the museum. I call this process of creating new contacts and relationships wrapped in affective dynamics ‘re-affect’—a term of which I propose to provoke a notion after recognition. Affect is also about love and solidarity and is an ethical practice that, while it might sound clichéd, is nevertheless central to our efforts to rebuild social relations and emotional ties that were destroyed by colonialism. I use the prefix ‘re-’ in ‘re-affect’ to emphasise the relational nature of affect as ongoing work and an alternative to a binary frame of recognition. Moreover, in the context of affective relations and colonial heritage, ‘re-’ does not suggest moving back to the past but rather a temporal-political relationship that looks to the past and connects it to present political aims. In the next section, I will explain how re-affect work is carried out in the artistic practices of artists in museums and how this work interacts with key practices that are critical for a politics of recognition: redistribution (Nancy Fraser) and resurgence (Coulthard).

Outside within the colonial theatre: Re-affect and redistribution after recognition

Follow my voice … I will take you through some detours, my reveries. I will introduce you to some of my friends here: other mannequins, the paintings, the writings. We are all brought here to give life to a theater of colonialism, a play staged in a museum structure which was built to enclose the institution’s property claim on a territory far far away, a land which is now called Indonesia. Who owns the stories of Indonesia? Who owns its history? Who owns the knowledge on Indonesia?

The above quote is enunciated by the mannequin Sulastri, the central character and intellectual avatar in the audio guide Outside Within the Colonial Theater produced by Kunci.²⁶ The ‘detours’ and ‘reveries’ of Sulastri navigate the listener on an alternative interpretation of and journey through the permanent collection ‘Netherlands East Indies: A Colonial History’ (hereinafter NEI) at the Tropenmuseum, which has now closed. Unlike the official Tropenmuseum guide that must be listened to through a museum device, Kunci’s audio guide can be accessed on our website or a visitor’s smartphone. Kunci’s physical presence at the Tropenmuseum was temporary and we mitigated this by making our intervention permanent without relying on the museum. Moreover, Kunci’s audio guide can be listened to without one being present at or ever having directly viewed the Tropenmuseum exhibition.²⁷ Kunci’s interest in audio practices during the residency started as our method of research to interview various activists and academics about alternative archival practices in the Netherlands, including political exile Sarmadji, anthropologist Chiara De Cesari and archivist Michael Karabinos (who also writes in this volume, see Chapter 10).²⁸

We open an opportunity for visitors, by adopting an embodied and affective approach through listening to an audio guide, to take part in and form a relationship with museum objects. The theatrical position we offer is always a political one. The Kunci audio guide spoken through the mannequin Sulastri does not eschew her subjectivity and recognises political positions that were excluded or sidelined in the NEI exhibition. The mannequin Sulastri was located on the second floor of the museum, in the middle of an exhibition zone that presented fragments of the history of education systems and the Ethical Policy in the Netherlands East Indies. It is a wax statue of a brown-skinned woman with her hair in a neat bun, wearing a white kebaya (long-sleeved blouse) with a small floral pattern and a batik material that appears a little shabby. The name Sulastri denotes the character of a ‘wild school’ (nationalist independent school) teacher in the semi-autobiographical novel Out of Bounds (Manusia Bebas or Buiten het Gareel, 1946) written by Soewarsih Djojopoespito (1912–77). The figure of Sulastri drew Kunci’s attention because of our long-held interest in alternative education.²⁹

Sulastri is a new role that museum curators assigned to this mannequin on the opening of the permanent exhibition in 2003. Before this, she was an unnamed wax statue that had played many roles in the colonial theatre through the years: as a tobacco worker displayed at the World Exhibition in Paris in 1931, a warung (‘kiosk’) seller in an exhibition on food and hygiene in Amsterdam in 1933 and, finally, in the Tropenmuseum as a jamu (‘herbal medicine’) seller and batik maker.³⁰ In the 1970s, wax statues like the mannequin Sulastri were considered outdated and embarrassing for critical Dutch curators. Most of these statues were thrown away as they were regarded as no longer fitting with the Tropenmuseum’s postcolonial renewal concept, although some were kept in a storage facility and eventually exhibited in the NEI exhibition.³¹

The multiple identities assigned to and changes in the material status of Sulastri’s mannequin make it a colonial ethnographic object that has stored the history of Dutch knowledge of colonialism or, to be precise, a history of misrecognition through the colonial gaze that classifies colonial subjects into ethnic types and works within the hierarchy of colonial society. Here, the colonial museum is a site of misrecognition that performs epistemic violence by denying the individual and collective agency and knowledge of colonial subjects. In a wave of decolonial demands, museums have moved in droves to revise this history of misrecognition by presenting narratives of anticolonial thought and resistance that are excluded from the hegemonic colonial gaze. Curators of the NEI exhibition, Susan Legêne and Janneke van Dijk, interestingly chose to practice self-recognition of the colonial gaze that shaped the objects and information in the Tropenmuseum’s collection, trying to self-criticise the institutional practices of the museum. They articulated this institutional self-recognition by presenting nine new mannequins representing archetypes of colonial identities and the collector community that shaped the museum’s collection and titled this part of the exhibition ‘The Colonial Theater’.

