This spring, Zone2Source invites Paula Albuquerque for a research exhibition in het Glazen Huis in which she will present new works while exploring the Amstelpark for questions around the representation of landscapes.
For her solo exhibition Colonised Landscapes and Spectral Deterritorialised Flora, Albuquerque focuses on the portrayal of the colonised landscape in formerly occupied territories, alongside the role of early film as a form of proto-surveillance in sustaining and perpetuating colonial structures.
The material is drawn from the Eye Film Museum archive, including home movies made between 1912 and 1940 in the former East and West Indies, which depicts Dutch settlers’ journeys that shaped how the Netherlands perceived its overseas territories.
Using audio and visual monitoring devices, both digital and analogue but also experimental and improvised versions thereof, Albuquerque will study plant species that were appropriated during the colonial era, patented by Western systems that replaced their native names with colonising taxonomies. Plants like these were finally relocated to various botanical gardens, such as the Amstelpark and the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam, where Paula conducts her artistic research.
During this two-month exhibition at Zone2Source, Albuquerque will work in the Amstelpark and experiment with ecological processes for film development. She will present installations with surveillance equipment and analogue film connecting in and outdoors.
Paula Albuquerque‘s practice questions the legitimacy of archives that create social stereotypes, which still haunt the contemporary social fabric. Assembling historical and contemporary moving image and photographic materials, she analyses how they support politics of dispossession and discriminating racialised and gendered representation
het Glazen Huis
