CATCHING UP ON HISTORY

Ethical Imperialism & (Crafts) Education in the ‘Dutch East Indies’ after 1900

by Rosa te Velde







Working in the field of ‘design’, researcher and educator Rosa te Velde had a lot of catching up to do when it came to the colonial history of the Netherlands, which is hardly part of the curriculum of Dutch art schools. In the past decades, things have changed in art and design education: institutions aim to be more ‘inclusive’ and express the desire to move beyond a 'eurocentric canon'. But is that possible without a rigorous examination of the ‘cultural archive’ as a result of centuries of colonialism? This project looks at the period of the so-called ‘Ethical Policy’ at the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which it played out in crafts and (crafts) education at the backdrop of the violent expansion of the Dutch occupation in the Indonesian archipelago.

Rosa te Velde is a researcher, designer and teacher. The Decolonial Summer School, led by Rolando Vazquez and Walter Mignolo, which she attended in 2016, has been decisive for her work and thinking. She edited Vazquez’ book Vistas of Modernity: Decolonial Aesthesis and the End of the Contemporary (2020). In 2021 she published Drafting Futures: Remembering a Building, a research into segregation, gentrification and the ëpolitics of forgettingí in Amsterdam Nieuw-West, commissioned by De Appel. From 2022-2024, Rosa was part of the Social Justice and Diversity in the Arts lectorate at the Amsterdam University of the Arts, where she currently still works as a researcher. She is also teaching at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague at the MA Industrial Design.





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COLOPHON

AUTHORS
Marjolein van Asdonck
Raistiwar Pratama
Saut Situmorang
Marjolein van Pagee
Rosa te Velde

READERS
Fitria Jelyta
Lisa Baumgarten
Mark Oomen

EDITING/PROOFREADING
Harriet Foyster
Iris Pissaride
Marjolein van Pagee

IMAGE RESEARCH
Rosa te Velde

GRAPHIC DESIGN
Zuzana KostelanskáCC BY-NC-ND

This project is published under CC BY-NC-ND license, which enables reusers to copy and distribute the material in any medium or format in unadapted form only, for noncommercial purposes only, and only so long as attribution is given to the creator. 

Some of the texts were published before by the Wereldmuseum (02 ‘Yes, but...’; 03 A Firm Nudge & 06 A Rejuvenation Cure?).

Questions/corrections/suggestions? Contact us at
recallrecalibrate (at) gmail.com 2025

This project was funded by Het Stimuleringsfonds voor de Creatieve Industrie.




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