‘The Colonial Theater’ attempts to shift attention from objects of colonial collections to subjects of colonial collectors. The characters showcased are a Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger (KNIL, Royal Netherlands East Indies Army) soldier, the wife of a missionary, a governor, a housewife, an artist, a plantation owner, an explorer, a civil servant and an academic. Some of these mannequin characters were based on those in colonial novels. For instance, Himpies, the KNIL soldier, is from the novel The Ten Thousand Things (De Tienduizend Dingen, 1955), written by Marie Dermoût and Tuan Anwar, and the civil servant is from the novel The Advisor (De Raadsman, 1958) by H.J. Friedericy. Others were based on real people, such as the blind scientist Georgius Everhardus Rumphius (1627–1702) and former Dutch East Indies governor-general Bonifacius Cornelis de Jonge (1875–1958). The curators stated that their conceptual decision was intended to centre ‘an interpretation of the colonizers’ perspective on colonial society during the era of the Ethical Policy’. Colonial voices were intentionally privileged precisely to ‘weaken the authority of the institution [Tropenmuseum] by making it vulnerable for critique and offer possibilities for counter narratives and a dialogue on history’.³² The voices of nationalist groups and Indonesian independence fighters appeared in the exhibition, but the curators stated that they intentionally treated them only as an insertion within it.³³ This decision is reflected in how the mannequin Sulastri was treated as a minor character and not physically refurbished. In contrast, the nine new mannequins feature highly detailed skin texture and eyes, while some parts of their limbs are made from transparent fibreglass materials that disrupt the mimetic effect of realist sculpture. The hyperrealist impression that was deliberately given to the new mannequins made their appearance contrast with the stiff and caricatured nature of the colonial heritage mannequins like Sulastri.

It is because of this curatorial choice that, unlike Sulastri’s voiceless mannequin, each new mannequin has a fragment of a personal story and an individual voice that museum visitors can listen to through headphones. In the NEI exhibition, body and voice are metaphors as well as important material elements for rereading the museum’s colonial history. Through their material embodiment, the new mannequins have more opportunities to express their human agency and individual voice as ambivalent figures entangled in colonial structures. Here, affect plays a role as an important pedagogical element because the platform of the new mannequins’ bodies and voices has been presented to invite visitors to listen to the feelings and sentiments of the figures represented.

Kunci ‘brought to life’ Sulastri’s voice and body to decentre the perspectives and affect privileged by the curators. Kunci arrived 14 years after the NEI exhibition opened and our involvement was facilitated by Heterotropics, an independent platform based in Amsterdam founded by curator Sara Giannini.³⁴ Giannini submitted Kunci’s residency proposal to the research wing of the Tropenmuseum, the Research Centre for Material Culture, which at the time was led by Wayne Modest. The presentation of new mannequins was a courageous choice with the potential to break a cycle of colonial recognition through self-recognition of the colonial gaze in the history of the Tropenmuseum as an institution. However, self-recognition always risks becoming a practice of domination when it is centred on only one perspective and does not weave contacts and connectedness with other articulations of self-recognition outside oneself or one’s group. In the exhibition’s material structure, the curators did not offer a permanent platform for subjects excluded by the centrality of the colonial gaze to speak back and articulate moments of self-recognition. Despite the good intentions of the curators to weaken the authority of the colonial gaze through the NEI exhibition project, during its 14 years on show, it materially failed to provide the promised space for criticism and ongoing dialogue. This shortcoming was caused by the narrative and concept of the exhibition that were too dependent on the curators’ authority, instead of making the exhibition a growing, open platform to invite the participation of the museum public.

Kunci borrowed the anticolonial body of the Sulastri mannequin as a semifictitious actor to practise self-recognition and express a voice of disobedience to talk back to the theatre of coloniality. Sulastri recognises herself as a subject who is perceived by, and perceives, others, who is spoken of as well as speaking back to the exhibition that has construed her as having a part in the colonial theatre. The audio guide Outside Within the Colonial Theater can be interpreted as an intervention that proposes the de-identification of the supremacy of a white gaze and decentring the museum’s single voice. Kunci’s re-affect work attempts to create a new position through which a relationship with the museum can be forged and enable a plurality of role choices and affective routes within the theatricality of a journey through the museum. More than that, in Kunci’s audio guide, the impacts of re-affect work are projected not only to the outside but also within us, as a process of self-reflection—a position ‘outside within’ that Kunci adopted when working with the museum.

