The Empire project

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Meet the Dutch-Indonesian Charles Bronson

Norman De Buck was born in Indonesia in the 1950’s. Even as a child, he was fascinated with cowboy and Indian lore. He came to Southern California via The Netherlands as a teenager, and settled in El Monte, a town rich in frontier history. He’s now living the dream in the San Gabriel Valley, where he makes a career for himself playing Mexicans in Hollywood westerns and commercials.

The hat is his own.

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Westward the course of Empire takes its way.

Empire is coming to America

And guess what? We won’t be making anything about the Henry Hudson-led VOC mission that brought New York City into existence. Instead, we’re headed to the West Coast to learn about Southern California’s twice-displaced “Indo” community.

In the 1940’s, 50’s, and even 60’s, some 300,000 people of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent left behind the conflicts of their newly independent tropical homeland and relocated to The Netherlands. Not all of these new immigrants felt comfortable with the cold winds of Northern Europe, and so a small number immigrated to the States and settled in warm climates like Florida and California.

Despite encountering some early setbacks—including various straight up racist, quota-driven immigration policies—the US’s Indo population integrated and assimilated rather seamlessly into American culture. In the US, as in The Netherlands, they were considered to be a “model” immigrant population, with all of the baggage that that label implies.

For the new Empire story in California we’ll be investigating how multi-generational families in the Indo community resolve the friction between the congruent Dutch, Indonesian and American parts of their identity. With any luck, we may even meet the most American of Indos, Mr. Zack Morris himself, Mark-Paul Gosselaar (pictured above after a blond dye job).

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And so it begins…

And by “it,” we mean digital development on the online Empire adaptation.

We’re happy to announce that ace designer Clint Beharry and master developer Sam Bailey have jumped on the Empire crazy train. In the coming months, we’ll be working with Sam and Clint to come up with imaginative ways to transform the Empire video installations into interactive whatsits like this thing. Our shared goal is to bring the 3-dimensional work into the 2-D world of the web, and show you something you’ve never seen before. If it sounds like we’ve set the bar high for ourselves, that’s because we have.

More soon…

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EMPIRE & MÜÜRILEHT

This article by the independent Estonian culture publication MÜÜRILEHT starts with a review of IDFA and is then followed by an interview with the EMPIRE team. The translation goes something like this:

Q: How this kind of experimental multi-screen work has been received so far?

A: We started producing and exhibiting EMPIRE in 2010 and we’re now almost 3 years later, so the project has been very successful so far. Young people across the world are extremely receptive. They have grown up in globalized world, so they understand the subject matter intuitively. They also accept the multi-screen format easily. Older generations seem to gravitate mostly to the historical element of EMPIRE, which is great as well because EMPIRE uncovers ‘hidden’ histories and unknown subcultures.

Q: Why did you choose your way of storytelling and what has been your experience with the outcome?

A: We chose to structure EMPIRE as a series of video installations that are exhibited simultaneously in one room. We refer to it as an ‘exploded’ feature film: viewers wander from installation to installation, from story to story. As a viewer, you create your own narrative and come to your own conclusions about what it all means. We want viewers to pick up on the thematic threads that exist in several installations. Themes like the sense of dislocation that comes from having a mixed Asian/European or African/European background run through many of the pieces, and there are also strong threads about labor, power and the exploitation of natural resources—it’s not a coincidence that we have one story about gold mining in Suriname and another about granite quarrying in India. So there are a lot of recurring elements, but there are also situations that are unique to one country/piece, which contributes to this feeling that EMPIRE is more than the sum of its parts. A frayed history asks for a frayed way of telling the story.

Q: And more general to inspire and encourage (or the opposite) Estonian young people interested in film -what are the possible channels to market this kind of documentary?

A: The EMPIRE video installations themselves can travel physically via the regular channels. However, in order to show the full scope of the project: platforms for this kind of work are currently being invented. EMPIRE cross-references several disciplines: documentary film, video art, journalism, transmedia. There is no fixed model out there, so it’s really going to depend on technological inventions to get the work out there in its intended form. We’ve just been invited to participate in the POV Hackathon, so it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that.

