Empire: The Unintended Consequences of Dutch Colonialism by Eline Jongsma & Kel O’Neill

From Atelier Carvalho Bernau:

In a 4 year, 150.000 km tour de force, Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill travelled the globe tracing the unintended consequences of Dutch colonialism across the five continents. They distilled their findings into a series of interactive films and installations, trying to show the complex and emotionally fraught consequences of the Dutch empire. This book is at once their research report, travel diary, and collection of their notes and findings, as well as a catalogue of the four projects that resulted from Eline’s and Kel’s research.

In close collaboration with Eline and Kel, we proposed an editorial structure that synthesises these different aspects. Parts of the book are linear, and parts are clustered together by topic. Different narrative modes and different kinds of content have distinct visual and material treatment, and individual typographic voices.

Headers and footers on every page give the reader orientation about the place, time and project that every text belongs to. Call-outs in the margins of the text work as exit cues: Further explanations in the form of web links that we asked Eline and Kel to compile specifically for this publication.

We think that this can be one function that a book can fill better today than any other medium: To act as a narrative centerpiece, permanent and with a feeling of immutability in itself, while at the same time pointing outward, referencing and making use of other forms of communication.

For Eline Jongsma & Kel O’Neill, Los Angeles, 2014.
132 pp., 17×24 cm.

Photos: Nadine Stijns