AMN x wysiwyg: Can you hear the objects speak?

In recent years, the Dutch government has launched a series of critical inquiries into the ethics of restitution—addressing looted artifacts and even human remains held in the national collection. Moving beyond straightforward provenance tracing, these investigations have raised more fundamental, open-ended questions about value, ownership, and justice.

Derived from Beyond Provenance, a transnational collaboration between art collective Indeks from Bandung and screening platform wysiwyg from The Hague, this interdisciplinary film program, Can you hear the objects speak? by Asian Movie Night and wysiwyg, seeks to reclaim the living worlds of displaced heritage. Rather than focusing solely on material significance—a logic that often mirrored colonial frameworks of preservation—the program foregrounds the emotional, cultural, spiritual, and communal values these objects hold for the communities from which they were taken, as a gateway to understand the animist and relational cosmopraxis shared by many Indigenous nations in the present day Indonesia.

Through film, conversation, and performance, we will listen to the voices of ancestral beings held hostage in museums, mineral stones extracted for AI technology, as well as the ghostly presence in the streets of Amsterdam built by looted wealth. In doing so, it challenges the Western ontological impulse to turn living beings into static objects, and instead reawakens a sense of liveness, agency, and wisdom in the beings we connect with, thus learning different ways of relating—ways that may help us not only rethink restitution, but also reimagine worlds and futures beyond the crisis we are facing.

• Language: Indonesia, English
• Subtitles: Engels
• Duration: 90 mins.
• Country: Indonesia, the Netherlands, Australia, India