“A Triumphal Song of The One Who Had a Victory We Never Heard About – 1621” is anchored on the song “De Zilverfloot,” which is time-related to the starting point of the Netherlands colonial history in Indonesia. To give a context, “De Zilverfloot” (The Silver Fleet) is a celebrated Dutch song that depicts the key victory of the Netherlands over the Spanish in 1628, led by Piet Heyn. Around the same time, in 1621, the Dutch Indies Company (VOC) led by J. P. Coen initiated a trade monopoly that began with a genocide on Banda Island, and this act was also known as a starting point of the Dutch colonization in Indonesia– formerly known as the Dutch East Indies. The song then became a commemoration song that is still played today. This song is more than just a song. It has become one of the many monuments of victory in the form of a song carved in people’s minds until today. The song coincidental relation to the timeline of the starting point of the Dutch colonization in Indonesia through the Banda Islands is what triggers me to create this work. For the work, I worked with the musicians to reinterpret and rearrange it into something slightly similar but with a different perspective and tone. Instead of emphasizing the feeling of pride, the song turn into a low and deep tone; furthermore, instead of singing it with its lyrics, I asked the singer to hum along to the music. Humming becomes an act of refusal from the triumphal expression expressed by the song and a healing process that emphasizes the embodiment of the pain of the colonial experience. While the song continuously played, the video project images depict the East Indies based on literature written or published around the 17th and 18th centuries. Through the image generator technology, my prompt began with describing the literature that transformed the words into moving images, intertwining imagination, fantasy, and speculation.
This work are the continuation works from my previous residency at @hotelmariakapel (Hoorn, The Netherlands) in 2023, and presented at SAC Gallery, Bangkok curated by Loredana Pazzini-Paracciani.