re:assemblage collective

Expedition Content

Directed by Veronika Kusumaryati and Ernst Karel
USA/Indonesia · 2022 · 78'00

Four years in the making, Expedition Content is an exploration in “decolonizing the archive” through deep listening. The nearly imageless film is constructed from recordings made in 1961 in West Papua by Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil family who had been involved in early oil exploration in New Guinea. Rockefeller made the recordings as part of an expedition organized by another figure: filmmaker, professor and Harvard Film Archive co-founder Robert Gardner.Many of his films would enter the ethnographic canon, though he strived to set himself apart from that rigid categorization by taking a distinctly poetic, philosophical approach.

Without dismissing the endeavors of their forebears, Karel and Kusumaryati open up the cinematic and ethnographic space to allow for more points of view, for questions and reconsiderations. Expedition Content film brings sounds unheard for decades, out into the open and now into the Papuan archives as well. While West Papua remains occupied by Indonesia, Rockefeller’s formerly hidden audio archive also represents a vital preservation of much of the Hubula language and traditional songs which have been lost to current generations through years of colonial rule, exploitation and globalization. (Harvard Film Archive)

Veronika KUSUMARYATI is a political and media anthropologist working in West Papua, a self-identifying term referring to Papua and West Papua provinces of Indonesia. Her scholarship engages with the theories and historiography of colonialism, decolonization, and postcoloniality. She holds a doctoral degree from the department of anthropology at Harvard with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies. She is an affiliate of the Sensory Ethnography Lab and currently a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University. https://acmcu.georgetown.edu/profile/veronika-kusumaryati/

Ernst KAREL works with sound, including electroacoustic music, experimental nonfiction sound works for multichannel installation and performance, image-sound collaboration, and post-production sound for nonfiction film. Lately, he works around the practice of actuality/location recording and composing with those recordings, with recent projects also taking up archival audio. At the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard University, he collaborated on sound for a number of films and developed and taught a practice-based course in 'sonic ethnography.’ http://ek.klingt.org/