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Rediscovering and preserving: meet collection manager Esmée Manubulu!
Meet Esmée Manubulu, our new collection manager at Museum Maluku. We talk with her about her professional background, her renewed connection with her Moluccan roots and what it means to her to work at Museum Maluku.
From collection management to restoration
"I was born in Arnhem, but after my parents divorced I moved to Assen with my brother and my Dutch mother. My father is Moluccan, but I did not grow up in a Moluccan neighbourhood. My grandmother on my mother's side always took me to museums and taught me about art and culture. That interest grew, and after a vocational course in decoration and restoration in Zwolle I took the degree course in Cultural Heritage in Amsterdam, specialising in collection management, care and preservation. From my second year of study I was already working in the collections department of Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle. By now I have ten years of experience in collection management and I also work as a book and paper conservator."
An unexpected reconnection
Esmée worked with a wide range of collections, from modern art to military objects, but never specifically with Moluccan heritage. "In 2024 that changed. My grandfather on my father's side died, and as a result I had more contact again with my father's family. Shortly afterwards my father died too, which brought us even closer together as a family. Suddenly I was taking in more of Moluccan culture, I went to the Moluccan church in Marum and realised how much I still had to learn."
That year Esmée travelled to the Moluccas for the first time. "My brother and I had never been to Ambon. It felt like the close of a hard year, but also like a new beginning. I was well prepared; I had heard the stories all my life. Even so it was a hundred times more beautiful than I had expected. As it happened, Huib Akihary (former Head of Collections at Museum Maluku) was on a working visit in Ambon at the time, and we went to Museum Siwa Lima together. It simply fitted; it was meant to be."
A new beginning at Museum Maluku
In that very year of rediscovery, Henry Timisela, director of Museum Maluku, approached Esmée about the role of collection manager. "We had been in touch before, but two weeks after my father's death we arranged to meet. It felt like the right step. As collection manager I focus on the preservation and management of objects. A curator tells the story of an object, but I make sure it is still in perfect condition in a hundred years' time. I do not make exhibitions, but I arrange everything else around the collection."
Some objects struck her immediately. "On Ambon I saw a parang salawaku for the first time, and now I come across them again here in the collection. The furniture from the barracks also makes a deep impression; it shows the harrowing conditions in which Moluccans lived in the Netherlands. Such as a mortuary table that was probably used as an ordinary dining table in the barracks."
Heritage as healing
For Esmée her work feels like a way of rediscovering her background. "Working with Moluccan heritage is for me a reconnection with a part of myself that I ignored for a long time. Now everything falls into place. This is exactly the right moment, and exactly as it should have been."
