Being Part European

Around the world, Indigenous artworks and sacred objects, stolen from their origins as the spoils of colonial ventures, are kept by museums as part of ethnographic collections. Of the hundreds of thousands of articles held by the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands, only a minute portion is on display to the public. This film moves through the aisles and corridors of the secluded depot that stores the majority of the collection, casting light upon shelf after shelf of effigies, sculptures, and textiles dislocated from their cultural and spiritual contexts. Guided by the words of Fijian poet Sam Simpson, Being Part European invites us into an unsettling space, opening the vault to these ancestral objects and the memories and knowledges they hold.