Kunci’s Sulastri mannequin looks within and speaks from within Kunci’s subjective layers to decentre the colonial perspective that was curatorially privileged by the NEI exhibition. However, it is important to note that Sulastri’s voice does not present a stable and intact narrative that is all-knowing and free of bias. As Fanon reminds us, self-recognition to affirm an anticolonial subjectivity is important but always risks being trapped in essentialism and elite nationalism. The identity of the colonised is plural and fragmented, so ‘it is impossible for them to claim a single unity’.³⁵

Recognition of the limitations of Sulastri’s voice and critical gaze emerged at the end of the voice-guided tour, at the point where an exhibition depicts the history of missionaries in Papua and Papua New Guinea. Between the juxtaposition of the Bible and the missionary’s white robes with totems and traditional Papuan clothing, Sulastri’s mannequin ponders distance—an abyss—and finally runs out of words:

The distance between Java and Papua is not as far as between Java and the Netherlands. Yet, the distance between me, as someone who was born and lives in Java, feels so far away. I feel so separated from Papua. The history and culture of Papua seems to be much more foreign to me compared to Dutch history and culture … The Javanese become new missionaries who bring enlightenment to the darkness on Papuan land. I feel like I’m starting to lose my voice here. I feel like I have to stop my ranting now before I speak as if I know anything about Papuan people.

Instead of talking for a Papuan subject who until this day is still subaltern-ised by Indonesian-Javanese–centric colonialism (also see Suryawan’s Chapter 15 in this volume), Sulastri’s mannequin ends her journey by recognising her privileged position as a Javanese subject within the constellation of the postcolonial theatre. Like the NEI exhibition curators, Kunci also undertakes a process of self-recognition that privileges a certain perspective. However, unlike the voices of the new mannequins, the voice of Sulastri’s mannequin explicitly invites the listener to step outside the colonial theatre and advocates for the redistribution of discursive space for subjects other than herself within the structures of the attention economy in the museum. This is because self-recognition risks becoming neoliberal identity politics if it is proclaimed solely for the sake of an individual identity’s status, which will eventually compete for the status of victim, instead of claiming collective agency to fight for shared rights through demands for the redistribution of access and resources. As Nancy Fraser reminds us, not all claims of self-recognition are automatically progressive. As a result, to justify a claim of self-recognition, one must be able to show how the desired change will redistribute and work towards participatory parity.³⁶ If the physical space of the museum is confined within the concrete and walls that surround it, Kunci claims that the aural space of the museum is infinite in which one can intervene to encourage more participation.

It is in this space that self-recognition as an ethical position enacts not only the courage to speak but also the humility to be quiet and listen. The audio guide wants us to share such experiences of listening. The practice of ‘decolonial listening’ that we propose is not a passive act but rather an actualisation of the redistribution of discursive space, because it is precisely by letting go of our right to speak that a privileged subject can contribute to efforts to undo colonial silencing and erasure. Active listening requires an intention to shift from the centrality of the author, admit bias, reposition oneself and establish relationships with subjects who have been silenced and excluded by modernity and coloniality. The re-affect work voiced by Sulastri is not satisfied in the comfort of self-recognition, but instead opens a niche of discomfort towards her own position and proposes work to redistribute discursive space within the structure of the museum’s economy of attention. Re-affect work within a museum puts into practice self-recognition that is oriented both internally and externally to move beyond the stable binary between the acts of recognising and of being recognised, as well as decentring the museum as an authority of recognition.

The tale of the tiger and the lion: Re-affect and resurgence after recognition

Must the truth be evidenced by the presentation of objects? Or can truth be equated to a lived belief without the need for physical proof? Which version is more reliable? Is the narrative constructed by the museum more believable than the stories told by people in North Sumatra?³⁷

This reflection on the relationship between objects, narration and institutional politics was put forth by Sita Magfira, a member of Lifepatch, after her collective came face to face with the history of the Batak War (1878–1907) and two contrasting models of preserving memories—in Antwerp, Belgium, and Tanah Toba, North Sumatra, Indonesia. Lifepatch’s exhibition, ‘The Tale of Tiger and Lion’, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (M HKA), focused on links between two important figures in the saga of the Batak War, Hans Christoffel (1865–1962) and Si Singamangaraja XII (1845–1907). In Antwerp, at the Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Lifepatch found hundreds of collections of objects from Tanah Toba, such as war banners, weapons, jewellery and heirlooms donated to the museum by Christoffel, a Swiss-born military captain of the Colonnie Matjan (Tiger Brigade) that was decisive in the Dutch victory in the Batak War. Soon after military operations ceased, Christoffel moved to Antwerp and married the daughter of governor Jan van Rijswijk, Adolphine, who was known as a pacifist. His marriage to Adolphine changed Christoffel’s view of war. Adolphine is credited with donating Christoffel’s collection of items to the MAS.³⁸ These findings prompted Lifepatch to travel to Tanah Batak in North Sumatra—itself a ‘living museum’, which is a term used by Lifepatch member Agung ‘Geger’ Firmanto—which also holds memories of the Batak War and Si Singamangaraja XII.