Q: Does the experimenting with the form so much actually makes sense?

A: Ha ha ha! What DOES make sense? We believe that this way of working and combining media is still in its infancy. People are trying to figure out how to communicate information, stories, visuals, data, etc, while using new technologies wisely. It’s exciting. We’re in a Wild West period, which is good, because our heroes have always been cowboys. And Indians.

Q: You worked in so many different cultural contexts, which all had something that connected them, but still totally different cultures. What was the most enlightening and most devastating experience of all these travels and series of mini-projects in each country?

A: Well, we worked in every country in the context of EMPIRE, so that already limits your scope. For the first four installations, we collaborated with local arts organizations in the countries that we visited. That way we could have a small safety net and meet incredible people. That was definitely one of the highlights. You can file witnessing the environmental destruction in the gold camps of Suriname under devastating.

 Q: How did you cope with adjusting with so many totally different cultures within relatively short period of time?

 A: We didn’t. You can’t. You just try to roll with it and focus on the work that you’re doing.

Q: What did you learn?

A: That the world is so incredibly small and the people in it are connected in more ways than they know. But you can find that out on Facebook as well.

(by Terje Toomistu, published in February 2013)

EMPIRE at The New School in New York

We came, we saw, we talked.

Photos by Topaz Adizes

Fifty-three Beds

The essay below is the original English-language version of our piece Drieeënvijftig Bedden, which appeared in the March issue of the magazine BK-informatie. Enjoy!

Fifty-three Beds

by Kel O’Neill & Eline Jongsma

Empire: The Unintended Consequences of Dutch Colonialism is a transmedia project that uses nonfiction filmmaking, journalism and video art to tell the human-scaled stories of people and communities whose lives are still in some way affected by the Dutch colonial endeavor. The project started with a single video installation we made during a residency in Sri Lanka, and has since grown into a sprawling monster that is eating our lives. In 2010, we gave up our house and our job to make Empire happen. We have since travelled over 140,000 kilometers across Asia, Africa and the Americas in pursuit of the stories at the project’s core. And yet, we’re somehow still not finished.

In a rare moment of downtime last New Years Eve, we calculated that we have slept in fifty-three different beds since we first started working on Empire. This means that, on average, we change sleeping spots every twenty-one days. Some of these beds were more notable than others. Here are the ones we remember best:

Bed One: Colombo, Sri Lanka

Bed One stood in a stark yellow room in the Theertha International Artists Collective’s second floor residency space. Countless itinerant artists—from Pakistan, from South Africa, from various parts of Europe—had slept in the bed before us, and it showed. We tried our best not to dwell on this on the hotter nights, when our sweat would seep into the mattress and mingle with the sweat of performers and installation artists from every corner of the globe.

When we applied to Theertha’s month-long residency, a disclaimer on the collective’s website made us keenly aware that not all of our predecessors had enjoyed their time in Sri Lanka:

“Please note that Sri Lanka is a tropical country and food and weather are both equally hot and spicy. A whole range of animal, insect and plant varieties as well as diseases that usually come with hot and humid weather conditions prevails in Sri Lanka. These may be annoying to the visitors sometimes.”

We viewed the disclaimer as a gag order against whining, and, in public at least, we kept our mouths shut about our various rashes and swollen extremities. We didn’t say a word when, one morning, we awoke to find a trio of dead 10 cm-long roaches floating in the deep-bottom pan that served as our teapot, and stayed silent again when Eline discovered one of their live counterparts wriggling around in her sundress. “Nothing annoying about that,” we’d say to anyone who’d listen. “That’s life in the tropics!”

