Affiliated researcher at the Amsterdam Centre for Ancient Studies and Archaeology. Current projects: Dutch Mediterranean fieldwork history; protohistoric Latial pottery; archives of Frisian archaeology; archives on UvA research Wieringermeer.

GLAM professional since 2014. Previous roles at UvA include field director of the Satricum Research Project, researcher and lecturer in the archaeology department, postdoctoral researcher in the anthropology department (AISSR), co-creator of PRAXX studio greenhouse for alternative practices and histories.

Board member of BABESCH foundation Dutch Study Centre for Latium. Co-initiator of platform argos
Awards: Municipality of Latina (2007) Mervyn Heard Award (2020)

MAKING MEDITERRANEAN PASTS

Het project Making mediterranean pasts: stories from the archaeological field is een project over de geschiedenis van de Mediterrane archeologie in de Lage Landen. De aanleiding is de wens voor een geschiedenis van de Mediterrane archeologie in Nederland en België, en het maken van bronnenmateriaal hiervoor.

2021-2025 Een serie interviews met inmiddels gepensioneerde wetenschappers (archeologen, fysisch geografen, technici) over hun benadering van het archeologische vak tijdens hun loopbaan; met speciale aandacht voor theorie en methodiek. De interviews worden t.z.t. gearchiveerd bij een universitaire bibliotheek.

2027 Bundel met interviews.

Making Mediterreanean Pasts is een vervolgproject op History of Mediterranean Archaeology in the Low Countries.

History of Mediterranean Archaeology in the Low Countries

De eerste editie van HMALC vond plaats in het RMO in 2019. Voor de eerste keer waren onderzoekers van de geschiedenis van Mediterrane archeologie in de Lage Landen bijeen om naar elkaars onderzoeken te luisteren. Het resultaat was een zeer informatieve dag over de verschillende manieren waarop geschiedenis van de Mediterrane archeologie gedaan kan worden. De dag was lang van tevoren volgeboekt waarmee het voor het platform duidelijk was dat er in een inhoudelijke behoefte werd voorzien.

Tijdens de dag vonden vier sessies plaats: 1. Repository initiatives for future historical use; 2. Histories of archaeologists and collections; 3. Histories of methodologies I; 4. Histories of methodologies II. De dag werd begonnen met een keynote lecture van Ruurd Halbertsma over de motivatie van Nederlandse archeologen om veldwerk te doen in het Mediterrane gebied. De dag werd afgesloten met een discussie over de mogelijke toekomsten voor (de geschiedenis van) de Mediterrane archeologie.

Laboratory Wieringermeer

The project Laboratory Wieringermeer: new land knowledge production 1936-1939 (Polderen met kennis: UvA wetenschappers in de Wieringermeer 1936-1939) is a short-term 'ethnography of archives' project on research carried out by the University of Amsterdam in the Wieringermeer polder in the 1930s, focusing on ethical tinkering and datafication in community research, and on landscaping as a community building technique. Consists of: archival research, interviews with children researched in the 1930s, publication.
May be extendend with analogous project on the Pontine Region polders in the 1930s (Italy) and/or on data collecting practices of the presentday Wieringermeer mega-servers.

MAGIC VISIONS

Jeltsje Stobbe, Rosa Deen & Margriet van der Waal

The project (2019-2021) concerns the conservation and digitisation of a lantern slide collection which has led to an online collection, an essay volume and an expo.

Context

The Zuid-Afrikahuis in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, houses an interesting collection of lantern slides. The slides depict how South Africa was ‘branded’ through specific categories to potential Dutch labour migrants looking for better lives at the beginning of the twentieth century: urban development, industries, agriculture, nature and relations between various population groups. Two issues arose for the curator.

VISIBILITY. Little was known about the slides except for generic qualifications as ‘non-unique’ materials. As it is difficult to discuss the potential value of such slides when hidden in boxes, the slides were cleaned, preserved and digitised in 2018-2019. Another means to enhance visibility was to search for cross references with other collections. A rediscovered archive on Dutch labour migration to South Africa made the slides relevant, as the migrants had been lured into a new life by exactly these same images. The archive has been digitised in 2018-2019 (Metamorfoze grant: 2017). Together with the lantern slides it provides promising research material for a comparison between the ‘branding’ of South Africa in the Netherlands and the actual experiences of Dutch migrants as written down in their letters.