In Belgium, Christoffel is a minor historical figure whose name is quite foreign to the public. The current occupants of the villa where Christoffel and his wife once lived in the Kalmthout district only came to know of Christoffel when Lifepatch members visited. Indeed, Christoffel himself did not seem to want to remember his past as a military officer. Archival research conducted by Lifepatch highlights a journalist’s interview with Christoffel for the newspaper De Telegraaf in 1940. In it, the captain of the Tiger Brigade said: ‘Thirty years ago, I dropped a curtain about everything that had happened. I shook off all my time in the jungle, started a new life, thought about the past as little as possible, searched for and found peace.’³⁹ Christoffel’s anxiety about his past suggests that the Batak archives and artefacts in Belgium can act not only as sources of historical knowledge ripe for information to be extracted, but also as affective subjects that contain mixed emotions with ever-changing meanings—from trophies of pride to monuments of guilt. The MAS building, which houses the collection of objects donated by Christoffel, can thus no longer be regarded as a gallery of the glory of colonialism but as a warehouse where historical objects that generate trauma and inconvenience are packed away and hidden. The museum is paradoxically a place of care and abandonment, a site of recognising and forgetting history. Christoffel’s gesture of donating objects from his past to ‘close the curtains’ on history is arguably an articulation of a politics of recognition partial to colonial bias, wherein its main function is to save Christoffel from guilt.

In the living museum of the Tanah Batak, Lifepatch attempted to reopen the curtains of history and was confronted with the reality of the enormous popularity of Si Singamangaraja XII, who was installed as a national hero of Indonesia in 1961. Although there are no photographic records depicting Si Singamangaraja XII, Indonesians alive in the 1980s recognised the drawing of his face from 1,000-rupiah banknotes. Lifepatch conducted fieldwork for a month using a trail method to follow the route of the guerillas led by Si Singamangaraja XII when they were chased by the Tiger Brigade around the Lake Toba area, in Bakkara, Balige, Parlilitan, Silindung and Pangururan. The collective walked, stopping when tired, chatted to people they met along the road and stayed in the houses of people they met. Their research was full of coincidences and unanticipated encounters. With the hospitality and enthusiasm of communities around Lake Toba who positively welcomed Lifepatch’s research, they collected memories preserved by older generations and traces of narratives in folktales and songs. This artistic research method was developed collectively by Lifepatch, which is framed as a ‘citizen initiative’. Since its foundation in 2012, Lifepatch has operated at the intersection of art, science and technology to democratise access to shared knowledge-production processes.

The absence of script-based archives in Tanah Batak is inversely proportional to the fact that the history of Si Singamangaraja’s resistance survives as a force in identity politics among Batak communities today. It could be suggested that Lifepatch’s artistic research is part of a methodological shift in understanding archives, from extractive to ethnographic work. In this shift, in coherence with Ann Stoler’s notion, an archive is a ‘messy space between reason and sentiment’ where critical historical reformulations can take place by destabilising a hierarchy of credibility between ratio and affect, which generally regards hard archives (documents, artefacts) as primary sources and soft archives (oral histories, traces of memories) merely as secondary data. The push to reformulate the way we construct historical narratives was similarly conveyed by ‘The Tale’ exhibition’s curator, Alia Swastika, who stated that Lifepatch’s artistic research method invites us to rethink the meaning of ‘collecting’ in the context of museums, which are typically obsessed with the acquisition of artefacts or archives. For Alia, Lifepatch’s journey to these sites stressed the practice of gathering, which produces a collection of stories from various sources and perspectives so that history becomes a space for the contestation of versions of truth that sometimes intersect and sometimes contradict.⁴⁰

For me, this practice of gathering is contingent on Lifepatch’s role as facilitators of a process of collective self-recognition and mediators of re-affect work. The art exhibitions presented by Lifepatch in the exhibition space were not just illustrations that extracted findings from their research, but also a tool to drive conversations connecting stories and activating the ‘messy space between reason and sentiment’ as a place where sources of decolonial political affect could come together. There is much that can be discussed in detail about each work in the exhibition ‘The Tale’. Due to the limited space in this chapter, I will focus only on three works that I think successfully demonstrate the complexity involved in practices of self-recognition and that set in motion decolonial re-affect work.

Figure 13.1 Replica of Gajah Dompak sword, 2017

Source: Lifepatch/Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp.

The first is a replica of the pedang (‘sword’) Gajah Dompak (Figure 13.1), which visitors see immediately as they enter the exhibition space. The Gajah Dompak sword belonged to Si Singamangaraja and has been passed down through the generations. Our understanding of its previous whereabouts is cloudy. The National Museum of Indonesia has a collection of Gajah Dompak swords whose authenticity has been questioned by several people Lifepatch met in Tanah Batak. These interlocutors stated that the swords in the National Museum are different from visual images that have been circulating in the community. The shape of the sword in the National Museum is more like a Japanese Samurai sword, while communities believe that the Gajah Dompak blade has two branches like elephant tusks, meaning that it cannot be used for killing and therefore symbolises peace rather than war.⁴¹ Ownership of historical artefacts does not guarantee the veracity of the authority of recognition. By presenting a replica of the Gajah Dompak sword produced from the visual speculation of Toba communities, Lifepatch alludes to the unclear whereabouts of the sword, and these questions about its authenticity strengthen a narrative of the supernatural powers of Si Singamangaraja. According to local stories, Si Singamangaraja always carried this sword and it can only be revealed to and used by his descendants. The existence of this story contradicts colonial military reports that Si Singamangaraja was killed by a bullet from one of the Tiger Brigade soldiers.

