13/05/2026
Following up on a research project we did at Het Noordbrabants Museum last year, we returned this year for a longer period of study of the collection. Originally assembled in the nineteenth century, the collection brings together ethnographic objects, weapons, shells, natural specimens, textiles, and everyday tools gathered largely through a family networks in the Dutch East Indies. Many of the objects were collected during the family's travels and military postings in colonial Indonesia, before being donated to the Provincial Society for Arts and Sciences in North Brabant—the institutional predecessor of the museum. Parts of the collection later circulated within contexts of military education and training, including at the Royal Military Academy (KMA), where colonial objects and ethnographic knowledge were studied as instruments of governance and control, before eventually returning to the museum collection.
This research marks the first in-depth research project dedicated to the particular collection, developed in collaboration with its Indonesian counterpart, Cemeti Institute for Art and Society.
After visiting the museum depos and reviewing the collection closely, we became increasingly fascinated by the breadth and complexity of the archive. The diversity of the objects reveals not only a history of collecting, but also a layered system of classification and knowledge production shaped by colonial frameworks and opened a critical perspective on how objects were decontextualized, categorized, and instrumentalized under the colonial gaze.
In the coming years, there will be a long-term project that recontextualizes the collection through artistic and academic project, artist residency, and presentation of collection rotation within the museum, alongside further activations and reinterpretations of it. Through this project, we aim to reverse that historical gaze: rather than treating the collection as a static archive of “curiosities,” we approach it as a living and contested site of inquiry, where meanings remain open, unstable, and continuously renegotiated through collaborative and interdisciplinary work.
