Colonial Spectres #3
In the third and closing iteration of the Colonial Spectres series, researcher Theo Paijmans and filmmaker Janilda Bartolomeu will provide an in depth look at how the rise of Spiritism in the Netherlands coincided with the Dutch colonial occupation of Indonesia. They will continue to discuss how Couperus' novel serves as a departure point to address how spectres arise from both colonial oppression and colonial guilt.
21 April 2022 19:30 - 21:00
Colonial Spectres #3 with Janilda Bartolomeu and Theo Paijmans
Theo Paijmans
Theo Paijmans writes about the variety of human experience beyond the threshold of consensus-reality and its effect on art, literature, and social culture. His books and articles are published in the Netherlands, America, Japan, Australia, the United Kingdom and Germany. He is also an internationally recognized expert on the histories of proto-science fiction and esoteric movements. Paijmans lectured in London and Paris on several occasions and was invited to lecture at the Cielo Habitado Conference in Madrid (2015), which was part of the art exhibit ARSTRONOMY. Incursiones en el Cosmos in Casa Encendida, featuring amongst others works of artists Keith Haring, Mike Kelley, Yves Klein, Panamarenko, Thomas Ruff and Sigmar Polke.
Paijmans currently researches and writes about Afro American folk scares, afrofuturist utopias, colonial scares and their impact on western culture as an instrument of psychological warfare and institutionalized racism.
Colonial Spectres
The starting point of Colonial Spectres is the speculation that the Dutch colonial elite brought haunted objects back to the Netherlands from Dutch-occupied Indonesia, coupled with a close reading of Dutch writer Louis Couperus' 1900 novel De Stille Kracht (The Hidden Force). The aim of this three-part series is to develop a cultural reading of the spectres which, in concrete form and as memories, are interwoven with bodies, material spaces and objects in Indonesia and the Netherlands. These themes are examined from the perspective of object collections, spectral tropicalism, pre-colonial folklore and early 20th-century occultism. In this programme, the colonial spirits take centre stage and are replaced by de-colonial perspectives.