The powerful interventions of the Indonesian artist, cultural studies scholar and filmmaker Timoteus Anggawan Kusno are internationally renowned. What distinguishes them are the empowering attitude and the breathtaking aesthetics he employs to re-interpret in different media the cultural traditions passed on in his homeland. With “Afterlives”, he delivers another unequivocal reckoning with the representations of history shaped by colonial annexation.
The opening sequence is already a declaration: On the soundtrack we hear screaming, in which both pain and its liberating relief are manifest and united. On screen we see an explosion of colours: Jathilan, a ritual Javanese war game, is being performed. Men are dancing on horses made of plaited bamboo until they fall into a trance or the evil spirits are driven away. The impressive precision of the editing to tribal trance music by Setabuhan makes the colonialist archive images expose themselves – and fade. Those of (dance) performances in which the Javan tiger, killed multiple times in historic rituals, is symbolically reanimated come to the fore. In the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, it now guards – in the shape of a re-interpreted colonial sculpture – the empty frames that once gave (representative) power to the governors-general of the Dutch East Indies.

“My therapist said it’s like an Abschied,” Monica Vanesa Tedja says. Monic embarks on a journey from Berlin to Indonesia to return to the bosom of the family for a short while. The camera is in the luggage, and an important question: Can the devout Christian parents who are so happy about the visit accept their child’s non-binary, queer concept of life and identity instead of blocking it out?
In the beginning we see private archival footage of a supposedly perfect childhood. Monic talks about their own dreams and fears. We listen to tense phone calls with the mother and exchanges with friends, we learn details from therapy sessions. This film is not about harsh confrontations but rather about a quiet departure, about changing relationships, the significance of biological and chosen families, about letting go and arriving – perhaps where you least expect it.