Participatory postcolonial research: the making of the vodcast Unboxing: Uitgepakte Verhalen
How can objects reveal unspoken histories? In Unboxing: Uitgepakte Verhalen, Dr. Gerlov van Engelenhoven explores Moluccan heritage in the Netherlands. Through artifacts and stories, the vodcast highlights memory, silence, and expression beyond words. In this news article, he shares his experience being part of Unboxing.
Vodcast Unboxing: Uitgepakte Verhalen
Last year, in the summer of 2024, Museum Maluku Den Haag approached me with an exciting opportunity: to co-develop and host their new vodcast Unboxing: Uitgepakte Verhalen (transl. Unboxing Stories), a series about intangible heritage of the Moluccan community in the Netherlands.
As students of my course Cultural Interaction: Conflict and Cooperation know, The Netherlands is home to multiple postcolonial communities, due to a complex history of colonization primarily in current-day Indonesia, Surinam and the Antilles. The Moluccan community originates from Maluku, a province in current-day Indonesia that attempted to establish their own nation-state a year after Indonesian independence, in 1950. One of the effects of this thwarted attempt at Moluccan independence was that a group of 12,500 Moluccan soldiers and their families were brought to the Netherlands in 1951.
Their residence in the Netherlands was supposed to be temporary but gradually turned into a permanent migration. Moluccans were treated as prisoners: they lived in badly maintained camps outside of cities, without the right to go to school, seek employment or even cook their own meals. Moreover, they remained stateless until the late 1970s, when they were offered Dutch citizenship, marking the official defeat of their struggle for independence. To protest this development, multiple activist actions were executed throughout the 1970s, including the infamous hijacking of two trains in 1975 and 1977, which in turn led to increased discrimination against Moluccan people in Dutch society.
Museum Maluku’s archive is filled with objects bearing witness to this troubled history. The vodcast Unboxing was conceived as a project to actualize the history in contemporary society, by inviting Moluccans from different generations to step into the archive, and interact with the objects it contains. The vodcast focuses on intangible heritage, the culture, customs and traditions that are somehow attached to these objects, invisible and often hard to describe. We divided the series into five episodes, each focusing on a different type of intangible heritage: spirituality; (activist) youth culture; food; love and marriage; music (forthcoming).
I was honored that the museum would approach me to collaborate with them. I am myself a member of the Moluccan community: my grandmother was twelve years old when she arrived in the Netherlands with the rest of her family. Like most of the community’s first generations, she grew up in the camps. This is my personal reason for having said yes to the invitation, not in the least place because I knew one of the participants I would interview was going to be my father Aone van Engelenhoven, a linguist specialized in Moluccan oral tradition.
But I also have a professional reason to accept the invitation. For my previous book (available in Open Access), Postcolonial Memory in the Netherlands: Meaningful Voices, Meaningful Silences¸ I primarily took case studies from Moluccan history. And, as the subtitle indicates, I analyzed not only the outspoken elements in contemporary Dutch postcolonial culture, but also the unspoken or unspeakable elements: the “meaningful silences”.
In Dutch society’s discussions about remembering the colonial past, voice is often used as a metaphor for empowerment (‘we must raise our voices’), whereas silence is often used as voice’s negative counterpart, signifying a loss or lack of power (‘we will no longer be silenced’). Yet, silence is expressive: sometimes it even speaks louder than words, as can be seen in silent protests and vigils. Moreover, even in the general experience of diaspora, displacement and intergenerational trauma, much that is mutually understood within the experience is nonetheless impossible to put into words. Some things are unspeakable, yet communicated.
The next phase of my research began in early 2024, when I started my Veni, a four-year research project for early-career researchers, funded by the NWO (Dutch Research Council’s Talent Program). My project is called Listening to Silence: Silence as Empowerment in Dutch Decolonial Art and Activism, and I conduct it in direct collaboration with decolonial artists, curators and activists from the variety of postcolonial communities which the Netherlands is home to. All of the participants are decolonial memory practitioners who use silence actively in their work, whether as form of resistance, as path toward solidarity or collective healing/recovery, as rhetorical or pedagogical tactic, as basis for reflection and listening, or as communication beyond language.
It is due to my focus on productive and expressive silences in decolonial memory practice, that the museum was interested in collaborating with me. After all, the participants of the vodcast unbox tangible objects, but discuss intangible meanings and memories attached to these objects. More often than not, these meanings and memories are hard to describe. Hence, the need for this series to be a vodcast, and not a regular audio-based podcast: we need the video, in order to also be able to show people’s body language as they discuss the given themes. When topics become too difficult to grasp in words, facial expressions and bodily gestures take precedence, as an alternative, sometimes more emotional and more direct, form of communication.
Here, the context of the conversation also becomes significant: some of the episodes were filmed in the archive, but the food episode was filmed in a Moluccan restaurant, the marriage episode was filmed in people’s private homes, and the music episode was filmed in front of a live audience in ZIMIHC Theater Zuilen (Utrecht). By focusing not only on the content of the conversation, but also on the setting in which it takes place, we emphasized the fact that context matters. The environment in which people discuss memories and culture influences the discussions as such. Not in the least place because a meaningful environment can aid a conversation by providing people with objects to ‘speak through’ when regular language reaches its limits. Participants were encouraged to ‘speak’ through the act of cooking, through their musical instruments, through ancestor statues and other sacred objects, through jewelry and through items of clothing.
Working together with Museum Maluku’s producer Yanise Zijlstra was inspiring and exciting, a real pleasure. I learned a lot about all the dimensions that come with an initiative as this: from reaching out to, selecting and briefing participants, to conceptualizing the ‘stage’ of the project, to the design of the interview/conversation format, to the editing and dissemination of the final product.
I was humbled by the amount of work that goes into this, and by seeing my own limitations: as a (co-)host I led some of the conversations (episodes 1, 2 and 5), I helped design the general direction and scope of the topics, and suggested some of the eventual participants. But I had no experience to offer with video and audio technology, and also very little to offer in terms of editing and dissemination. I was happy to see the power of collaboration here. A team working together can get stronger results than a person alone, whether that person is a scholar like me, a cultural producer like Yanise, a memory institute such as the museum providing us with the platform for our project, or the technical staff supporting all the logistics of actually shooting a five-part video series.
The series has been watched thousands of times since two months ago, when the first episode aired. Not bad for a relatively small postcolonial museum focusing on a still underrepresented chapter of Dutch colonization. And certainly not bad for a cultural studies researcher trying to reach wider audiences beyond academic circles. The success of our project proves that general audiences are interested in the type of research that is done in the humanities, and are basically just looking for encouraging points of entry (other than academic texts).
Yanise and I are currently thinking about making a second season, perhaps under a new title, that focuses on children of multiple postcolonial backgrounds in the Netherlands, discussing shared themes and topics with one another. We hope our project will inspires many other scholars and cultural practitioners to work together. Collaborating across boundaries, whether cultural, disciplinary or institutional, is one of the most satisfying experiences I know, and I can heartily recommend it.
About the Author
To learn more about Dr. Gerlov van Engelenhoven and his research, click here!