Sins Beneath the Equator
This past year, I’ve been working with Marco Zero, an investigative news agency in Recife, in the northeast of Brazil, and Nest, an exhibition space in The Hague, to bring you a collection of 100 short, location-based podcasts, on the history of the Dutch colonisation efforts in northeastern Brazil.
This project was funded through a grant by the Dutch Stimuleringsfonds, as a response to an Open Call which asked to highlight the Hidden (Hi)stories of the Dutch colonial past. In response to the call, 13 fascinating and diverse projects received funding, with the overarching project wrapping up with a symposium at the end of last month.
Sadly, I had to attend, and present, remotely, not being able to travel to Rotterdam for the occasion.
This Friday, December 20, on the 345th anniversary of the death of Maurice de Nassau, the German governor of Dutch Brazil who controlled the Dutch colony for 7 years, the accompanying website will see its soft launch, which I’ve built as a map-based storytelling platform.
The podcasts ‘live’ on the platform Placecloud, which I run as part of the NGO I co-founded, walk · listen · create, and combines location-based technologies, audio, and Google Street View. The website will launch on Friday, but the first set of a a few dozen podcasts, viewpoints, are available right now on Placecloud.
The website dives deeper into the contextual history, and provides transcripts of all the narratives, all in three languages, English, Portuguese, and Dutch.
Back in 2018, Natalia and I visited Olinda, close to Recife, from where the Dutch governed their colony. As we were admiring the facades of some of the buildings, a man came around the corner, and started talking to us. Figuring that we were tourists, but assuming we were both Brazilian, the man was a tour guide, and tried to sell us his services. One of the very first things he said was “Oh, if only the Dutch had never left, Brazil would have been a much better place, today.”
It’s fun to speculate on alternative futures, and, perhaps the man was right, who knows? But, considering that Holland literally burned Olinda to the ground a year after capturing it, and are responsible for what historians consider the only successful genocide in world history, on the Banda islands in Indonesia, facts on the ground suggest our Olindense tour guide might not have been quite correct in his assessment.
Back in 2006, Ismail Farouk and I pioneered using digital storytelling tools to retell the history of the Soweto Uprising, generally considered to be the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa. The website, using now very outdated technologies, has long disappeared down the memory hole, though an interview for The Guardian, conducted ten years later on the 40th anniversary of the uprising, is still available online.
Since then, I have extensively experimented with map-based storytelling, including in the project The Museum of Yesterday, with Agência Pública, which showed the dark underbelly of Rio the Janeiro, through stories of colonialism and corruption.
Originally released as an app, this, too, stood to be lost to time, changing technologies and requirements making it difficult to keep the app alive, in the two leading app stories. However, this one I did manage to sustain as a slightly more robust, if slimmed down, online platform.
So, late last year, when I came across the open call from the Stimuleringsfonds, specifically asking for innovative ways to uncover the hidden history of the Dutch colonial past, I felt the project was perfect for my interests, abilities, and context. I managed to convince both Marco Zero, and Nest, to team up and, now, almost, the rest is history.
Both the main website, and Placecloud, are web-based, not app-based. Hopefully, this means they’ll stick around for a decade, or two.
This Friday, we start with around 25 viewpoints, location-based podcasts, each available in three languages. We’ve got anther 65, or so, lined up, and then another 15 should come in from Holland. Over the next few weeks, we’ll release new viewpoints every week, so if this is your thing, we’re set to entertain you for a while.
Visit the accompanying website to browse the material, and to sign up for receiving updates in your inbox.