The narrative that Si Singamangaraja died from a bullet from a modern weapon is incongruous with the belief in Batak culture that he had supernatural powers of invulnerability (‘ilmu kebal’) due to the purity of his soul as a priest-king. Lifepatch heard this oral history account circulating in communities articulated in many versions and accents, all of which, it can be said, commonly apply moral and occult glosses to death, humanity and Si Singamangaraja’s anticolonial heroism. When one says that Si Singamangaraja was killed by a bullet fired by the corporal of the Tiger Brigade, there is no explanation that can adequately bridge the terror of the modern colonial weapons they wielded with the dignity of Si Singamangaraja’s anticolonial heroism and spiritual strength. The various accounts told and kept alive by communities as articulations of their self-recognition fill the void in the above explanation with the close relationship between fact and fiction and realism and surrealism in ‘the space of death’ to narrate colonial violence during the Batak War.

I borrow the term ‘the space of death’ from the conceptualisation of anthropologist Michael Taussig, who researches the relationship between capitalism, colonialism and shamanic practices in Colombia in Latin America. Death is a space for the growth of imagination and social metaphors in the verge between the tenacity to survive and the reality of colonial violence. Paradoxically, the space of death is a symbolic sphere in which to fight against death, which is so close to daily lives full of terror—from not only past colonial violence but also colonial violence that is ongoing today.⁴² In the context of reformulating archives, memories and history, we can add to this definition that the space of death is a place of political relationships between reason and sentiment, drawing on Stoler’s conceptualisation mentioned above. Therefore, instead of allowing a secular Enlightenment world view to deny the fantastical and mystical aspects of the oral narratives that circulate about the death of Si Singamangaraja, we must see the transformative power of reimagining and historical speculation about the figure of Si Singamangaraja as a political metaphor that speaks back to histories of colonialism and the coloniality of history. Holding onto and claiming collective self-recognition in the sphere of death are an effort to protect anticolonial consciousness for people who, within a script-centric historical method, are regarded as ‘a people without history’.⁴³

Historian of Southeast Asia Anthony Reid stated that those in the Batak highlands are ‘a people without history’, according to the premise that ‘history’ equates to professional academic research and there are very few written sources that ‘speak directly from the past that has been lost’, such as artefacts, inscriptions and the records of pre–nineteenth-century colonial travellers. While Reid thickens a construction of Batak historiography by detailing travel records and archaeological evidence that can be excavated, Lifepatch deepens the complexity of modes of historical storytelling by collecting personal and collective narratives of self-recognition from people they met during their journey. The space of death in the history of the Batak War is a space for the resurgence, or revival, of memories and narratives that have been marginalised by the structures of colonial history. The resurgence of cultural practices, languages, ways of thinking and collective memories is an articulation of the dynamism of tradition that is given life once more not as nostalgic gestures to the past, but as a presentation of the past as a source of political knowledge that can change the colonial relations that dominate life until the present.⁴⁴

Working in the historical space of death, artists are positioned as political mediators between colonial archives and oral history, between narratives of the lethal colonial terror of the past and the afterlife of anticolonialism today. These cultural resurgence efforts were pursued by Lifepatch through the postcard project (see Figure 13.2) ‘My Message to Tana Toba’, initiated by Geger. Lifepatch asked community members whom they met to write messages on postcards that were then displayed in the exhibition space. Through these dozens of short messages, we see the variety of community members’ agency for self-recognition that awakens their passion and embodied cultural knowledge as well as revokes an essentialist viewpoint of a narrow, singular political identity. Some of the messages demanded that artefacts in Belgium be returned to Batak communities, some wanted villages burned by the Dutch during the war to be rebuilt and others articulated a vision of the history of Si Singamangaraja as global heritage. Claims of identity and cultural ownership, whether mediated by national, regional or ethnic identities, always risk creating essentialist imaginations, so artists, as agents who facilitate collective processes of self-recognition, must provide a platform where a plurality of visions and aspirations can exist simultaneously notwithstanding the impossibility of it being whole.

Figure 13.2 One of the postcards from ‘My Message to Tana Toba’

Source: Lifepatch.

