Trigger

My eyes dart across the sections of the elaborate museum installation, squinting at each of the descriptions, trying to find some mention of my home. Ghana, India, Suriname, Indonesia, . . . Sri Lanka.

There it was at last.

A footnote. One side of a glass panel dedicated to remembering over one hundred and fifty years of exploitation and settlement, using safe language to talk about colonial atrocities.

The exhibition is an ambitious attempt to acknowledge, inform, and educate the public about Dutch colonial history and its repercussions today. Visitors are supposed to be confronting colonial legacies, but it didn't feel like they were. All I could see was the encasing of objects of rich cultural and historical significance.

Glass cabinets with shiny spotlights illuminating their ‘subjects’. Prized possessions. Trophies. Stolen artefacts.

Who is included in dialogues on decolonisation?

Which communities and ‘experts’ are consulted in the process?

Is an event like this an attempt to truly reconcile with the past, or an act of tokenism?

I feel small and insignificant among the tall columns and extravagant decor of the colonial-era building. As a non-Dutch visitor, I can’t help but reflect on just how entrenched these cultural institutions are in the very colonial systems they’re trying to shed light on.

Something that strikes me is the unbearable silence of these spaces. What grand narrative did these collections and installations bring forward?

What does honouring true provenance look like? Is it returning objects? Is it issuing an apology? Curating an exhibition?

How can we, as visitors, reflect better on these gestures and what they reveal?^{These reflections follow one of my first museum visits in 2022 to see the permanent exhibition Our Colonial Inheritance at the Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam, NL.}

As someone who grew up in Sri Lanka and recently moved to the Netherlands, I was struck by this apparent blind spot. Many Dutch people seemed unfamiliar with their country’s past colonial connection with Sri Lanka.

My hometown was a strategic base for Dutch imperialists. They built fortified walls, shipped slaves, constructed canals, and replaced wild forests with cinnamon plantations. Growing up in Colombo, Sri Lanka, I experienced a different relationship with Dutch–Sri Lankan colonial history, which had always seemed so naturally entangled with my own.^{I remember sitting on the ramparts of the Dutch fort in Galle, walking the cobblestone streets of the narrow fort while eating ice cream and soaking in the colonial-era villas and restaurants steeped in chic interiors. There was a sense of nostalgia in the air. These were relics, museums, and monuments that beamed a proud history and recognition of a foreign heritage inherited and amalgamated over the years.} Even today, there are many visible traces of this colonial heritage^{UNESCO declared the Dutch fort in Galle, Sri Lanka, as a World Heritage Site in 1988. Since then, the fortified town of Galle has become a major tourist attraction and the largest colonial monument on the island. Following the end of Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict in 2009, the Dutch government has been restoring many forts and complexes, creating attractive tourist hot spots and heritage sites.} in architecture, food, culture, and language.^{The Dutch Burghers, descendants of Dutch VOC in Sri Lanka, are one example of living heritage on the island. The Dutch Burgher Union of Ceylon, founded in 1908, is an active organisation in Colombo with a vision to ‘promote the moral, intellectual, and social well-being of the Dutch descendants in Ceylon’. The organisation is also well known for its ‘VOC cafe’, a popular restaurant serving Sri Lankan–Dutch Burgher foods.}

Nira Wickramasinghe, professor of Modern South Asian Studies at Leiden University, remarks that in the last decades, Sri Lanka has produced its past through processes of ‘heritagising’, noting that ‘urban planners and independent designers began what can almost be described as a love affair with very specific aspects of the Dutch heritage’.^{Nira Wickramasinghe, from a speech delivered at the Rijksmuseum in 2016 based on her foreword to the book Cinnamon and Elephants: Sri Lanka and the Netherlands from 1600 by Lodewijk Wagenaar (Vantilt Publishers, 2016).} Wickramasinghe refers to this as a ‘canny reversal of situations’, where ‘the colonial became the object of gaze and exploitation by market forces. While Portuguese and British colonialism are fading away, the Dutch past pops up revived, in multiple incarnations'.^{Wickramasinghe, 13.} But I want to raise another question about how colonial pasts and contemporary consumptions ‘meet’: How does the bark of a tree growing in forests of a distant land find its way to your kitchen cabinet?

Unarchiving through photography

Photography had not yet been invented in the seventeenth century. Paintings, drawings, and maps fuelled the Dutch colonial gaze on a distant paradise, a place of abundance that was available for exploration and exploitation. Images from this period depict colonial classics: idyllic and expansive scenes of rolling hills, depopulated landscapes, and its people as ‘natives’ in an antique land.

The western colonial gaze portrayed the cinnamon tree using botanical drawings throughout most of history. Drawings from the seventeenth and eighteenth century offer a scientific look at the leaves, flowers, and buds of the cinnamon tree.^{See, for example, the drawing of Cinnamomum verum (Ceylon cinnamon) from Köehler’s Medicinal-Plants (1887).}

Today most people only relate to cinnamon as a packaged product. Through my practice I offer another way of ‘seeing’ the tree, by playing with the idea of cinnamon as the protagonist in my story – one that has witnessed momentous changes over the years yet remains unchanged within the landscape. Using a studio-like setting with bright colours to photograph parts of the tree, I hope to flip the conventional gaze of how it has been traditionally documented.