11 December 2018
This presentation examines photographs from nineteenth and twentieth-century Indonesia as objects that provide unique insights into histories of living with disaster. Susie uses photographs from the Volkenkunde and Tropenmuseum collections of the Wereldmuseum to demonstrate methods and approaches for using colonial archives, in dialogue with contemporary images and other objects, to put Indonesians in the centre of stories about natural disasters as well as war and conflict. She will focus on volcanic eruptions, and photographs from the Aceh War and the Indonesian War of Independence. These are ostensibly different kinds of catastrophe, but a key theme that cuts across both is the Indonesians who were working in disastrous contexts. These labourers have been present, and in high resolution, for more than a century––sometimes they are looking right at us, as in this photograph––but the visibility of their everyday modes of persistence and survival has largely escaped scholarly attention. This talk thus reflects on how photograph collections can illuminate historical and present-day issues of social and economic marginality, environment and vulnerability, and the ethics of spectatorship in a global media and museum context.