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| Sharing Heritage Expertise |
No.13, October 2020 |
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view of Paramaribo, Suriname (photo: Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands).
Welcome to the fall 2020
edition of our Sharing Heritage expertise newsletter! The Covid-19 pandemic
continues to affect the lives of individuals and organisations around the world,
and the Shared Cultural Heritage programme of the Cultural Heritage Agency of
the Netherlands (RCE) is no exception. For a programme that rests on
international cooperation and knowledge exchange, travel restrictions
constitute a significant challenge. Yet with creativity and flexibility from
all sides, the RCE has been experimenting with different solutions: see for
instance, the case of the Urban Heritage Strategies training which took place online this summer. In this newsletter, the feature article presents
a good practice developed in the context of a collaboration with Indonesia on
shared difficult heritage. Our partner in the spotlight is The Black Archives,
an organisation that plays a central role in ongoing discussions in the
Netherlands about the need to produce more inclusive narratives about the past,
and especially regarding the colonial past. And as always, you can catch up on
our recent projects at the end of the newsletter. Good readings! |
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|  | | Good practice: international collaboration on shared difficult heritage |
| The Indonesian and Dutch
team members who carried out the fieldwork in 2019 (photo: ARKENAS/Cultural Heritage Agency of
the Netherlands).
This article presents a
good practice that developed in the context of an international collaboration
around a site of shared cultural heritage. Partly still ongoing, it involved a
joint Dutch-Indonesian investigation into the disappearance of the wrecks of
three Dutch warships - the Hr. MS. De Ruyter, the Hr. Ms. Java and the Hr. Ms.
Kortenaer. These ships sank off the coast of Indonesia in 1942, in the context
of the Battle of the Java Sea during WWII. The good practice refers to the way in which this project, albeit
propelled by a painful event, was framed and guided by a three-track-research
plan, and was based on open discussions between both countries. To write this
article, we talked to Robert de Hoop of the International Programme for Maritime Heritage of
the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands (RCE) and Shinatria Adhityatama
of ARKENAS,
the National Research Center for Archaeology in Indonesia. Both were closely
involved in this project as maritime archaeologists.
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|  | | Meet our partner, the Black Archives |
| Mitchell Esajas and Myra Winter during the opening of the exhibition
“Surinamers in the Netherlands: 100 years of emancipation and fight” on 13
December 2019 (photo: The Black Archives).
The Black Archives (TBA) is a historical archive in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands, which consists of approximately 3000 items
(archival materials, books and artifacts) that focus on racism and race issues,
slavery and colonialism, gender and feminism, Suriname, the Netherlands
Antilles, South America, Africa and more. These are materials and topics which
aren’t often discussed in schools and universities in the Netherlands, which
are inaccessible in many libraries, and often unknown to the general public.
The expertise of TBA lies in making complex and often invisibilised histories
and perspectives accessible to the public, such as the histories of black
emancipation movements in the Netherlands. It does so by developing
exhibitions, public events, history projects, and by inviting school (and
other) groups to visit TBA to learn more about marginalised histories and
communities, and overlooked perspectives on the Dutch history and present. An
example is the exhibition "Surinamers in the Netherlands: 100 years of emancipation and fight", on show until 5 December.
TBA often collaborates with other
institutions, such as museums, to develop exhibitions and public events which
take on a decolonial perspective, and that articulate more inclusive narratives
about the past and present. An example was the recent event co-organised with the Rembrandt House Museum, around the exhibition “Black in Rembrandt’s Time”, about people of African descent
in seventeenth century Amsterdam, the development of racial thinking and the
representation of black people in the arts throughout the centuries. Or the
organisation’s involvement in the RCE’s recent pilot project to research its art collection
for traces of slavery and colonial history, for which Mitchell Esajas and
Jessica de Abreu of TBA wrote short articles with more inclusive narratives and
language-critical descriptions about particular artworks. TBA also organises
tours for different organisations around themes from its archives. For
instance, TBA often organises tours during different activities of the broader Shared Cultural Heritage programme, such as during the Sharing Stories on Contested Histories training in 2019 (organised by the Shared Cultural Heritage programme of the RCE and the
Reinwardt Academy) and during International Visitors Programmes organised by DutchCulture. In
these cases, the tours also delved into the TBA’s perspective on shared
heritage between the Netherlands and other countries. For those interested in
learning more or working together with TBA, please contact info@theblackarchives.nl. |
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|  | | Impact
assessment project // September-December 2020 // At the end of
2019 and beginning of 2020, Rianne Walet carried out part 1 of a pilot project
to investigate the impact of the Shared Cultural Heritage programme of the RCE
in relation to the projects carried out with South Africa, over the policy
period 2017-2020. Sofia Lovegrove will execute part 2 of this pilot project,
focusing on RCE’s collaboration with Indonesia. With the results of both parts
of this pilot project, Sofia will deliver advice regarding the implementation
of impact assessment in the policy period 2021-2024.
