VII - A Never-Ending Story:Colonial Collections in Rotterdam

Summary

Juicy – that was the title style profiler Ellie Uyttenbroek gave this photo of a young woman dressed in red. She added the subtitle In the Mood for Unplugged Exotic Neo Soul Singer-songwriters. The photo was originally taken in Paramaribo (Suriname), at some time between 1865 and 1880, and donated to the Wereldmuseum (‘World Museum’) in Rotterdam in 1910. A century later, the photo ended up with the Dutch national photography museum, Nederlands Fotomuseum, along with the Wereldmuseum's entire collection of photographs. In 2017, guest curator Uyttenbroek put together the first exhibition based on this collection, entitled Ethnomania. She was given carte blanche and chose style as the theme. She selected one hundred portraits taken as front views that she felt both accentuated the individual expressions of the subjects and highlighted various aspects of their clothing, posture and silhouette. She then edited the photos to make them more stylized, coloured them in, blew them up until they were five metres tall and gave them titles like Everybody is United by the 1980s Colors of Benetton, No Matter your Age, Race, Culture or Sex. Doing this let her distance the photos from their origins long ago in far-away Suriname and Indonesia, and placed them in modern-day Rotterdam. According to Uyttenbroek, they now typified the kaleidoscopic street and fashion scene in Rotterdam, an ‘ethnomaniac’ city where numerous cultures and subcultures live side by side without any real problems “not despite but thanks to the many ethnic and other differences”.

What a contrast with the perspective offered by the East Indies Dossier exhibition on the history of colonial Indonesia three years later in the Wereldmuseum, with guest curator Thom Hoffman. He too selected portraits from the Indonesia collection. But his selection focused on photos of the ‘social types’, for example, who populated the East Indies colony according to conventional European opinion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, such photos were taken in series and intended for sale as souvenirs. The photos depicted the colony as it was seen by Europeans: pictures of scenery, princes and their consorts, craftspeople and farming folk in a kind of timeless, unchanging ‘Orientalism’.