The Empire project

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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COLONIAL COCKTAILS! (part 2)

Discussions about colonialism can get tense—especially in the Netherlands, where certain aspects of the country’s colonial past remain very touchy. Since liquor loosens tongues, we’re starting an every-now-and-again series called “Colonial Cocktails,” where we sit down with historians, journalists and filmmakers, make them drinks of our own devising, and ask them for their take on colonialism.

This week’s expert is Tristan Mostert. A junior curator of the Rijksmuseum’s history department who wrote his master’s thesis on 17^th century VOC warfare, Tristan has all kinds of insights into why the Dutch transformed from fearsome warriors into bike-riding peaceniks. His conclusion: they gave up.

Tristan is drinking a Jodensavvane, our slave-revolt themed cocktail that is a variation on a Bourbon Old Fashioned.

Kel O’Neill: So how do you like the cocktail?

Tristan Mostert: Well, after what you told me about it I’m not sure I really can like it, of course. But it’s good.

KO: We were wondering if you could draw any continuity between private armies as they exist now, and as they did during the initial VOC military experiment.

TM: Yeah, it’s a different thing. Nowadays we think of armies as being national armies, usually with conscripts and you have to have your passport and there’s all sorts of links to nationalism and the like. This simply didn’t exist in the days of the Dutch East India Company. Conscription, well it happened, but it was rare, and it always met with great opposition. Nationalism, like it developed later, wasn’t there yet, and all armies, even the Staatse legers, which were like the state armies of the Dutch republic, were much more like private armies, and the Dutch East India Company simply had been allowed to have an army of its own. But also, if you ran a small trading company you brought cannon. There wasn’t much of a violence monopoly at the time. It was a lot more open. So if you tried to compare the Dutch East India Company to Blackwater, you’d run into problems.

KO: When you look at VOC sea battles, do you think that most of the time the conflicts that came up were conflicts of self-protection, or conflicts of aggression by the VOC?

TM: The first bit of warfare that the Dutch East India Company waged, I suppose you could say, was mostly defensive. 

It was an extension of European conflict. The Netherlands were at war with Spain, which automatically meant they were at war with Portugal. It was the same king at the time. They wanted into the Asian trade and tried all kinds of things to make that work, but in the end they were going to end up getting shot at by the Portuguese. And then, at a certain point, they started shooting back.

Later, they start winning. They beat the Portuguese up quite a bit, then they discover, specifically in the Moluccas, that violence can be very practical if you want to enforce certain trade conditions. And they start doing that with relish. They’re very practical about it—they’re not out to conquer the world. It’s not the second half of the 19^th century. They use it when they think it’s profitable.

So if they think, “hey, we can beat up these people in the Moluccas and it will help us with our spices,” they do that. If they see a big Japanese shogun or Indian Moghul who is more powerful than them, they say, “no, wait, we’ll just build a little settlement there and we’ll be very nice to you.”

Often, when people talk about early colonialism, this whole 19^th century notion comes with it. So in the 19^th century, European countries swarm across the world and really divvy it up. And they bring steam engines, and they bring antibiotics, and they bring rifled artillery, and they’re willing and able to conquer the world.

At the height of its power, the Dutch East India Company had 10,000 soldiers spread out across pretty much half the planet. And you could discuss, yeah, that the ships were a litte better and they had firearms, but the technological differences weren’t that great. There were cases, particularly in Taiwan, where the Dutch East India Company was just smashed by a largely Chinese army.

Eline Jongsma: The Dutch aren’t known these days to be fierce warriors or anything. How were they doing in the 17^th century? How did they compare to the others?

TM: To the English and the Portuguese? They did exceedingly well, but they also had the time with them. The Portuguese empire was kind of falling apart and the Portuguese were very cocky, like most colonial empires are, and felt that they could win it all. But in reality their organization wasn’t too good, and was a little outdated. As soon as they came to blows with the Dutch, the Dutch won and won and won until the 1660s, when the Portuguese had a few specks left and the rest was taken.

EJ: Why do you think that changed? What happened to us?

TM: In the 18^th and 19^th century we were passed left and right by other European powers, and were no longer a serious party in battles, or in wars at all. So I guess we kind of stopped trying at some point. I guess that’s the short answer.

EJ: So you sort of automatically retreat if you’re not one of the big players?

TM: Well, they tried. I mean during the Napoleonic age, when you had this whole mess with the colonies, they tried to defend the Cape. They failed miserably. They tried to defend Java. It worked for a bit, then the English took it all the same. They’d already lost most of India. They fought. They just weren’t too good at it anymore. 

And that’s all folks! See you next time.

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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.

C'est magnifique! →

Holy shit. This French blog just compared our work in Suriname to the best documentary ever made.

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De Ware Tijd

Right after we left Suriname, we got a write up in one of the country’s more progressive newspapers, De Ware Tijd. 

They also put up the article on their registration-required website (boo!), but if you want to avoid all that hassle, just click on the fast & dirty cut & paste job we put together on the right and give it a read. 

Direct link, such as it is.

The ecstasy of gold

Or is that “agony”?

In this trailer, we take you into the illegal gold mines of Suriname, where half of the country seems to be seeking their fortune.

We’ve never worked harder to get images. Hope you enjoy them.

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.

Day off with sloths & anteaters

Working on this gold rush story can be tough. That’s why we like to spend our days off hanging out with sloths and anteaters.

(check out the anteater urinating in the dogs mouth at 00:59)

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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.

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First days of shooting

Meet Peppe, a Ndyuka gold miner in central Suriname. Peppe is currently relaxing in front of the remains of a Dutch Army jeep parked by the banks of the Saramacca River.

In addition to being a gold miner, Peppe writes and performs reggae songs in Sranan Tongo.

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El Dorado

Guess what? There’s a gold rush going on in Suriname and its no joke.

Every day, gold seekers travel from the city to the bush, their hired minibuses stuffed with water pumps and pick axes. You can buy these items—along with knee-high waders and vials of mercury—at any of the Chinese-owned supply stores that line Saramacca Straat in Paramaribo. The mining itself mostly happens south of the city, on the ancestral lands of Maroon and Amerindian tribes. Tribal leaders are in on the game, and earn healthy commissions (paid in gold, of course) on everything that comes out of the ground.  

In the 16th and 17th centuries, Dutch explorers came to the Wild Coast of South America looking for gold. In the ensuing centuries, they found some deposits in Suriname, locked away in the impenetrable jungle of the country’s interior. Faced with the daunting prospect of creating the infrastructure necessary to extract the riches, the Dutch quickly shifted their focus to more profitable ventures, like the slave trade and sugar plantations.

Now that gold prices are through the roof and Suriname’s road system is (marginally) better than it was during Holland’s Golden Century, it’s time to take a look at the players behind one of the least documented mineral grabs in the 21st century.

Photo: a freshly-smelted  500 gram bar of Surinamese gold, market price $25,000

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.