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“One enters a room and history follows; one enters a room and history precedes.”


Dionne Brand




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A Memory of Elephants



Article
Publisher: Metode at ROM
Year: 2025

Full Article here: a memory of elephants

A Memory of Elephants is one element of Fugitive Tone, a long-term ongoing research project working towards a film installation on the necropastoral. On colonial representational regimes, the re-representation of images beautifying enslavement in national and private museums in Europe and Brasil, focussed on painting from the Dutch West Indies Company colony in Brazil through sonic, archival, intertextual, and visual research.

A Memory of Elephants is an article taking a critical look through ekphrasis at the cultural archive from the Dutch West Indies company colony in Brazil, and the myth of tolerance. About museums inscribing and re-inscribing racialised hierarchies from colonial fantasy and about the haunting of the social and ecological imagination by fantasies of total violence, beautified by landscape; about buying reputations; sonic experiences in museums; the silencing of the world; and the invention of nature. About transmitting phantasms; the construction of the tropics as a tool for building Europe; about the museum as the site of capture par excellence. About painting, Frans Post, Mauricio de Nassau, Albert Eckhout, and centuries of culture washing.

It’s about finding elephants where I least expect them.

It’s about the conjuring up of whiteness and the inertia of its conservation.