The uneasy balance of Western mentality and the South Asian circumstance became the focus of our work in Sri Lanka. We spent two days filming in the rainforests around Badalgama, a town on the island’s northeast coast, where in the early ‘90s a wealthy Dutch fisherman had built a charity village in what he described as “the Dutch style.” The little enclave housed a community of formerly “roofless” elders—forgotten old folks without family support who now lived in quaint houses designed to evoke the storybook “Dutchness” of Monnickendam. The tropical heat and humidity waged an unending battle with the village. Wood rotted in no time. Paint peeled instantly. Red-tiled roofs swarmed with ants. The village seemed to fight valiantly against the decay, and everywhere we looked holes were being spackled, wood and bricks replaced. The village existed in a state of constant renewal.

We returned to the art space alive with inspiration, and spent the following evening sitting on Bed One with a notebook and two pens, sketching out our plans for a new video installation that would incorporate our footage of the village. We were completely unaware that this installation would be the first step in a journey that is still in progress today.

Bed Five: Brooklyn, New York

Bed Five currently lays secured behind two industrial padlocks in a 2x3 meter storage unit on the 4^th floor of a self-storage facility overlooking Brooklyn’s Plumb Beach Channel. It shares space with winter coats and half-broken cameras, as well as cardboard boxes filled with books and records, and an imitation Noguchi coffee table that at one time served as the centerpiece of our Greenpoint apartment. We slept on Bed Five while assembling the first round of funding for Empire, and put the bed into storage in November of 2010, shortly after we stopped working as the US correspondents for VPRO’s Metropolis TV, and shortly before we flew to Indonesia to continue the work on Empire.

Putting all of our belongings into storage was a difficult decision motivated by harsh economic reality. Storage is cheap, especially when compared to the price of rent in New York or Amsterdam, and cheap is what we needed in order to stretch our production budget while we worked Empire. To make the project a reality, sacrifices had to be made, and thus our new life as Hermit Crabs began.

Bed Twenty-four: New Delhi, India

Kel spent the better part of a week coughing his lungs out in Bed Twenty-four. It was May 2011, and we were stranded in New Delhi’s searing 40°C heat, watching Bollywood DVDs and trying our best to stay away from cigarettes.

We moved to Bed Twenty-four after spending a month in Bed Twenty-three, which lay inside a dusty, badly ventilated guesthouse in one of New Delhi’s rapidly developing suburbs. Bed Twenty-three kicked our asses like no bed before or since. It’s in this bed that Kel developed a rattling, hacking cough. We spent the days of Bed Twenty-three in foggy silence behind our laptops, editing like zombies while we sucked in mouthfuls of dirt and pollution. We’d use the daylight hours to cut and re-cut sequences over and over, and then retreat to the bed, where around 2 AM every night Kel’s cough would return. When we woke up one day on a pillow flecked with blood, we decided to move.

Bed Twenty-four had soft sheets and was surrounded by air conditioning that served to filter Delhi’s granular air. The bed cost more than we could afford, but we got it at a discount because the couple that owned the hotel felt pity for us. What kind of idiot foreigners come to Delhi in May?

The bed changed our luck. Editing became easier. Video sequences that we had struggled with for a month fell together in a couple of hours. Journalists from national papers visited us in our room to talk to us about Empire. They took our picture and misquoted us. They offered us cigarettes and we declined. Neither of us have smoked since we found Bed Twenty-four, and Kel’s cough has disappeared.

Bed Thirty-two: Orania, South Africa

“Orania’s 800 or so residents often refer to their village as ‘the inside’, or, in the interest of brevity, ‘inside’.’ Outside’ refers to the rest of South Africa, or perhaps the rest of the world. For the people of Orania, life inside makes sense. It is safe, crime free and governed by the rules of Protestant decency. The outside, by contrast, is violent and godless.

To drive the point home, inside and outside are separated by kilometer upon kilometer of chainlink fence and barbed wire. Beyond the wire is a seemingly endless expanse of dry Northern Cape desert. The inside isn’t dry at all; it is well watered by a network of sprinklers.”

