The Empire project

EMPIRE at IDFA

A lot of people who couldn’t make it to IDFA have been asking to see what our installation there looked like. So on the last day of the festival, after the doors to the venue were closed and the public had been sent home, we took these pictures. We think they give a nice impression of the feel of the work. 

Big thanks to Rogier, Marc, Veerle and Fleurie at De Brakke Grond for giving us such a beautiful platform for Empire—and thanks to Joost and everyone else at IDFA for an amazing festival.

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Grolsch Filmworks interview

“Ultimately, the Dutch will have to let go of the blackface, whether they like it or not.” 

In this interview by Grolsch Filmworks we talk Dutch Christmas traditions and much more.

Post production

As we’re breaking our heads over the Empire: Migrants edit, we want you to enjoy this wonderfully strange photo from our neighbors at the Tervuren archives. The photo was taken around the turn of the 20th century, in what was then the Belgian Congo.

While it paints a picture of the awkwardness of life in the colonies, the photo is also telling the viewer something about the act of portraiture—a theme that’s investigated in Empire: Migrants. Coincidence or not, it’s a great photo.

Stay tuned.

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EFM magazine

A shout out to the Empire project from EFM, a new Surinamese publication about finance, economics and management. Okay!

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Empire in VICE

VICE just published this article/photo essay we wrote/photographed about small-scale gold mining in Suriname. 

Read it and weep! Seriously. It’s actually kind of sad.

Ghana’s aging elites

Behold! The third teaser trailer for Empire: Migrants.

This time, we take a look at Ghana’s Afro-European aristocracy through the eyes of Dutch-descended photographer Isaac Vanderpuije.

Also, there are Freemasons.

Enjoy!

The European-descended aristocracy in Ghana

…aren’t what they used to be. Once the proud leaders of a country full of promise, these well-to-do fellows are increasingly relegated to Ghana’s collective memory.

The latest (and final) piece of Empire: Migrants looks back at Ghana’s aging elite through the eyes of the Dutch-descended photographer Isaac Vanderpuije, owner of the Deo Gratias photo studio. At its height in the early 20th century, Deo Gratias was the most successful photo studio in Accra. Although the studio has fallen on harder times in recent years, its walls are still decorated with images of the unofficial nobility—including a good number of Freemasons—who came to have their pictures taken. These sharply-dressed men created a hybrid culture that drew from European and African style in equal measure.

A meditation on personal presentation and the power of images, the last section of Empire: Migrants investigates the importance of recording history before it fades away.

Stay tuned for news about the film as it comes together, and for information about upcoming screenings.

European Masters

Winneba, a small city on Ghana’s central coast, was a European hotspot during the 19th century. While the African locals earned their living as fishermen, Dutch and British traders grew fat on earnings from the gold and slave trades. 

The Europeans may be long gone, but their spirit lives on at the Winneba Fancy Dress Festival, a yearly event dedicated to the mocking/lauding of the long-departed colonists. Participants wear light-skinned masks and flouncy clothes, and dance like there’s no tomorrow. Dancers choose their costumes from a variety of strictly-defined categories: there are Robin Hoods, Devils and, of course, European Masters. 

Click through the selection of our video stills on the right to see some of the old guard brought to life.

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The Craft

1859 marked the consecration of the first Masonic lodge on the Gold Coast of Africa. 

Of the lodge’s seven founders, six had British or Irish names, while one man, Brother Charles Bartels, did not. Bartels’ name placed him just slightly apart from his colleagues, and marked him as a descendant of C.L. Bartels, former Governor-General of the Dutch Gold Coast.

The late 19th century saw the end of the Dutch empire’s influence over the Gold Coast (current-day Ghana), and the beginning of British rule over the region. The mixed-race traders who controlled the colony’s commerce under the Dutch went with the flow and became anglicized. As time wore on, they mingled with the British and their British-African offspring, and joined their secret clubs. They found positions in the higher ranks of civil service, attended Oxford and Cambridge, and spoke in sparkling Received Pronunciation of the English aristocracy. 

