Paula Albuquerque / Netherlands / 24’ / 2024

During her research at EYE Filmmuseum archive, Paula Albuquerque has encountered travelogues, home movies, and institutional films made by Dutch settlers in Indonesia, which bypass the colonial conflict to present a benevolent relation to the local people. Siluman challenges the Western and masculine aesthetic notion of the sublime to expose film’s construction of the colonial landscape as exotic, including indigenous people as part of nature and awaiting structure and exploitation.
It unveils early colonial documentary’s haunting of the contemporary reality of Buruh Siluman, which is the Indonesian term for palm oil plantations’ women “ghost-workers.”

Concept and production Paula Albuquerque
Voice Over Axelle Maillet
Translation Jean Couteau / Pascal Philippe
This project is supported by AFK (Amsterdam Fund for the Arts), Creative Industries Fund NL, EYE Filmmuseum, Mondriaan Fund, Zone2Source – testing ground for art & ecology

Paula Albuquerque
Albuquerque is an Amsterdam-based Portuguese artist and scholar showing work in solo exhibitions at galleries Zone2Source (2024); Bradwolff Projects (2023, 2018, 2015), Looiersgracht 60 (2023) and Nieuw Dakota (2020); with films at International Film Festivals IDFA (2024); Ji’hlava IDFF (2024); DocAlliance (2024); DocLisboa (2023); Sheffield DOC|Fest (2020) and Rotterdam IFFR (2016); and conferences EYE International; Media in Transition at MIT; NECS; and Visible Evidence. She published the books Enter the Ghost—Haunted Media Ecologies (2020) and The Webcam as an Emerging Cinematic Medium (2018). She is currently a Senior Researcher at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, an Assistant Researcher at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, and a Supervisory Board member of the Framed Framed Contemporary Art Platform.