-from ”Life on the inside,” sinisterhumanist.tumblr.com, October 9^th, 2011

Orania, South Africa is a whites-only community established by the descendents of the architects of Apartheid. The community is home to the Oewerhotel and Spa, which is in turn home to Bed Thirty-two, where we slept for 7 nights in October of 2011.

Our style of filmmaking hinges on the reservation of judgment. We do our best to like—or at least accept—everyone we film, no matter how much we may disagree with them. No one can reserve judgment forever, of course, so our strategy is to stay neutral during working hours. Then, at night, the judgment flows.

Nowhere has this working method proved more challenging than in Orania. Because the community is in the middle of the desert, and the Oewerhotel is the only option for lodging, there was really no escape from the work. The judgment could not flow freely, which after a few days led to a sort of mental and spiritual constipation. To combat this, we spent our nights in Bed Thirty-two whispering judgments into each others ears.

“These people are crazy, aren’t they?”

“Can you believe that that kid said he wasn’t a racist right after he said he would never want to live next to a black person?”

A month later, when we showed the South African Empire installation at Cape Town’s Stevenson Gallery, a young (white) woman raised her hand during the Q&A to tell us how uncomfortable the Orania footage made her. She said that a part of her wanted to see us use our film to condemn the Oranians’ racist beliefs. We responded that we never worked that way, and told her that we believed that audiences are smart enough to tell right from wrong without our prompting. She said that was what made the installation so hard to watch: it was up to her, and the other people in the audience, to draw their own conclusions. We offered no safety.

Bed Forty-two: Nieuw Koffiekamp, Suriname

Bed Forty-two was a stained twin-sized mattress that lived in an outdoor closet behind an abandoned schoolhouse in the village of Nieuw Koffiekamp. After a long day of filming in the artisanal gold mines around the village, we dragged Bed Forty-two into a concrete room in the schoolhouse where we bunked down for the night.

We woke up the next day with a bad case of headlice. As in: an army of creatures marched all over our pillows, confidently claiming territory on our heads. Despite never having seen the species of lice in question, a doctor in Paramaribo prescribed a potent crème that is illegal in the US and most of Europe due to the risk of seizures. We threw it into our hair anyway, in a desperate attempt to get rid of the parasites. This may explain why we both still suffer from dandruff nearly 10 months after treatment.

* * *

Since Suriname, we’ve found places to lay our heads in Europe, Africa and the US. We saw 5 Empire pieces premiere at IDFA in November 2012, and won a prize for a sixth piece in January 2013. We now find ourselves sleeping in a short term sublet in Brooklyn, preparing for the final stage of Empire’s production in the US, Australia and Japan. Someday in the future, we hope to take Bed Five out of storage and ship it to a place we can call home. But for now, we remain Hermit Crabs, carrying our little house on our backs.

Brooklyn, February 2013

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Space Colonialism is a thing now

“By the end of my second term, we will have the first permanent base on the moon and it will be American.”

With these words, spoken on the campaign trail in 2012, Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich pulled off a hat-trick of self-sabotage. The line is a model of rhetorical economy: rarely have hubris, ignorance and jingoism sat so comfortably together in a single sentence.

Gingrich’s ideas about space exploration are not only deluded, but are also outmoded. His words appeal to a conception of Manifest Destiny that is rooted in idealism rather than economics. Despite his hollow talk of the lucrative scientific discoveries and tourist revenue dangling above the stratosphere, Gingrich is clearly a man who wants to boldly go where no man has gone before just ‘cause. This sense of adventure may be laudable, but it is unrealistic. Now, as in the 17^th century, we expand into new frontiers in pursuit of resources, not knowledge.

Enter Deep Space Industries. In January of 2013, almost exactly one year after Gingrich’s comments, DSI declared that it would become the first deep space mining company. DSI will focus on mining asteroids, which are chalk full of minerals like platinum, gold and in-demand elements like Iridium and Palladium.

