Facing Forward with Found Footage: Displacing Colonial Footage in Mother Dao and the Work of Fiona Tan

The re-presentation of audiovisual material is a means to bring documents of the past into the present. The displacement of existing images from one context to another entails a change of meaning, that can make us see the past in a new light. This paper studies the reuse of colonial footage from the Dutch East-Indies in the compilation film Mother Dao, the turtlelike by documentary filmmaker Vincent Monnikendam (the Netherlands, 1995) and in the work of visual artist Fiona Tan. The analysis of these cases aims to investigate to what extent the confrontation with these works encourages contemporary viewers to reflect upon their relationship to Dutch colonial history, and to what extent the form in which the archival material is being presented allows for a more critical perspective on this historical period.