A research and exhibition project on Basel's colonial history at Theater Basel. Provenance research in collaboration with Basel museums (Museum der Kulturen, Natural History Museum) and artists from Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Research: 2018 - 2019 Exhibition: January - May 2020 Foyer Grosses Haus, Theater Basel, Switzerland Curatorial team: → Vera Ryser → Sally Schonfeldt Supported by: ETH Zurich, SNF Agora Project, The Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, Christoph Merian Foundation, Ernst Göhner Foundation, Aargau Kuratorium
In the name of science, two naturalists from Basel, Fritz and Paul Sarasin, brought back exotic animals, plants, ethnological and archaeological objects, as well as skulls and skeletons from various colonial territories to Basel around 1900. In doing so, they laid the foundation for one of the largest ethnological collections in German-speaking Europe. The history of the Sarasins was comprehensively examined in Bernhard C. Schär's study Tropenliebe (Tropical Love). Based on this study, Ryser and Schonfeldt initiated a research project focusing on the gaps in the Sarasin collections in Basel and invited artists from Indonesia and Sri Lanka to engage with these objects and their history.

In cooperation with Theater Basel, which produced a play about the lives of the Sarasins, Ryser and Schonfeldt curated an exhibition and mediation project in the theatre's foyer. This resulted in ten different art works by Rahmat Arham, Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige, Julia Sarisetiati, 'Jimged' Ary Sendy Trisdiarto, Angela Wittwer, as well as Ryser and Schonfeldt. All artworks reference and comment on each other within the overarching exhibition structure. Thus, a material and visual world is created in the foyer of the theatre that refers to the colonial connections between Switzerland, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka around 1900, commenting on and critiquing these connections from a polycentric perspective and from various geographical viewpoints. The exhibition is accompanied by a public programme featuring guests from the fields of science, art, and education. The point of departure for Voices from an Archived Silence is the colonially acquired collections of two major museums located in Basel — one in the Museum der Kulturen (MKB), the other in the Natural History Museum (NMB). In particular it revolves around local Basel-born Swiss natural scientists Fritz and Paul Sarasin who contributed significantly to both museums’ collections. Both are also closely intertwined with the foundational histories of the two Basel museums, not to mention being intimately involved with numerous other important cultural institutions in Basel. Fritz Sarasin was the founding Director of the Museum für Völkerkunde (today’s Museum der Kulturen) in 1918, he was also the Director of the Natural History Museum from 1899 to 1919. The Sarasins both came from wealthy Basel patrician families and obtained scientific degrees from prestigious European universities. Their considerable wealth afforded them the ability to self-fund their scientific collecting expeditions in colonially occupied countries at the turn of the 19th century. The work stems from an investigation into Colliq Pujié (1812–1876), a writer and anti-colonial Sulawesi intellectual and mother of Queen We Tenri Ollé (?–1919), whose dynasty ruled over parts of Sulawesi at the time of the Sarasins’ expedition. Pujié actively instigated resistance against the Dutch colonial powers by means of a codified secret language that she distributed in the form of sureqs, or oral poems, and which incited local populations to rise up against their colonizers. The audio-visual work brings Pujié’s voice of resistance into the present. “My works are inspired by a personal desire, as a Sri Lankan, to set the record straight and to defy the indifference of Fritz and Paul Sarasin’s scientific expedition to Ceylon in 1883. Going beyond reductive categorizations of people and intrigued by their writings and expeditions, I decided to follow in their tracks 136 years later.“ “‘The Parisian colour chart’ was created by Paul Broca, the founder of the Paris Anthropological Society. He had specifically created a skin colour chart for the Sarasins according to their needs in dividing the people of Ceylon into different races during their scientific expedition in the 1900s. The colours were grouped into Vedda Men skin colours, Vedda Men chest colours, Vedda Women skin colours, Vedda Women breast colours, Tamil Men skin colours, Tamil Men chest colours, Tamil Women skin colours, Tamil Women breast colours, Singhalese Men skin colours, Singhalese Men chest colours, Singhalese Women skin colours & Singhalese Women breast colours. At some point this colour chart was not enough for dividing the people examined and the Sarasins had to extend the colours of the original chart. For this work I decided to select three colours from the original Sarasinian skin colour chart used to represent Vedda, Tamil and Sinhalese people.