DSI’s underlying business model of finding scarce resources in inhospitable places isn’t particularly original, but it does bring the international scramble for resources to a whole new level. Throw a few interstellar rockets into the mix and China’s mineral-grabbing efforts in Africa and South America seem positively quaint. Admittedly, DSI’s efforts are still in their infancy, but the company already has its a strategy laid out. In its first years, DSI will focus on unmanned, robotic mining. Manned missions come later, presumably after the earth becomes so thoroughly depleted of resources that space miners become a viable economic option. When that happens, colonies are sure to follow. By the end of our lifetimes, we may even see Gingrich’s prophecy of a moon base come true. But we seriously doubt that it will be American.

Image by Brian Versteeg Studios from the DSI website.

NEW AMSTERDAM & AMERICA’S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE 

So we’ve just landed in New York (aka New Amsterdam), and we’re catching up on all the things that make the city special to us. Last Sunday that meant taking a walk through Brooklyn from Carroll Gardens to Fort Greene, and sitting for a while by this grimly beautiful monument in Fort Greene Park. 

The Prison Ship Martyrs’ monument wasn’t built until 1908, but the bones of the 11,000 bodies stuffed in its foundation are much, much older. If you don’t know what we’re talking about, get off our blog immediately and read the wikipedia page on the subject. 

Back? Pretty jaw-dropping, right? 

People sometimes forget that the United States is a post-colonial society. While we all know that settlers fought a bloody war against their British colonial overlords between 1775 and 1783, this struggle has since been rebranded as a bloodless folktale. In reality, both the violence and the geopolitical machinations behind the struggle were thoroughly modern: The Netherlands, along with the French (Britain’s arch-enemy at that time) and the Spanish (France’s ally) supplied arms and other supplies to the revolutionaries, in many cases using their colonies in the Caribbean as a base of operations. Imagine Iran-Contra or the US’s 1980’s Afghanistan policy, but with more tri-corner hats.

There are several connections between the American Revolution and the Netherlands, explains our friend Tristan Mostert, junior curator at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam: “Benjamin Franklin corresponded with the leader of the ‘Patriotten’, Joan Derk van der Capellen. John Quincy Adams studied here for a bit. Before the French would have their Revolution a few years later, the Netherlands were the only functional Republic in Europe and the US looked at them for inspiration in these years. The Dutch loaned a lot of money to the US in the first years of its existence.” 

So the Dutch had their reasons for backing the revolution—and had they not, there may be even more bones entombed forever in Fort Greene Park. We do wonder, though, if the Dutch just wanted to get a belated revenge against the British for taking the New Amsterdam colony. Colonial empires can be petty like that.

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WE WON!

We are proud to report that the EMPIRE prototype we made during the POV Hackathon was selected as the Participants’ Choice winner! 

Try the prototype here (NOTE: optimized for Chrome, may not work on other browsers and won’t work on mobile devices).

Also, read about it in our third blogpost for The Creators Project, Hacking the shit out of everything part 3.

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Hacking the shit out of everything: parts 1 & 2

So Empire got invited to POV Hackathon, a two-day event that brings together web developers and documentary filmmakers. We used the time to put together a digital adaptation of one of Empire’s installations (big reveal of that coming soon…).

We’re also writing a series about the experience for VICE and Intel’s site  The Creators Project. Here’s a taste:

Much of the talk coming from the design/code side of the table sounds like “bleep bloop bleep bloopity bloo.” Every now and then we learn a new term, and it becomes less opaque: “bleep bloop bleep bloopity bloo functionality.” It is literally like learning another language.

Read the rest here:

Hacking the shit out of everything 1

Hacking the shit out of everything 2

Submarine Channel’s EMPIRE video report

Have you ever wondered what the hell the Empire project actually is? This video should clear that all up.

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Film Comment’s review of the Empire project

“Hovering around 10 minutes apiece, the uninflected loops don’t need to press the points of the complex human narratives they unearth, each of which short-circuits one’s usual conceptions of a history long laid to rest.”

This quote and more in a beautiful review from Film Comment (Film Society Lincoln Center’s publication) about the Empire installation at IDFA. Read it in full here.