Wednesday, June 17, 17:00 – 20:00

at the Van Abbehuis (Bilderdijklaan 19, Eindhoven)

Across islands, archives, museums, photographs, rituals, and intimate domestic spaces, the films in this programme investigate how histories of colonialism, extraction, and systemic violence persist in the present. Fragments in the shape of discarded objects, inherited statues, forgotten photographs, personal memories, and acts of burning, question who has the authority to preserve history and whose narratives are allowed to endure.

Together, these works propose alternative forms of witnessing, where beings, everyday objects, and personal gestures become carriers of silenced histories. They challenge institutional systems of value and knowledge, revealing how colonial and historical legacies continue to shape ideas of authenticity, ownership, memory, financial worth, and belonging. Moving through cyclical, fractured, and embodied understandings of time, the films uncover the violence concealed beneath ordinary landscapes and familiar images.

Rather than seeking a singular or objective truth, this programme embraces history as a fragmented and contested terrain, shaped by multiple voices, memories, and ways of knowing. Moving between fact and speculation, remembrance and imagination, the films propose truth as a collective collage—one that challenges dominant (hi)stories and opens space for more plural ways of remembering, relating, and imagining the future.

Line-up:

A Machine for Making Authenticity | Mirjam Linschooten
2025 | 07:44 | Dutch/English | The Netherlands

A Machine for Making Authenticity emerges from research around a group of wooden statues inherited from sociologist Norbert Elias, traced back to various West African regions. Through conversation and poetry, it brings together Ghanaian artists and historians, Nigerian and Surinamese thinkers, Dutch collectors, and Elias himself, whose perspectives form a shifting constellation around the objects. The statues become sites where questions of authenticity, value, migration, replication, memory, spirituality, and art are continually negotiated.

Interesting Things | Salome Erni
2025 | 11:10 | English/Dutch | The Netherlands

How to look at photographs while witnessing a genocide? Interesting Things is the title of 59 negatives that were shot in Palestine by Dutch photographer Frank Scholten in the 1920s. This video essay reflects on appropriating visions, unstable connotations and meanings in flux. The artist decides to be present in the video essay herself while handling the negatives and reciting the voice-over. By inverting the video footage – and thereby turning the negatives into positives – the film deals with the notion of the gaze while emphasizing that we not only partake in the act of watching: Everyone is related to Palestine.

Pearls on Credit | Tony Dočekal
2023 | 16:58 | English | The Netherlands

A young woman examines her reflection as two competing voices shape the space around her: one unravels the relentless pursuit of creditworthiness, the other recites Allen Ginsberg’s America (1956). Through this collision of personal and political narratives that centers a female perspective, Pearls on Credit explores how systems of value are inscribed onto the body and how they can be resisted.

BREAK

La Quema (del Planeta “B”) | Francisco Baquerizo-Racines
2025 | 21:26 | Spanish | Ecuador/The Netherlands

La Quema (del Planeta “B”) connects the 1624 burning of Guayaquil by the Dutch Nassau Fleet to Ecuador’s present-day año viejo ritual, where sculptures are burned each New Year. To mark 400 years since the colonial event, artists Joshua Jurado and Diego Cuesta created a galleon inspired by a Dutch East India Company ship, which was paraded and burned as part of the ritual. Through an Andean zig-zag understanding of time, the film explores history as a continuous process of repetition, renewal, and protest. Filmed amid rising violence in Ecuador, it reflects on the enduring colonial and capitalist structures that continue to shape the present.



Dream Your Museum | Khandakar Ohida
2022 | 18:00 | Bengali | India

Dream Your Museum follows Khandakar Selim, a 75-year-old collector from a village in West Bengal, India, who has spent over five decades gathering discarded objects to build an inclusive museum of memory. Blending documentary, handmade animation, and magical realism, the film transforms ordinary objects into witnesses of forgotten lives and marginalized histories. Through Selim’s lifelong project, Dream Your Museum questions how systems of value are shaped by class, colonial histories, and exclusive, institutional systems. The film reimagines collecting as an act of solidarity, care, and resistance against dominant narratives of cultural value.

Curated by Text My Sister.