At the outset of their project, Lifepatch planned to produce a speculative proposal for the return to Tanah Batak of Batak cultural objects (pusaka) from the Christoffel collection. After the exhibition, the MAS curator even contacted Lifepatch to consult about this wish. There has so far been no meaningful follow-up and, in my conversations with Sita and Geger, both expressed Lifepatch’s doubts. First and foremost, as an artistic collective operating in Yogyakarta, they do not feel they have the right to represent ‘the Batak community’ to talk about an issue as complicated as repatriation. Indeed, the repatriation of colonial heritage is the most complex area of negotiation in recognition and ethnographic re-affect (see Boonstra’s Chapter 9 in this volume). This complexity is intensified if we acknowledge that the framework of international diplomatic relations has the potential to reduce the diversity of individual agency and entanglements of power in the community of those who are the main stakeholders in the repatriation process. In repatriation, processes of personal and collective self-recognition confront national identity politics and, as Fanon repeatedly warned, have the potential to be abused by the political elite. Of course, the aspirations of one or a handful of community members do not give them full rights to determine the political and contextual fate of a cultural heritage object. Whether we like it or not, a democratic solution must be forged through negotiations that are contingent and political. The political agency of artists as mediators of re-affect processes is important to centre and provide perspectives about which issues must be considered urgent. In the political arena of collective self-recognition, the agency of artists cannot be assumed to be neutral. Reflecting on the exhibition ‘The Tale’, Sita and Geger also realised that 90 per cent of the people who wrote messages in the postcard project were men. This gender disparity is easily identifiable, and we have not explored the internal hierarchies based on class or inherited status in the gathering of self-recognition narratives collated by Lifepatch.

I want to return here to connect re-affect work with practices of collective self-recognition and cultural resurgence. The performance piece ‘Tribute to Boru Lopian’ (Figure 13.3), initiated by Ferial Affif, demonstrates processes of resurgence that mediate affect in an embodied history. This work focuses on the story of Si Singamangaraja’s child Boru Lopian, who fought and was killed in the Batak War. This story is kept alive in songs, dances and children’s games performed by a group of teenagers from the village of Parlilitan, where Si Singamangaraja and several of his children died. Ferial recorded the Parlilitan youth performances and projected them in the M HKA exhibition space. She then invited four teenage white girls from Antwerp to follow the Parlilitan teenagers’ choreography as a gesture symbolising the transfer of embodied knowledge across cultural boundaries.

Figure 13.3 Performance piece ‘Tribute to Boru Lopian’, Museum HKA, Antwerp

Source: Lifepatch.

This cross-cultural knowledge transfer is important because a spectacular performance of a cultural practice implies a position ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, where the performer puts forth an insider identity they are playing and the audience becomes an outsider or a distant consumer. By provoking the synchronisation of movement between teenagers in Parlilitan and Antwerp, Lifepatch blurs inner and outer boundaries so that cultural performance practices can become a metaphor for regenerative engagements that dispel the terror of the Batak War to work towards processes of peace today. The performativity of this work invites us to consider the issue of repatriation not just as a transactional process of returning objects to those entitled to them in a one-way move and state-to-state framework. Transactional repatriation will only accumulate moral capital for colonial authorities who return the objects and accrue the capital of narrow identity politics for the postcolonial national authorities who accept them. Because of this, repatriation as re-affect work requires processes to reconnect and form new, more equal relationships. In so doing, the politics of re-affect work clearly does not come to an end in the field of artistic practice and museology, but also is something we work through together in spaces of social justice activism.

Conclusion: Decolonial re-affect outside and within the museum

Speaking analytically towards artists who are invited by museums as authorities of recognition, I suggest that the terms and conditions when accepting invitations for such work should be used not to seek recognition from institutions but as an opportunity to decentre the authority of the museum and practise personal and collective self-recognition. In a decentred framework, artists exist strategically outside the museum. Artists are not just subjects who receive recognition to enter the museum; they also problematise power relations in the politics of recognition and mediate decolonial demands from outside the museum so that recognition does not become merely an instant solution to save the moral position of an institution.

Artists play a role as agents of self-recognition to articulate, reflect and mediate relational matters such as conflicts, tensions and negotiations between a variety of positions outside and within the museum’s colonial heritage. Self-recognition is a relational process that dismantles the binary of the giver and receiver of recognition. Critical personal and collective self-recognition must be able to redistribute space for balanced participation, showcase a plurality of positions and agencies to safeguard us from cultural identity essentialism and undertake a process of self-critique of internal colonialism among groups in postcolonial societies. Self-recognition practices that are productive for decolonial activism will be directed not with a desire to create a mutual relationship with the coloniser, but with a desire to reawaken the dignity of cultural knowledge (resurgence), to be in solidarity with and mutually affirm the rights, experiences, feelings and aspirations of those who have been marginalised by present-day coloniality. Because of the centrality of psycho-affective elements in the process of relational self-recognition, the method offered by this chapter is re-affect work that values feelings, sentiments and embodied experiences.

Black feminist Audre Lorde long ago cautioned that recognition and institutional inclusion must be approached critically. She wrote that ‘an old and primary tool of all oppressors’ is a mental framework that ensures that the oppressed subject must always be preoccupied with the issues of concern and existential interests of the oppressor alone.⁴⁵ Will artists become like Marie Kondo, helping to reorganise and clean the excesses of colonial consumerism that no longer ‘spark joy’? That is not an impossible implication of re-affect work funded by museums, and it is our choice to not be absorbed by colonial anxiety that requires the atonement of guilt through the politics of recognition. However, it is also not impossible—and is something that must be fought for—that when artists receive an invitation to enter the museum, they break down the boundaries of property, redistribute museum resources and use them for the resurgence of anticolonial knowledge to be brought outside, to the field of social justice solidarity, which is far vaster than the European colonial fort.

