PHOTO: Finn Maätita and Jerrold Saija-Tones of The Ecotone

Finn Maätita explores the interspaces of his cultural identity, resulting in multilayered media installations, where drawing, sound, moving image and performance come together. 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.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Foam Archive

The Moluccas islands also known as spice islands are a small group of islands to the north-east of Indonesia, between Celebes and New Guinea. They include Halmahera (the largest), Seram, Buru, Ambon, Ternate, and Tidore and the Aru and Kai island groups. They were known for being the largest producers of mace, nutmeg, cloves and pepper in the world. Sagu is 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 kitchen and culture, even before rice. There are 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? “Tones of the Ecotone” is the name of a collaborative exhibition by Finn Maätita and Jerrold Saija. The exhibition honors the ‘ecotone’ – the transition zone between two ecosystems, such as between land and water – and connects this with the artists’ Moluccan roots and the diaspora. The central focus is on the sago palm, the basis of the staple diet on the Moluccas, as a symbol of Moluccan ecological and physical omnipresence. The collective experience of decolonization and intersectionality motivates Finn Maätita 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 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. Maätita and Saija give thought to the experience of the Moluccan body as an extension of the Moluccan landscape, emphasizing the intersection of ecology, ancestral knowledge, and physicality. In this way, they create a new ‘shelter’: a warm, harmonious space that offers new possibilities for the future. The exhibition offers an immersive, playful and pluriform audiovisual landscape. Combining ancient wisdom, photography, assemblage, and media technologies, they express the relationship and overlap between humans, nature and ancestral knowledge. In the exhibition, images and sounds merge: the heartbeat of the artists, the rhythmic beats of the Moluccan tifa, the pounding of sago palm into sago flour, the preparation of papeda, the sound guidance of gaba-gaba sticks and the melodies of the suling gaba. The exhibition itself becomes a living ecotone, a meeting place for the Moluccan diaspora, where generations, knowledge and media merge into a new ecological whole. The exhibition “Tones of the Ecotone” serves as a metaphorical homecoming of the Moluccan diaspora, presented in the heart of the Amsterdam’s canal belt: a place intrinsically linked to the violent exploitation, destruction and forced displacement of nature and communities.

Info: Curator: Zippora Elders Tahalele, Foam, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 21/3-12/6/2025, Days & Hours: Mon-Wed & Sat 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri 10;00-21:00, www.foam.org/