Paper short abstract:

The author reflects on her post-memory work 'Legacy of Silence', a mixed-media installation breaking the silence about colonialism, internment, independence war and expulsion from the former Dutch East Indies. This results in personal liberation despite a haunting fear for future social unrest.

Paper long abstract:

Troubled by her personal colonial legacy, the author, a visual anthropologist, conducted post-memory work by focusing on her own family, gradually revealing on camera a reluctance to remember. Over a period of nine years, a collection was compiled of various videos with nearly unedited conversations in a family setting, photo albums, letters, household items, documents and heirlooms, together spanning three generations of transference.

These private materials can be set up as a pop-up installation, accessible to the public on various locations. It offers an intimate atmosphere where one is free to follow one's own route, and touch, read, smell and look at authentic artifacts to explore this family's fragmentary, haunted past and relate it to today's mindset.

Some visitors come to realise that wide gaps between social hierarchies can cause similar ruptures in the future. This, in fact, was the maker's main motivation in assembling an installation: to stimulate reflections on colonialism as a persistent mindset.

In other words: opening up a silenced traumatic past may liberate an individual of their demons from the past, but may also unearth some 'ghosts' that will keep haunting the future.