References

Clifford, James. 1997. ‘Museums as Contact Zones.’ In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 188–219. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Coulthard, Glen Sean. 2014. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001.

Fabian, Johannes. 2014. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926.

Fanon, Frantz. 1986. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Charles Markman. London: Pluto Press.

Fraser, Nancy, and Axel Honneth. 2003. Redistribution or Recognition? A Political Philosophical Exchange. New York: Verso.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

hooks, bell. 1990. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press.

Kahlon, Rajkamal. 2019. ‘Love and Loss in the Ethnographic Museum.’ In Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, edited by Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlić, and Claudia Augustat, 101–10. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Kassim, Sumaya. 2017. ‘The Museum Will Not be Decolonised.’ Media Diversified, 15 November. www.mediadiversified.org/2017/11/15/the-museum-will-not-be-decolonised/.

Kunci Study Forum & Collective. 2020. Letters: The Classroom is Burning, Let’s Dream about a School of Improper Education. New York: Ugly Duckling Presse.

Legêne, Susan, and Janneke van Dijk. 2006. ‘Introduction: The Netherlands East Indies, A Colonial History.’ In The Netherlands East Indies at Tropenmuseum, edited by Susan Legêne and Janneke van Dijk. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers.

Lorde, Audre. 1981. ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.’ In This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua, 100–3. Watertown: Persephone Press.

Magfira, Sita. 2017. ‘Si Singamangaraja, Christoffel, dan Hal-Hal yang Terserak [Si Singamangaraja, Christoffel, and Scattered Things].’ In Pameran Seni Kontemporer Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia [Europalia Arts Festival Indonesian Contemporary Art Exhibition], edited by Alia Swastika and Irham Nur Ansari. Jakarta: Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan [Ministry of Education and Culture].

Mignolo, Walter. 2011. ‘Museums in the Colonial Horizons of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum.’ In Globalization and Contemporary Art, edited by Jonathan Harris, 71–85. Malden: Blackwell Publishing.

Modest, Wayne. 2019. ‘Introduction: Ethnographic Museums and the Double Bind.’ In Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, edited by Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlić, and Claudia Augustat, 9–21. Leiden: Sidestone Press.

Peers, Laura, and Alison Brown, eds. 2003. Museum and Source Communities. London: Routledge.

Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2002. The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism. Durham: Duke University Press. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv116895z.

Reid, Anthony. 2010. Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia. New York: Cambridge University Press. doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511691829.

Stevens, Mary. 2007. ‘Museums, Minorities and Recognition: Memories of North Africa in Contemporary France.’ Museum and Society 5, no. 1: 29–43.

Swastika, Alia. 2017. ‘The Tale of Tiger and Lion: Lifepatch at M HKA.’ In Pameran Seni Kontemporer Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia [Europalia Arts Festival Indonesian Contemporary Art Exhibition], edited by Alia Swastika and Irham Nur Ansari. Jakarta: Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan [Ministry of Education and Culture].

Syafiatudina. 2017. ‘Something About Nusantara, the Listening, and the Project of Decolonization.’ No Man’s Land, 28 December. www.heath.tw/nml-article/something-about-nusantara-the-listening-and-the-project-of-decolonization/?lang=en.

Taussig, Michael. 1987. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226790114.001.0001.

Thajib, Ferdiansyah. 2019. ‘Inhabiting Difference: The Affective Lives of Indonesian Muslim Queers.’ PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.

Tolia-Kelly, Divya P., Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, eds. 2016. Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures. London: Routledge. doi.org/10.4324/9781315586656.

Westerkamp, Willem. 2015. ‘Ethnicity or Culture: The Career of Mannequins in (Post)Colonial Displays.’ In Sites, Bodies and Stories: Imagining Indonesian History, edited by Susan Legêne, Bambang Purwanto, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, 89–112. Singapore: NUS Press. doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nth6b.9.

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1. 1 Laura Peers and Alison Brown, eds, Museum and Source Communities (London: Routledge, 2003).

2. 2 Wayne Modest, ‘Introduction: Ethnographic Museums and the Double Bind’, in Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, eds Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlić, and Claudia Augustat (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019), 9–21, at 14.

3. 3 Mary Stevens, ‘Museums, Minorities and Recognition: Memories of North Africa in Contemporary France’, Museum and Society 5, no. 1 (2007): 29–43.

4. 4 James Clifford, ‘Museums as Contact Zones’, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997), 188–219.

5. 5 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), doi.org/10.7312/fabi16926.

6. 6 Walter Mignolo, ‘Museums in the Colonial Horizons of Modernity: Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum’, in Globalization and Contemporary Art, ed. Jonathan Harris (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2011), 71–85.

7. 7 Rajkamal Kahlon, ‘Love and Loss in the Ethnographic Museum’, in Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe, eds Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlić, and Claudia Augustat (Leiden: Sidestone Press, 2019), 101–10, at 104.