“ “During my expedition to Sri Lanka I also documented the environmental and economical changes that have occurred since the Sarasins’ journey to Ceylon. I collected objects from the Vedda community, as well as some sample materials from each village area, such as earth and rocks. Mirroring the Sarasins’ historical collection of ethnographic and skeletal material during their expeditions to Sri Lanka, I have installed a contemporary re-enactment of this practice of collection in the vitrines in the Foyer of the Theater Basel.“ In her work Voices of the Ancestors, Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige actively subverts and repeals the scientific racism that led to the production of three Vedda exhibition figures in the MKB collection by producing a contemporary 3D version of them, based on her own self. In doing so, she not only reflects on the violent racialized “othering” practices embedded in the figures’ construction, but also on the contemporary legacy of racist practices. In reclaiming the position for herself of someone who would have historically been “othered” she offers us a poignant subversion. The library is conceived of as a concentrated space that offers visitors a chance for indepth reflection on the Swiss colonial entanglements elaborated on in the exhibition. Through the provision of a curated selection of both contemporary and historical literature the library acts as a counter-space, in which an alternative reading of Swiss history is offered. Books can be consulted on-site or copied to take away. How have practices of “othering” traditionally functioned? One historical strategy in ethnographic museums was the production of racialized stereotypical exhibition figures used to represent a certain “race” of people often deemed “primitive” in the logic of the late 19th century up until the mid 20th century. Fritz and Paul Sarasin used this logic in the production of three plaster exhibition figures depicting Vedda people that they commissioned for display in the Völkerkunde Museum (today’s Museum der Kulturen) in Basel in the early 20th Century. Ryser+Schonfeldt reverse and reconfigure this “othering” gaze on the Sarasins themselves. By producing 3D copies of two busts, which stand in the lobby of Basel’s Natural History Museum honouring Fritz and Paul Sarasin, Ryser+Schonfeldt demand an urgent self-reflection from today’s Swiss society in confronting historical and contemporary forms of “othering.” Two historical display vitrines offer a fictionalized imaginary of Fritz and Paul Sarasin’s everyday life in Basel around 1900 as a counterpoint to the history of their scientific expeditions to colonially occupied Indonesia and Sri Lanka. In the vitrines, which were historically used in museum displays constructing ethnographic views of exoticized “Others” at the Museum für Völkerkunde (formerly Museum der Kulturen), Ryser+Schonfeldt subvert a Swiss “othering,” gaze and turn it back on itself. Through an assemblage of objects, images and documents attesting to colonial presences in Basel, such as Tea tins advertising with racial depictions of colonized subjects, juxtaposed with the wealthy interiors of Fritz and Paul Sarasin’s Basel abode, the vitrines provoke a critical reflection on those collecting, rather than on those being collected. Grounded in ideas of critical whiteness and the need for white Swiss society to self-reflect on its own significant role in colonial enterprises, Ryser+Schonfeldt turn the mirror around with their fictionalized display. In doing so the duo asks what a museum display of ourselves and our own practices of exoticizing “Others” might look like? What could an object lying in a museum storeroom tell us about itself and all the different contexts it has been entangled in, if it could tell us its own story? Using this question as a foundation for a two year long archival research in two of Basel’s museum collections, the Natural History Museum and the Museum der Kulturen, Ryser + Schonfeldt have created two so-called Object Biographies. Selecting an individual object from each collection, a preserved bird from the Natural History Museum and a pair of lifesize exhibition model figures from the Museum der Kulturen, the duo shows the different colonial entanglements encircling each object. On two large-scale stage curtains and accompanying museum boards intervening in the existing architecture of the Foyer, the two objects biographies offer a comprehensive selection of both primary and secondary archival images and texts. By situating each object’s trajectory within a complex field of trans-local networks, the colonial provenance of the two objects, as well as the museum collections themselves, are revealed. In Sarisetiati and Trisdiarto’s video works, A Possibility of Owning Other’s Text, Colliq Pujié’s sureqs are performed and re-sung in the present by a group of local workers at the Sulawesian port of Parepare. Parepare is significant today as a site of numerous resistance struggles against precarious labour conditions as well as of contemporary Indonesian (undocumented) migrations to Malaysia in search of employment. By actualizing local voices of historical resistance the work embeds a defiant continuum of resistance and anti-colonial struggle at the port, countering Western historiography with its Indonesian counterpart.