Indonesia is a place of constant comings and goings, a maritime world where things appear on the horizon, wash up on shore, surface and disappear with the rhythm of the tides and seasonal patterning of the monsoons and trade winds. They arrive as random, occasionally serendipitous, often oblique traces of travels and trade, of myriad lives led near and far, today or in times past. 

Flotsam & Jetsam is the concluding conference of the Swiss National Science Foundation-funded project, “Images, (In)visibilities, and Work on Appearances (ImageApp),” centered around the projects and practice of visual artists in port cities and towns across eastern Indonesia, especially Banda and Ternate in Central and North Maluku. Historically, as the source of coveted nutmeg and cloves, these small islands were at the very center of European competition and greed, and remain in some respects scarred by their brutal, violent histories. Yet today, as in the past, these places speak back and against their destruction--through prophecies emitted from the flickering tops of volcanoes, spirit voices agitating from distant mountains against the “new spice” nickel, presently extracted in North Maluku with devastating social and environmental consequences, through the care shown the ruins of old clove trees in gardens aromatic with cinnamon and climatically-challenged if still healthy cloves, and through activism and compelling artwork. These are the places from which the visual artists and practitioners, including (drone)photographers and filmmakers, primarily hail and/or concern themselves with. Their projects and practice will be at the center of the five-day conference convened at the Geneva Graduate Institute from May 12-16.

Flotsam & Jetsam is meant as a loose gloss that gathers some of the themes of the conference built around exhibitions of art and photography, film screenings, exhibition tours, three roundtables, and discussion. Orienting roundtable topics are materialities foregrounding artistic craft and visual experimentation through work that repurposes materials from till paper, spices, and discarded wood to archival footage and photographs;  spaces of encounter privileging questions of attunement, sensory and affective engagement, modes of address, and circulation; and everyday archives/alternative histories exploring speculative and reclaimed histories, memory work and futurities that are suggested and set in motion by the art projects of conference participants. More broadly, we are interested in “decolonizing the image,” seen as a process, a challenge, and a provocative, wide-ranging set of questions.