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


Dionne Brand

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-presentation of images beautifying enslavement in national and private museums in Europe and Brasil, focussed on painting from Dutch Brazil through sonic 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 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 invention of the tropics; 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.