Expedition Content
Synopsis
In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (current day West Papua). Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donations, and consisting of several of the wealthiest members of American society wielding 16mm film cameras, still photographic cameras, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and a microphone, the expedition settled for five months in the Baliem Valley, among the Hubula (also known as Dani) people. It resulted in Gardner’s highly influential film Dead Birds, two books of photographs, Peter Matthiessen’s book Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic monographs. Michael Rockefeller, a fourth-generation member of the Rockefeller (Standard Oil) family, was tasked with taking pictures and recording sound in and around the Hubula world. Expedition Content is an augmented sound work composed from the archive’s 37 hours of tape which document the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on intertwined and complex historical moments in the development of approaches to multimodal anthropology, in the lives of the Hubula and of Michael, and in the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.
Schedule
1st Screening
18 November 2022, 15:00 GMT+7
Credits
Ernst Karel
Ernst Karel works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and postproduction sound for nonfiction vilm, with an emphasis on observational cinema. Lately he works around the practice of actuality/location recording and composing with those recordings with recent projects also taking up archival location recordings.
Veronika Kusumaryati
Veronika Kusumaryati is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua. She is currently an assistant professor of anthropology and international studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. With Ernst Karel, she composed a feature-length documentary Expedition Content (2020). The film has been screened at international film festivals and listed as one of the New York Times’ best films of 2022.
