Object Reconnaissance: interview with director

AG: There’s a personal narrative at the center of the film in the story of Merah Muda, a political exile who flees Jakarta in the 1960s to live in The Netherlands. The story is intimate — a kind of counter-narrative perhaps — that also allows for the possibility of moving across different times, spaces and positionalities.

ST: Yes. Merah Muda is a woman who is looking for a new home and a new place. Ria (her granddaughter) is looking to understand better her identity in the present. This again is another way to talk about belonging and of arriving to a place that feels like home. As a filmmaker, the starting point was this idea of where we find home, especially when we are displaced. This is connected to my own personal identity because I’m someone who shares a lot with the heroines of the film and these scenes of displacement and this constant search for a home. I come from a family where both my father and my mother were political exiles. I was raised by a Greek father and an Iranian mother in a culturally diverse home but in a time that was very puritanical and conservative, in a small village in early 1970s Greece. All these elements of cultural displacement my mother encountered as an Iranian, educated woman in a place that wouldn’t, or even couldn’t, support that. These are stories about searching for home, which are quite embedded in producing, thinking and creating art. I have a personal affinity with these stories, but also throughout my career, I saw there was so much to unpack behind these personal stories, and you can’t unpack them if you focus solely on singular historical events and moments. There’s so much detail, there’s so many references, there’s so many metaphors in what we can read through personal stories and what these kinds of stories project onto a wider understanding of history.

AG: Merah Muda may be a fictional character, but you draw from historical events. For instance, she is a member of the Gerwani — a progressive women’s movement in Indonesia in the 1950s and ’60s. You also film extensively inside the Tropenmuseum. Could you say a little more about the specific spaces and histories that inform the narrative?

ST: I’ve had the idea of working on a project in the Tropenmuseum for about 20 years because of an exhibition I saw in 2005 or 2006 on Indonesia and Indonesian culture. It was during the period that I studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, which is very close to Tropenmuseum. The exhibition was huge and dedicated largely to Indonesian communities that moved to the Netherlands and settled there. Looking back on this exhibition and attitudes in the Netherlands from 20 years ago, I am struck by both the change in language and terminology, understanding of colonial history, and the contemporary political role of Indonesia. It’s very complex to break down, but one interesting example is language. This was something sensitively taken up in the Words Matter publication, which also appears in the film. Compiled by the National Museum of World Cultures (formally known as Tropenmuseum, Afrika Museum, Museum Volkenkunde, Wereldmuseum) the book catalogues an unfinished list of words including the word “Indo” which appears in the film.

With regards to the narrative, the film starts with a voiceover in Bahasa Indonesian, which narrates the story in the first person of Merah Muda. Initially, we hear this very young woman who is inspired by the politics of the time in the early 1960s. She moves to Jakarta to participate in different political movements there. For example, the first conference of the Non-Aligned Movement summit which took place in Jakarta. Specifically, she says: “after I was exposed to all these ideas, I couldn’t go back to my home in the countryside to be another peasant woman.” She moved to Jakarta. She stayed there, and she was looking for other people to be connected to, who had the same sort of story as hers. And she clearly says: “I found many of them.” This was very true for that moment in Indonesia. Women came together, they formed the Gerwani, which actually stands for the Autonomous Movement of Women of Indonesia, and it had this strong affiliation with the Communist Party of Indonesia at the time.

So, we start with this kind of strong political opening of a young woman who was striving for justice, who was striving for all these new ideas about the independence and liberation and emancipation of Indonesian women in Indonesian society. That didn’t work out the way she was hoping. Her comrades were dying. They put her on a boat and shipped her to the Netherlands. I read a lot of stories about people who ran away during those times. Some of them because they had the chance, others because they were forced by family or friends.

In the second chapter of her story, Merah Muda had to adjust and find her way around. And we see all this archival material portraying these early encounters of the Dutch with the immigrant Indonesians who were migrating at the time to the Netherlands. I don’t know if you remember in the film, there was a lot of (archival footage) that should graffiti that says “Indos Go Away!” or “Go back Home!” This was proof or traces of the reality of what was happening. We have all this archival footage in the film to also legitimize the fictional story. But also, there were these other smaller elements here and there in which it was clear that Indonesians were welcomed by other parts of the Dutch Society So, in a way, there’s a marriage of the two. It’s a story that becomes quintessential: it looks like it’s personal, but at the same time it’s not. So, while the film focuses on Indonesia and the Netherlands and references West Papua, the essence of the work is forced displacement. An experience and story that a lot of people share.  

Annie Goodner: While watching Object Reconnaissance, I was struck by the way different narratives and points of view emerge through different form formats: archival footage from Indonesia and West Papua, faux-documentary scenes shot on Super-8, more cinematic shots inside the the Tropenmuseum. Could you talk about how these different formats defy a single dominant narrative, or allow different kinds of storytelling to emerge?