8. 8 Sumaya Kassim, ‘The Museum Will Not be Decolonised’, Media Diversified, 15 November 2017, mediadiversified.org/2017/11/15/the-museum-will-not-be-decolonised/.

9. 9 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Markman (London: Pluto Press, 1986); Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv116895z; Nancy Fraser and Axel Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition? A Political Philosophical Exchange (New York: Verso, 2003); Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816679645.001.0001.

10. 10 The term ‘outside/within’ is not mine, but rather was collectively coined by Kunci members as we titled the audio guide Outside Within Colonial Theater. Ideas presented in this chapter are also indebted to the collective learning and reflexive conversations shared among Kunci members.

11. 11 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 172.

12. 12 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 178.

13. 13 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 8.

14. 14 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 82–83.

15. 15 ibid., 171–72.

16. 16 ibid., 171–72.

17. 17 Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition.

18. 18 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 17.

19. 19 Stevens, ‘Museums, Minorities and Recognition’, 32.

20. 20 ibid., 38.

21. 21 ibid., 37.

22. 22 Fanon via Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 43.

23. 23 Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson, eds, Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures (London: Routledge, 2016), doi.org/10.4324/9781315586656, 1–11.

24. 24 Ferdiansyah Thajib, ‘Inhabiting Difference: The Affective Lives of Indonesian Muslim Queers’ (PhD diss., Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, 2019), 22.

25. 25 bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 22.

26. 26 The dual-language audio guide (English and Indonesian) can be accessed online at: radio.kunci.or.id/di-luar-dalam-teater-kolonial-sebuah-audio-guide/.

27. 27 In her residency in Taiwan in December 2017, Kunci member Syafiatudina (Dina) introduced the audio guide Outside Within the Colonial Theater, which was then later partly translated into Mandarin. During this residency, Dina also produced an audio guide for a public space in Taipei. For Dina’s reflections on listening and decolonial practices, see Syafiatudina, ‘Something About Nusantara, the Listening, and the Project of Decolonization’, No Man’s Land, 28 December 2017, www.heath.tw/nml-article/something-about-nusantara-the-listening-and-the-project-of-decolonization/?lang=en.

28. 28 We published this interview as a podcast and Kunci members Fiky Daulay and Nuraini Juliastuti had a central role in its production and conceptualisation. Access the podcast online at: radio.kunci.or.id.

29. 29 Since 2016, Kunci has developed the Sekolah Salah Didik (School of Improper Education) to experiment with collective learning methods, online at: sekolah.kunci.or.id. See also the collective’s writings in Kunci Study Forum & Collective, Letters: The Classroom is Burning, Let’s Dream about a School of Improper Education (New York: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020).

30. 30 Willem Westerkamp, ‘Ethnicity or Culture: The Career of Mannequins in (Post)Colonial Displays’, in Sites, Bodies and Stories: Imagining Indonesian History, eds Susan Legêne, Bambang Purwanto, and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Singapore: NUS Press, 2015), 89–112, doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1nth6b.9, at 105.

31. 31 Susan Legêne and Janneke van Dijk, ‘Introduction: The Netherlands East Indies, A Colonial History’, in The Netherlands East Indies at Tropenmuseum, eds Susan Legêne and Janneke van Dijk (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2006), 20.

32. 32 ibid., 24–25.

33. 33 ibid., 24–25.

34. 34 See: heterotropics.com/.

35. 35 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 133.

36. 36 Fraser and Honneth, Redistribution or Recognition?, 38.

37. 37 Sita Magfira, ‘Si Singamangaraja, Christoffel, dan Hal-Hal yang Terserak [Si Singamangaraja, Christoffel, and Scattered Things]’, in Pameran Seni Kontemporer Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia [Europalia Arts Festival Indonesian Contemporary Art Exhibition], eds Alia Swastika and Irham Nur Ansari (Jakarta: Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan [Ministry of Education and Culture], 2017), 83.

38. 38 All information about Christoffel is drawn from Lifepatch’s research, which is accessible on their website: lifepatch.id/Air_Antwerpen_Residency_Program_2017.

39. 39 This quote was highlighted by Lifepatch in their video installation ‘Lucid Memories’, which was shown as part of the exhibition. See: www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmOtpMKp0Y0.

40. 40 Alia Swastika, ‘The Tale of Tiger and Lion: Lifepatch at M HKA’, in Pameran Seni Kontemporer Europalia Arts Festival Indonesia [Europalia Arts Festival Indonesian Contemporary Art Exhibition], eds Alia Swastika and Irham Nur Ansari (Jakarta: Kementerian Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan [Ministry of Education and Culture], 2017), 77.

41. 41 Magfira, ‘Si Singamangaraja, Christoffel, and Scattered Things’, 86.

42. 42 Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226790114.001.0001, 5–7.

43. 43 Anthony Reid, Imperial Alchemy: Nationalism and Political Identity in Southeast Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511691829, 146.

44. 44 Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks, 157–58.

45. 45 Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House’, in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (Watertown: Persephone Press, 1981), 100–3, at 100.