She focuses on three series of facial casts taken by Dutch anthropologist J.P. Kleiweg de Zwaan in the Netherlands East Indies in 1907 and 1910.
“Reading” the facial casts as an archive of faces and an archive of plaster has the potential to reveal information systematically left out in their object biographies, including the colonial networks of control which made the plaster-casting possible.
She seeks out additional information to bring the object closer to the person whose face was appropriated for various colonial ends.
This epistemological experiment explores the first steps which can be taken to create a decolonial view of the large anthropological plaster-cast collections in European museums which have been left anonymous for decades.