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| | | Sharing Stories on Contested Histories –
Embassy edition // Spring
2021 // The RCE and the Reinwardt Academy are developing an
embassy spin-off of the successful training Sharing Stories on Contested histories. This new training will be organised for
cultural attachés and other embassy officers in the Shared Cultural Heritage partner
countries. With an adapted format, the participants will question and discuss
the role of cultural processes in nation and identity building and how they are
part of the dynamics of transnational collaboration and exchange. The training
will explore topics such as identity, culture, nationality and multivocality in
relation to discussions surrounding the need to decolonise heritage practices
and knowledge. The training will
consist of a preparatory course of around five online lectures and a two or
three day interactive workshop at museum locations in the Netherlands. |
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| | Urban Heritage Strategies (UHS) training for World Heritage Cities // 3 - 14 August // On 14 August, the
participants of part 1 (online) of the UHS training for World Heritage Cities presented the outcomes of
their two-week endeavour. During the training, the participants applied each day’s
learnings to their home situation: Paramaribo (Suriname), Willemstad (Curaçao),
Salvador da Bahia (Brazil) and Sawahlunto (Indonesia). Since circumstances in
each of these four cities is very different, the outcomes also differed significantly:
Paramaribo is dealing with a diminishing residential population, Willemstad is
struggling with development pressure, Salvador suffers from gentrification and
Sawahlunto is searching for a new base of existence. All participants were
granted a certificate of attendance, enabling them to participate in part 2 of
the training, which will be held face-to-face in Rotterdam in August 2021. The
focus will then be on practical management skills and network building, and less
on cognitive learning. In the meantime, the participants will elaborate on
their city profile, to be peer reviewed amongst themselves.
Shared Heritage Lab Semarang, ITB Bandung –
TU Delft // 2019 - 2020 // During the summer holiday, 6 Master’s students from TU Delft presented their
graduation projects concerning the former colonial city of Semarang, in
Indonesia. These projects are the outcome of the Shared
Heritage Lab, which was a collaboration between the Technical University of Bandung
(Indonesia) and TU Delft. During this Shared Heritage Lab students of both
universities jointly analysed the water-related heritage issues in Semarang.
Through visits and exchange, both universities helped each other’s students in
their graduation projects. The Shared Heritage Lab was carried out within the
framework of the Shared Cultural Heritage programme of the RCE, and it was
supported by the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta. The graduation projects of the students
from TU Delft can be visited online.
Intern at RCE - Kaanan Thakkar (KU Leuven,
Belgium) // 1 October
– 1 December // During her 8-week and mostly online internship, Kaanan will
research the future perspective of the former Dutch cemetery in Surat, India.
This is part of her academic curriculum at KU Leuven, in a Master’s degree in
Conservation of Monuments and Sites at the Raymond Lemaire International Centre
for Conservation (RLICC). Kaanan will use the outcomes of her internship with
the RCE as a starting point for her MA thesis. Since India is her home country, she will continue her research on site in
Surat through a participative process with the local inhabitants, in order to
explore the options for a sustainable and inclusive conservation of the
cemetery in the future. Her research will be an addition to the ongoing
research and conservation of the big tomb in the former Dutch cemetery in
Nagapattinam in South India, carried out by the Indian National Trust for Art
and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), in collaboration with the RCE. |
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| | | The International Programme for Maritime Heritage
recently published an English version of their interim report of May 2020, detailing the progress made in the last three years.
Chapter 4 focuses on the projects within the Shared Cultural Heritage programme
in the field of maritime archaeology. Due to the impact of Covid-19, much of
the international fieldwork planned for this year within these projects has
been postponed or put on hold, and uncertainty remains regarding when these can
take place. The team has therefore been focusing on data management,
communication and capacity building instead, updating the Maritime Stepping Stones platform and preparing several
publications, including a brochure on the
programme. |
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| | Sharing Heritage Expertise is the newsletter of the Shared Cultural Heritage Programme of the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. This programme follows from the International Cultural Policy Framework of the Dutch government. Other organisations executing the national Shared Cultural Heritage Programme are DutchCulture and the National Archives of the Netherlands, and the Embassies of the Netherlands in the 10 partner countries. For more information on their activities, see their respective websites.
For more information, please visit our website (English and Dutch) or contact the editor, Sofia Lovegrove (lovegrove.sofia@gmail.com). We welcome comments and suggestions regarding the content of our newsletter. |
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