Online Exhibition: From Cartography to Cookbooks

From Cartography to Cookbooks: A Web of Dutch Colonialism is compiled by students of the Master’s in Museum Studies at the UvA. Each year a new group of students has an opportunity to organize a small exhibition at the Allard Pierson, in collaboration with curators. This year we’ve made a virtue of necessity and opted for a completely digital exhibition. From Cartography to Cookbooks: A Web of Dutch Colonialism shows how seemingly neutral objects such as maps and cookbooks can embody a history of violence and suppression.

By focusing on the Dutch colonial context of the East Indies and, to a lesser extent, the West Indies, the students explain how cartography and cookbooks connect with the larger post-colonial story of Dutch colonialism: a story of violence and exploitation. The selected items are arranged according to three themes: gender, environment and space. Viewers are invited to question and decipher the messages that these objects communicate today. In addition, the students want to create space for discussion: both for the (online) visitor and for the Allard Pierson which, as the museum and knowledge institute of the UvA, aims to shed light on the heritage collections from multiple perspectives.

The online exhibition is in English because of the language used for the Master’s in Museum Studies.

Petra Huijgen