‘Expedition Content - Ernst Karel & Veronika Kusumaryati’

In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner led the Harvard Peabody Expedition to what is now West Papua. Funded by the Dutch colonial government and private donors, the group—made up of wealthy Americans armed with 16mm cameras, stills, and reel-to-reel recorders—spent five months in the Baliem Valley among the Hubula (or Dani) people. The expedition produced Gardner’s influential film Dead Birds, two photo books, Peter Matthiessen’s Under the Mountain Wall, and two ethnographic studies. Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil fortune, was responsible for capturing sound and images of the Hubula world.

Expedition Content is an augmented sound work for cinema, composed from 37 hours of archival tape. It reflects on the complex entanglements of anthropology, colonialism, and personal histories—of the Hubula people, of Michael Rockefeller, and of West Papua itself.