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Our Moluccan island grounds are covered with the pohon Sagu (Sago tree), a palm tree indigenous to Maluku. A cohabitant of the people on the islands. Roofs, walls, and furniture are made of its leaves, stem, and bark. It's soft marrow, made into flour, is a base ingredient in our kitchen and culture, even before rice. We have numerous myths, stories, and songs about the tree: It is an Ancestor of Maluku.
Moving further away from the islands, the tree is not common. The relation with it becomes suspended and alive only through the tongues and hearts of the ones who remember. How can the Moluccan diaspora find reconnection with this close relation?
In the shape of a mixtape we seek to make a portal, an ancestral communication tool to re-emerge this part of our heritage, community and identity. We revive the many tongues that speak on the Sago tree, who can come into voice about their relations. By retracing memories, feelings and smells the mixtape transports you into the Palm’s plentiful entanglements. Please listen with an open heart, friendly to the Sago’s spirit. And with open ears, beyond binaries and spoken language, to what is being sung and spoken between the lines.
Finn Maätita is a Moluccan-Dutch artist and researcher, born and raised in the Netherlands. He recently graduated in Photography from the University of the Arts in Utrecht. Maätita explores the interspaces of his cultural identity, resulting in multilayered media installations, where drawing, sound, moving image and performance come together. The collective experience of decolonization and intersectionality motivates him to make himself heard and seen as a Moluccan individual. "I remember the way I saw things as a child. Taking on a constant experiment with a language that was imposed by someone else.”
Jerrold Saija focuses on unlearning cycles of harm caused by colonial history and its impact on the Moluccan body. In his artistic practice he draws upon grief, oral history, lived experience, archives, memory and pleasures of the Moluccan body. He navigates new possibilities within and around that what remains. Clowning, photography, sculpting, 3D modeling, rendering & printing, as well as storytelling are used as tools to reconnect with what has been lost. Objects and installations re-emerge, becoming ancestral communication & healing technologies.
