The Archives of Science gallery is hosting an exhibition by an artist whose photographic practice straddles the realms of knowledge creation, activism, and magic. Maite Vanhellemont’s works offer an aesthetic experience whilst also creating a space for personal transformation. Working on the project “A Little Memory of ‘The Beginning’”, Vanhellemont conducts artistic research into a family archive of films and photographs. She reflects on her Dutch-Indonesian heritage and the history, full of ambiguities, of her ancestors entangled in the postcolonial history of the 20th century.

 

The artist’s grandparents and her father were born in Indonesia into families of mixed origin. The story of their Dutch ancestors has faded into obscurity; the origins of their family history may lie either in a bond that bridged cultural divides or in the crude violence of colonial domination. One might also assume that the ambiguous status of people of mixed heritage encapsulated the complexities of colonial exploitation and domination, rooted in the false notion of European cultural superiority. This condition proved particularly fraught during the turbulent period of the Second World War and the Indonesian National Revolution (1947–1949), ultimately contributing to the decision to emigrate to Europe. Family accounts of this period are fragmentary. Reconstructing the events from the perspective of Amsterdam is hampered by the hypocritical language of Dutch propaganda and the silence of those involved, which may conceal an unspoken trauma—or perhaps, merely an experience—of transgression so complex that it defies verbalisation.

 

Maite Vanhellemont does not deny her ancestors the right to remain silent; she does not attempt to tell the story from beginning to end. She rejects the psychoanalytical doctrine that holds that becoming aware of suppressed memories is an essential prerequisite for coming to terms with it. Instead, she undertakes actions bordering on the magical—she travels along the trajectory of her family’s history, photographing the family garden, the river, and the volcano. She folds paper boats. She plants a tree. Through embodied practices, derived from haptotherapy and family constellations, she tries to find new rituals to engage with inherited memory and the stories that remain unspoken.

 

One might think that the history of the Dutch colony is so far removed from the Central European experience that it has no bearing on issues relevant to the Vistula region. Is that really the case? After all, the mechanism of gene expression and transgenerational trauma is not culture-dependent. Many Polish families have in their history stories of losing loved ones, losing homes, and land, of imprisonment, deportation or forced resettlement. Many also have a hidden memory of guilt—of involvement in the apparatus of repression, collaboration, denunciations and pogroms. Racism is replaced by class contempt—all the more difficult to grasp the more blurred the line becomes between the perpetrators and victims of exploitation, who are not distinguished by language or skin colour. The language in which the past might be recounted is lost amid shifting political propaganda and the understatements of private narratives. Maite Vanhellemont proposes a “consent to silence,” suggesting that by accepting the fragmentary nature of collective memory, we may turn to simple, embodied gestures that create a sense of belonging.

The work of Maite Vanhellemont (b. 1990) moves at the intersection of family stories and collective history. In the project A Little Memory of The Beginning, she reflects on her Dutch-Indonesian background using archive material, photography, video, drawings, and text. In collaboration with FW:books she will present this project as a publication at the end of 2026.

In the spring of 2025, she was selected for the Fotodok Talent Embassy (NL), and in 2024, the project Zoals mij gewoon is (As is common to me) was presented as a solo exhibition during the SPOOR Art Festival (BE), in collaboration with the Plan B Arts Platform. In 2021, she self-published Our Silver Lining, which was presented at various art book fairs in Europe.

In addition to her work as a visual artist, she works as a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Utrecht (NL) and as a language volunteer for a group of women at Stichting Dynamo in Amsterdam (NL). Maite Vanhellemont holds a bachelor’s degree in photography and is currently following the part-time master’s programme Education in Arts at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam (NL).