Jimmy Phillips, whose portrait you can see in the photo on the right, is one of the last representatives of that era. Jimmy is of Dutch, British and African descent, and is connected to the Bartels family line. He is also the Freemason’s former District Grandmaster For Ghana. We love Jimmy, and are currently spending a lot of time with him and his wife Rachel while shooting Empire: Migrants.

The small-scale miners of Suriname

…are risking life and limb for the promise of gigantic gold yields that rarely appear. Click through the slide show to get a taste of their muddy, toxic life.

The Dutch could never make a solid profit from the gold business when Suriname was part of their colonial dominion. From what we saw, the latest generation of miners, many of them descendants of escaped slaves who made their homes in Suriname’s interior, aren’t doing a much better job. It’s not that they don’t find gold. They do. But the expenses associated with the trade—in terms of supplies and machinery— are enormous. And then there are the physical costs. Pits collapse. Ethnic clashes break out in mining towns. Mercury finds its way into everything from the groundwater to the air above the gold camps. 

But there is a sort of honor and courage in what the small-scale gold miners do, which is where the latest film in the Empire series comes in. Shot in two different mining communities in Suriname’s interior, the piece tells the story of a group of Maroon miners trying their best to eke out a living from their ancestral soil. They aren’t backed by a multi-national corporation, and they have only the most basic tools, but they show up every day to earn their living on their own terms. 

Principal photography in Suriname wrapped on May 7th, 2012.

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Railroad to gold

The crew on the remains of the sole railroad line built by the Dutch in Suriname. Known as the Lamaspoorweg, this line was built at the turn of the 20th century for the transportation of gold from the country’s interior to ports in the north. Low gold yields led to the railroad’s demise, but today’s artisanal gold miners use the railroad as a footpath to their gold camps. 

More information about the railroad in Dutch here.

From left to right: assistant Gilbert Lobato de Mesquita, anthropologist Marieke Heemskerk, and Eline Jongsma (with tripod ). Photo by Kel O’Neill.

Where the hell are we?

If you’re not from the Netherlands, you may have never heard of Suriname. Situated in the northeast of South America, between Guyana and French Guiana, Suriname was the last outpost of Dutch colonialism—not counting the still-in-play islands of the Dutch Antilles. 

Suriname was founded as a plantation state/outpost, and its contemporary ethnic make up reflects the full reach of the Dutch empire. The country’s meager population of 500,000 inhabitants includes the descendants of people from every inhabited continent and social strata, including:

West African slaves, Indian laborers, Indonesian merchants, Dutch civil servants, French and British plantation owners, Chinese-Javanese traders, Amerindian hunter gatherers, and every possible mixture of the above groups yet conceived by man and woman.

On the margins, the mix grows even thicker, and includes a few Southern European Jews who found their way to South America via the Netherlands, some Lebanese Christians, and even a handful of South Koreans who moved here after their civil war (see the monument to Surinamese Korean War veterans in our slide show to the right).

Suriname’s newest immigrants arrived from northern Brazil. They started coming here in the last few decades, lured by the promise of a fortune beneath Suriname’s soil.

And that’s where we come in. Stay tuned.

Welcome to the jungle

We’ve spent the last three days scouting for our latest film Empire: 10º00’ S, 55º00’ W here in Holanda, Brazil.

Click through the photos for a glimpse of the places we’ve seen and the people we’ve met.

World domination

It’s official: Empire is going West! For the next year, we will be following the traces of the Dutch West India Company (GWC) in Brazil, Suriname and Ghana. 

The new set of films, entitled Empire: Migrants, will be produced with funding and support from the National Archives of the Netherlands. 

So with our four Dutch East India Company films, plus Bakermat, plus the new additions, we’re basically gunning for world domination.