Stefanos Tsivopoulos: This is actually the core of the work and is a way of drawing out the idea of positionality. I’m not only interested in the positionality of the viewer. Rather, I start with my own positionality, or an understanding of who I am, and in turn ask for who I am making this film. I’m interested in asking broader questions about authorship and ownership, but also about origins — both of people and of artefacts. Underscoring this is a concern with who has a right to tell a story — especially one which is loaded with political, historical references. For example, I’m working with archival footage and images that don’t belong to me, or I haven’t produced. For me, the use of these materials, makes it all the more important to understand where I’m coming from; how I arrived at certain ideas, and what it means to bring all these different elements together. Also, in bringing together these historical moments, materials and locations, I am not just trying to reflect artistically upon an historical moment or a political moment. I’m taking a very decisive step to create and to write down and develop a very personal story. This is a story of a woman and her descendent: one in the past, in the mid 1960s, and one in the now, and how these two moments play out in the film and overlap with each other.

AG: There’s a suspenseful aspect to the story too by way of the theft of an important object belonging to Merah Muda by her Dutch husband. I’m curious about this decision in the story and how you see this act as connected to larger scale theft perpetrated by (colonial) governments and institutions?

ST: To paraphrase Ariella Azoulay here, objects are like documents of people. And, more than that, people have a right to be reunited with objects. Merah Muda meets this Dutchman — he’s a journalist — and they develop this romantic thing and they’re getting married, and at the same time, as the title of the film implies, there is a search for this object in the present. For me, this object has a sort of metaphorical meaning or existence because Merah Muda has lost her identity, and her granddaughter is looking for it. So, the object is this sort of connection to a place. This is a very important part of the work for me because this place, the soul of this place, was stolen and sold. It was, in a way, commodified. It became something else.

In the scholarship about all these looted objects and artefacts that are still in collections of museums in the Global North and haven’t been repatriated, discussion about objects can sometimes suggest that they contain parts of the soul of a country and a place. So, in the removal of these objects, places lose their soul; they lose part of their identity; they lose part of their memory. In the last, say five years, there are of course discussions about repatriation and the role of colonialism in generating museum collections. On first thought you might imagine that origin communities unanimously would say, oh yeah, bring them back, we missed them, they belong to us. However, this is too simplistic. There is a far more complex response, for example, in Indonesia where communities sometimes say, “no we do not want them back because we didn’t forge an identity with them.” We forged an identity through their absence. In this way, repatriation can be understood as forcing a kind of forgiveness. As if to say, “here we give you the object back, we close the deal, now it’s fine.”

I was talking to one of the senior curators at the Wereldmuseum whose work focuses on Indigenous knowledge and material culture and engages closely with efforts to give back many objects to Oceania communities. We talked about shells, and ritualistic objects and coins; big and small. The museum is dealing now with this question of objects that don’t belong to anyone; these objects are in this sort of vague limbo because they haven’t been a part of a national identity or building a cultural identity of the people they belong to. In a way, they became part of the Dutch identity building process. Except now, many don’t want to be associated with these objects anymore and want to give them back.

AG: The Benin sculptures, whose return was the center of Mati Diop’s new film Dahomey, were meant to be shown. There’s a very different context to their presentation.

ST: ST: Exactly. The Benin sculptures are out of this world. They’re incredibly sophisticated artefacts and worth a lot in terms of their material value and in many instances with clear documentation of how and by whom they were looted. But we should also consider other objects that today are not prescribed such value — sometimes daily objects such as shells, wood and stuff.

So, what’s the endgame? How to approach all this negotiation? Again to return here to the approach of Wereldmuseum curators dealing with first nations artefacts and objects obtained in colonial collections — we have to find different ways of understanding. Yes, we want to give back. But this giving back needs to acknowledge that in many instances we stole not only history but also souls. We have to understand that. In turn, we need to ask what is it that they’re missing? What is it that they need? There are ongoing discussions about how the Wereldmuseum is willing to address these questions. It’s not at all straightforward. The object, as I’ve said before, becomes a quintessential element because it’s a kind of metaphor for the stealing and the loss of identity. In the film, Ria is looking for identity and soul through that object that her grandmother lost. So that’s what these two overlapping timelines are showing: this sense of identity and belonging and home. If you remember, the film ends withthis feeling of “I’m here now, I’m living with monsters, this is my home, but I miss my people. And where are you — my people?”

AG: The stolen object — the focus of the film’s reconnaissance — is a gift: a conch shell (a kind of dowry) that is hidden in Merah Muda’s belongings by her own mother. We discover the existence of this object at the same time as Merah Muda. I’m curious about the choice of the gift and what kind of different function or set of social relationships it carries.

ST: The film was partly also informed and inspired by a work that I did in 2013 (Alternative Currencies: An Archive and A Manifesto), where I focused on alternative economies around the world and built an archive with murals of around 60 to 70 examples that trace the past. There’s a micro, self-sustainable, but also communal scale to these economies. What’s fascinating is regardless of the place in which these economies were created, whether in the Pacific or Africa, or Latin America, or Australia, most of them had within their structure the idea of generosity and gift. In moments of deadlock and crisis, gifting becomes integral to these communities in order to continue and thrive.

The way Merah Muda brings this object that her mother slipped into her suitcase, which she found out along the way, is a kind of gift. I wanted to create this feeling in which she loses that, and when she realizes she won’t or probably can’t find this object again, there’s an admittance within her that says, “okay, I found something else.” I wanted to put this idea of circular reciprocity out there, and maybe people pick up on it. The film does not try to be explicit about all these elements, but there is an equation in Merah Muda’s heart; the shell had to go to find her place in the future.