Screening the Colonies: Whose Stories Shape the Frame?

Screening the Colonies: Whose Stories Shape the Frame?
Date: 19 May 2025
Time: 16.00-18.00
Location: Leiden University, Lipsius 1.48
Organizers: Quinsy Gario, Taufik Hidayah
Credits: 1 ECTS
Register ↯

Moderator: Dr Pepita Hesselberth

This event is a critical discussion and engagement with the colonial past through the lens of films and artworks produced in and about the East and West Indies (the former Dutch colonies). Colonial cinema often served as a window for colonising powers, like the Netherlands, to project their idealised visions of daily life in distant colonies. These stories, whether newsreels or fictional narratives, sought to “close the distance” between life in the Dutch homeland and its colonies (present-day Indonesia, Curaçao, and beyond). Today, such films might evoke nostalgia, acting as a time machine for audiences to romanticise the past. Yet, revisiting them critically does more than indulge in sentimentality: it exposes the harsh realities of colonial power and amplifies the silenced lives of Indigenous communities relegated to the margins.

The discussion will centre on: Rubber (1936), Films over De West (Films about “the West,” 1947), Deborah Jack’s video art fecund memories of sky and salt… the amnesia of a history unrehearsed, still lush… (2022), and Quinsy Gario’s Tracing a Memory (2020), a retracing of Films over De West.

Join Quinsy Gario (activist and artist), Sabine Groenewegen (filmmaker), Deborah Jack (artist), and Taufik Hidayah (guest researcher at Leiden University) as they challenge dominant narratives in colonial cinema by confronting the lingering afterlife of colonialism in film, asking: How can we reconcile with the past when its stories and silences still shape the present?

Explore the works

● Films over De West (1947): https://youtu.be/JOmn9evziJw?si=idgMfGHMVmIaiixG

● Rubber (1936): https://player.eyefilm.nl/en/films/rubber

● Tracing a Memory (2020): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MX4qoPKxcFQ

● View Deborah Jack’s fecund memories of sky and salt… (2022): https://www.pamm.tv/film/deborah-jack-fecund-memories-of-sky-and-salt-the-amnesia-of-a-history-unrehearsed-still-lush-2022/

Credit details

Students are expected to prepare by watching the film Rubber (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kP_0SESnZU), and reading:

• McKee, C. C. “a salting of sorts”: Salt, Sea, and Affective Form in the Work of Deborah Jack. Art Journal, 78(2), 2019, 14-27.

And at least one of the following two:

• McKittrick, Katherine. “Mathematics Black Life.” The Black Scholar, Vol. 44, No. 2, States of Black Studies (Summer 2014), pp. 16-28. //
• Agostinho, Daniela. “‘A Collection of Conjurings and Opacities’: Archival encounters, Memorialisation and Colonial Afterlives” (fc 2025)

Bring at least two reading questions to the event, relating the texts to one another.

Register