Excerpts from a Plantocracy 
2026, 2-channel installation

In collaboration with sound artist Malu Peeters
The Netherlands officially abolished slavery across its colonies on 1 July 1863. Yet in Sumatra's plantation belt, Dutch authorities used a legal construction granting planters far reaching power over racialized migrant workers. The Coolie Ordinance and Penal Sanction allowed criminal sanctions including corporal punishment and imprisonment. Planters used debt and deception to recruit and hired secret police to hunt down runaways and crush organized resistance. 
As Dutch men flocked to Sumatra to work as overseers, the plantation companies barred them from brining European women. Reproductive, domestic, and sexual labour demanded from Javanese women factored invisibly into the profit model. The plantocracy was facilitated by a concealed power structure – one that remained hidden behind closed doors and beyond the camera’s gaze – sustained by Dutch men’s dependence on, and dominance over, Javanese women confined within this colonial system.
Archival images of corporate propaganda from rubber plantations, fragments of written correspondence, and contemporary images converge in this two‑channel installation. Excerpts from a Plantocracy unfolds a layered composition whose haunting soundscape, assembled from fragments of field recordings and foley sound, lingers between past and present.
This work has been supported by EYE Film Institute

EXHIBITION
EYE Film Institute, Eye(s) Open, Curated by Hicham Khalidi