Remembering

Remembering. Intaglio, Digital Print, Chine-Collé. 45cm x 45cm, 2022. 

With the first print, I wanted to acknowledge the starting point for this project, i.e. the Paraguay collection at the British Museum. Since I wasn't able to go to London and access the objects in storage myself due to the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, the London team photographed and uploaded the images of all the artefacts. I noticed the system of boxes: physical storage boxes at 'The Orsman' stacked on shelves, digital folders labelled Box 1, Box 2, Box 24, etc, numbered, labelled, categorized, organized. A very neat and tidy system to organize and try to make sense of a collection, a series of artefacts outside of their natural environment. I felt a strange dissociation from the artefacts; they belonged to a different culture and time that I had little personal connection with, although I am familiar with the materials they are made from and their geographic origin. Nonetheless, I was very curious about their story and their current existence in storage. 

There is a kind of irony in the existence of the collection, in that the collector, Anglican missionary Wilfrid Barbrooke Grubb, tried to eradicate the Enxet indigenous culture and claims “[t]he people were disorganized and nomadic savages, possessing nothing that might be termed property,” yet he saw value in their artefacts, their clothing and their decorations at the very least as ethnographic objects of study worthy of preservation in a museum setting. At the same time he was eradicating the living culture of the Enxet, he was preserving parts of it by taking it away. What value do these artefacts have today, housed in storage, away from the descendents of the people who created and used them, away from the people who might still remember and know their meaning, their use, their importance?

For me, these artefacts are the starting point to question history: what does W.B. Grubb tell us about the objects and his time in Paraguay? What do indigenous voices have to say about their past and present? What do my own people, Mennonite settlers in the Chaco, tell about our arrival and settlement in the region? Whose experience, whose history is being told, preserved, taught and perpetuated? The text excerpts that accompany my prints give the reader access to different perspectives of the perception of events, thought processes, perceptions of people, and perceptions of self within colonial contexts and challenges preconceived western notions of history. The print plays with the idea of the boxes and the grid as a kind of imposition of order, of will, of religion, of a way of life, contrasted by the densely growing forest that gave everything to the Enxet: “We may have been poor, but that didn’t bother us because there weren’t any things. But we had the things from the bush.” The grey cloud and drips evoke a kind of loss, a loss of culture, and a fading of memories of the importance and the meaning of the artefacts with time.

Out of all the hundreds of artefacts in the collection, I was drawn to the incredibly long necklaces made of little discs cut from shells and pierced with hole to be threaded onto strings. I read that they were used as currency; the longer the necklace, the more worth it had. These necklaces were used as a kind of currency in trades and barters. I find the idea of creating your own currency based on skill, time, patience, need, and want, interesting. The second object I chose to print was a pipe head, because in a later text excerpt (in Loss) one of the Enlhet elders talks about how a Mennonite missionary threw their pipe in the fire to weaken the power and influence of the elders and shamans, and because for that very reason, the pipe represents a cultural power that was taken away.