Summoned From Obscurity: Reflections on the Colonial Depot

Being Part European, (the film) sheds light on what is deliberately kept in the dark, making visible an otherwise concealed infrastructure that presents a physical architecture of colonial persistence. Through the film, we witness not colonial history but the ongoingness of coloniality itself. It exposes how these depots constitute not merely storage facilities, but are also active monuments to an epistemic order that obscures whether these cultural forms were brought by missionaries, civil servants, or military expeditions. It obscures whether they were gifted, traded, looted, or stolen. In doing so, this obfuscation of provenance reaffirms the colonial refashioning of cultural theft as preservation, displacement as protection, and silencing as curation. Through the lens of van Tulder’s camera, we therefore confront not only the objectification of lifeforms but also the hidden grammar of power that arranges them. 


Consider this exhaustive labyrinth of gaining access: almost one year of unanswered and delayed communications, followed by two years of bureaucratic negation before the filmmaker could finally breach these storage buildings of cultural seclusion. In conversation with Mirelle, she speaks of experiencing an institutional fear, which she carefully left vague. However, I observe this anxiety as an echo of the colonial logic’s fear of perpetual vigilance against uprising, the persistent dread that haunts colonial power. It is the fear of never knowing when the subjugated might reclaim what was violently appropriated. Or, in other words, when the colonised might challenge the coloniser’s narrative of authority. I cannot de-link this institutional fear Mirelle experienced, together with the secrecy surrounding these buildings, from the continuation of the colonial fear of being confronted, of being held accountable, of losing control over the narrative. 


My subjective interpretation should (of course) not exhaust other possibilities; the institution’s hesitant attitude toward visitors may also stem from fears of ‘ritual practices’, concerns about material damage, lack of resources, lack of prioritisation, or perhaps the risk of exposure leading to public criticism. Whatever the reason may be, what remains incontestable is the calculated inaccessibility of the depot, for they exist beyond public awareness, let alone public scrutiny. The depot in ’s-Gravenzande, housing an astonishing 97% of the collection of the Museums of World Cultures, remained long unknown even to scholars engaged with questions of Dutch colonial restitution and cultural heritage. It is nearly impossible to understand this active invisibility as anything other than a foundational feature of continuing coloniality, for it is the institution that has the power to determine what remains unseen, unquestioned, and unaccounted for. 


The fragments offered by the film highlight the fundamental partiality and incompleteness inherent in any attempt to know or represent such an immense repository of dispossession. As the camera performs its slow, contemplative movement across the dispossessed artefacts, it offers a fleeting moment of encounter before revealing another frame where more artefacts emerge from darkness. Each transition between frames feels like an interruption, forcing viewers to break the continuity of the moment that came before. It is like a visual rhythm, a choreography of appearance and disappearance, moving between revelation and concealment. What Mirelle strikingly manages to present is the limits of knowing, not mastery but disorientation. In my experience, the film therefore feels less like documentation and more like an initiation. It is a first step into an archive of absence, an orienting gesture toward that which was kept from orientation. 


Being Part European invites us into the work of confronting what the project of modernity and coloniality has simultaneously preserved and erased. Mirelle approaches this work with care, resisting spectacle and refusing to provoke the gazing, spectator-object dynamic we are all too familiar with. To engage with these ancestral presences, be it through the film, is to consider the very conditions under which we think, as these presences embody the impossibility of tracing back linearity. Simpson’s poem reminds us, ‘We came from nowhere. / We belong to no one. / We belong to nowhere’. His words extend beyond diasporic subjectivity, as these displaced cultural forms share this fate. These ancestral presences, too, carry with them entangled lineages, ‘a white ancestor, / a black ancestor, / a colourful ancestor’. Their trajectories of dispossession render them irrevocably transformed. For now, they remain suspended between worlds, ‘between either or neither, / between either and or,’ lost in the nonworld that is the depot.


What then is to become of these cultural materials? Is their destiny forever contained within these hidden walls, arranged yet clustered upon metal racks, occasionally summoned from obscurity when their presence serves the thematic needs of an exhibition somewhere?


The question of colonial art restitution has been reverberating throughout Europe from different angles. Between 90 and 95 per cent of all cultural artefacts originating in sub-Saharan Africa reside not in the spatial location of their cultures of creation, where they once had purpose, and perhaps now could be(come) keys to a past. Instead, they are hidden somewhere within European institutional walls or perhaps in some private collection; who knows?


While advocates of postcolonial restitution campaign for the return of artefacts to their countries of origin, others question whether such simplicity is complicit in masking contemporary colonial complexities. What precisely constitutes return? Is it a matter of state-to-state transfer or between cultural institutions? What about cultural inheritances arriving in settler-colonial states or contemporary regimes long alienated and detached from the contexts that produced these artefacts? Should restitution not also be possible to the originating cultures? But how might this even be accomplished when international legal frameworks currently only recognise state to (origin) state transfer¹⁰?


Should this conversation in the West not begin with a reckoning with who ‘we’ are in this context and what the position of this Western ‘we’ should and can be in this practice? What happens if we (the West) stop speaking and start listening? Because how can a Western institution approach the question of restitution decolonially while still positioning itself as the central, authoritative voice that continues to reproduce the hegemonic order? The standard argument is that the matter is complex. And yes, it can be. But is it always? Must we not wonder? Or does the invocation of complexity serve as yet another colonial waiting room? Is this the familiar tactic of deferral that delays action whilst maintaining Western institutional control?


The institutional fear that surrounds these materials (that is, the reluctance to grant access, to acknowledge their existence, and to keep information hidden) suggests an unspoken recognition of this power. Even in their very silence, these ancestors speak volumes. They testify to the colonial foundations upon which European modernity built itself. It is precisely from this condition that the histories they interrupt and the futures they invoke become legible. In their suspended presence in the colonial depot, they already hold keys: to what has been lost, to imagining otherwise, and to what may become. Such recognition invites us to feel/think with and through their rootlessness: to sense here not lack, but the profound potential for otherwise-ways of coming and being together.


Mirelle’s work beautifully voices these suspended ancestral presences through Simpson’s words, capturing the difficulty of inhabiting this imposed in-betweenness. And so I end, not with resolution, but with the practice of the question—an invitation to wonder together where this moment leaves us and might lead.