Voices and Bodies in the Archive The Case of Colonial Audiovisual Media Heritage

Discussions about colonial heritage in European institutions have largely centered on physical objects in museum collections and written texts in paper archives. Audiovisual media, such as photographs, sound recordings, and film, bring both new challenges and new perspectives to these conversations. This essay asks: What can current debates on “decolonizing” colonial heritage bring to audiovisual media collections of colonial origins; and, conversely, what new perspectives can audiovisual media heritage bring to existing object- and document- focused debates? I use Dan Hicks’s “theory of taking,” developed in the context of debates in Europe around the Benin Bronzes, to propose understanding colonial audiovisual media as taken rather than collected or created; and as capturing human bodies and voices in colonial relationships that endure across time and power, rather than transparently or objectively capturing historical moments or events. I then use this framework to analyze two recent films that conduct critical artistic reinterpretations of materials from the media archive of Dutch colonialism in the Indonesian archipelago. The essay ends with some concluding thoughts about the concept of “decolonization” in relation to colonial media heritage.