Moluccan Archive x Museum Maluku
One photograph says more than a thousand words. Museum Maluku is proud to announce its collaboration with Moluccan Archive. Together we are joining forces to share the story behind a photograph and to expand both photographic collections. For this article we talked with the driving force behind the Instagram account Moluccan Archive and our brand-new partner: Talita Talaksuru.
Collaboration
Through its Instagram account, Moluccan Archive shares a remarkable collection of photographs and videos devoted to Moluccan and Dutch history; an initiative by Talita Talaksuru, who started this account two years ago. With this collaboration we want to share as much photographic material as possible via our Instagram accounts in the period ahead and take you into the story behind the photograph. To make you think (critically) and to start a broader conversation. We also want to invite and inspire you to dive into your own (family) archives. We hope to be able to add your photographs to our photographic collections. Help us expand our photographic collections and show the diversity of our community over the years.**
In conversation with Talita Talaksuru
Can you tell us something about yourself and why you started Moluccan Archive?
My name is Talita Talaksuru, I am 23 and I come from Assen. At the moment I am finishing my studies and working at the Drents Museum, where I am helping with, among other things, the opening and fringe programme of the exhibition Molukkers in Drenthe, which will take place in April 2023.
To get a better picture of where I come from, I regularly found myself in various online archives and particularly in the archives of Museum Maluku. Through all the different images I came across, I learned even more about our history, and in that way I felt even more connected to where I and where we come from. I wish that feeling for everyone, and that is the main reason I started Moluccan Archive two years ago. I also wanted to create a platform where you could experience our culture, values and history through the years at a glance.
For Moluccan Archive you work a great deal with photographs and images. What appeals to you most in the photograph as a medium?
A photograph says more than a thousand words. Images can give you a feeling that no word can match. Some images are simply a delight to look at, others are sometimes quite confronting or precisely very powerful. In the end it can give you a sense of recognition, of connection, and a better understanding. That is what I find so especially beautiful about it.
Which subjects within Moluccan culture (in the Netherlands) would you like to give more attention through the photographs you post? And what do you hope to achieve with the collaboration between Moluccan Archive and Museum Maluku?
Our history and culture are enormously rich and diverse and have so much of value to tell. My focus is therefore on making that picture – through images – even more complete, for ourselves and above all for the next generations. That is why I am very much looking forward to the collaboration with Museum Maluku, and we warmly invite you to share images so that we can strengthen and preserve our collective memory and thereby our shared cultural heritage. Because I believe that when we can feel our roots more deeply, we will flower even more strongly.
Donating photographs?
Do you have photographs, negatives or slides that strengthen our collective memory and might be of interest for our photographic collections? Would you like to donate your photographs to both Moluccan Archive and Museum Maluku? Or do you have more information about a recently shared photograph? Get in touch with us at collectie@museum-maluku.nl.
