Expedition Content

An immersive work of sonic ethnography, Expedition Content draws on audio recordings made in 1961, by Standard Oil heir Michael Rockefeller, during the Harvard–Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea. Nearly imageless, the film examines the encounter with the Hubula (also known as Dani) people, unsettling the power relations between sound and image, anthropologist and subject.

Veronika Kusumaryati: 'Dead Birds is a landmark ethnographic film; it is very controversial, not only in terms of its position within the canon of visual anthropology, but also in the history of the representation of the Papuan people with whom I work as an anthropologist. We are very critical of Dead Birds, precisely because of its emphasis on the fetish of the visual that is based on the representation of black bodies, [particularly] male black bodies, and how the Papuans are muted. So the way we composed Expedition Content, we attempt to challenge Dead Birds by meaningfully engaging with and being in conversation with it. For instance, in the archive, we found so many recordings of women: women who speak, women who laugh, women who work. So, for expressivity, we want to put women's voices in there, in the recording.’

Ernst Karel: 'The cinema [...] is a wonderful space for listening. [It's] like a built-in multi-channel listening environment. Whereas in the field of electroacoustic music, and other kinds of more sound-centric situations, venues are really not to be found. Basically people set up loudspeakers for concerts, it's not like there's usually a setup place where you go. [B]ut cinemas do exist, so we kind of imagined [the film] from the beginning as a sound piece for cinema, and even before there was any visual element at all. I'm not claiming any originality in that idea. [T]here's one essay that we sometimes read in my class: "Four and a Half Film Fallacies" by Rick Altman. I think it's the ontological fallacy, as he describes it, which is the idea that image without sound we take as cinema, but [...] sound without image, for some reason, wouldn't qualify as cinema. He's arguing with a lot of old historical examples that there hasn't always been image combined with sound.’

— Excerpted from Open City Docs Fest 2020 Focus: Listening Against A Colonial Present, 'An Interview with Expedition Content's Ernst Karel and Veronika Kusumaryati’