KNOWING, 2015

HD, colour, sound, 48min

English Subtitles

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What can museum collections tell us about people and their stories?

‘knowing’ was a project with Volkenkunde, Leiden. In 2014 Alana Jelinek invited a range of people from various backgrounds to talk about objects in the collection of Volkenkunde, Leiden, Netherlands, one of the partners in ‘Pacific Presences’, a research project led by anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas. Her aim was to explore the politics of occupation and colonialism through the historical objects from Papua in the Volkenkunde collection. The region now called Papua or West Papua has also been called Irian Jaya and Nederlands-Nieuw-Guinea reflecting the colonial past and present of the region. By inviting people from Papua, from Java and of Dutch origin to talk about the objects in the collection, including objects from their own cultures, the project collected stories about objects, some familiar, some chosen by other people, and always including some chosen by the participants themselves. Stories and knowledge were recorded on an audio recorder.The interaction with the objects was also filmed with only the hands and the objects in the frame. The reason for filming hands and objects only is because most 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.