Excerpts from a Plantocracy

Synopsis

The Netherlands officially abolished slavery across its colonies on 1 July 1863. Yet in Sumatra’s plantation belt, Dutch authorities created a legal structure that granted plantation owners sweeping control over racialized migrant workers. Through the Coolie Ordinance and Penal Sanction, labourers could be imprisoned, fined, or subjected to corporal punishment. Planters relied on debt, coercion, and deception to recruit workers, while private police forces hunted down runaways and crushed resistance. European overseers were discouraged from bringing European women to the colonies, making Javanese women central to the domestic, reproductive, and sexual labour sustaining plantation life. This hidden structure of dependence remained largely absent from official colonial imagery. Combining archival propaganda footage, fragments of correspondence, and contemporary images, this two-channel installation reflects on the enduring violence and silences of Dutch colonialism.