PURPOSE. One matter of concern for open research data is whether all that could go online, should go online. Another one is the theme of this specific collection: the paper descriptions on the slides are of a colonialist terminology no longer appropriate, and the topics depicted might be received ambivalently at best once online. It was decided to wait with both descriptions and metadata, and first invite various scholars to take a look at the slides, to think along with us about how to make the collection known. For this, the project MAGIC VISIONS was set up.

Project

ESSAY VOLUME. A group of 18 authors was invited to participate in an essay volume. They were invited to browse through the digitised slides which were made available on a temporary project website, and to pick a few slides for an essay. Some authors took a historical approach, others focused on postcolonial or personal reflections or made an art project out of it.

The result is the essay volume: Jeltsje Stobbe, Rosa Deen & Margriet van der Waal. eds. Magic Visions: portraying and inventing South Africa with lantern slides. SZAHN Series no. 2. Amsterdam: Zuid-Afrikahuis, 2020. ISBN/EAN: 9789083038513 (electronic version); ISBN 978-90-830385-3-7 (paper edition). The volume will be made available as a (free) downloadable pdf and as a print-on-demand book.

EXPO. Alongside the essay volume an artistic research project was set up. One of the authors took a selection of damaged lantern slides to a serigraphy lab, and explored what happens when one reproduces these slides. The result is printed in the essay volume and is currently visible in an expo. The expo runs in the gallery space of the Zuid-Afrikahuis until Feb 2021.

Leonor Faber-Jonker. When Memories Become Dreams. Expo space Zuid-Afrikahuis Amsterdam, 8/10 - 19/11 [extended to 31/01].

New insights and contributions

The project led to new insights on how to engage with lantern slides of what is often considered as contested heritage. As a curator it is tempting to first catalogue and write only later. In this case it proved highly fruitful to immediately engage multiple sets of eyes, to gain various perspectives on and engagements with the slides. The various reflections on the slides and their terminologies will be taken into account for the description and online release of the lantern slide collection which is scheduled for winter 2020-2021.

Another insight was how to make a collection maximum visible with minimum means in a relatively short period. The Zuid-Afrikahuis is a small knowledge and heritage organisation and tries to find manageable ways to present its collections to a wider public. Especially the basic temporary project website which was set up to present the digitised collection in an early stage to potential authors proved very useful to generate both interest for the lantern slides and the other collections. Hopefully the freely downloadable pdf of the book will do the same.

Acknowledgements

The project MAGIC VISIONS has been made possible by a generous gift from the Gravin van Bylandt Foundation.

The project was awarded the Mervyn Heard Award 2020 of the Magic Lantern Society for which we are very grateful. The prize money that came with the award has been donated to a photography project in South Africa.

The conservation was done by former UvA student of conservation and archaeology Marijke Top (Atelier 't SCHERVENGERICHT). The digitisation was done by photographer Anneke Dekker (AEM Dekker Fotografie; also photographer for Archaeology dept. at UvA).

SOLID KNOWLEDGE Bunkers, data and the materialities of information

a hands-on transdisciplinary research seminar by PRAXXstudio

BUNKERS

The bunker has encapsulated, molded, and stunted the imaginaries of the 20th century as an architectural by-product and illegitimate spawn of aerial war, cabin ecology, cybernetic systems, and modernist brutalism. But, far from being abandoned, the current return of looming apocalyptic futures lets new lives crawl and move into the empty spaces and deep figures of underground shelters. While humans are still the beneficiaries of the security of these spaces, other less fleshy kinds are increasingly making their way in: knowledge, information, data are all crowding into the narrow niches of old and new shelters.

Bunkers nowadays are meant to protect, hide, manage and make accessible the circulation of knowledge. These spaces represent a useful vantage point to consider current articulations of theories and practices of knowledge, and their various materialities. While modernity relies on its profession of faith in the immateriality of information - especially in the excitement of the coming singularity, it simultaneously grounds itself in very specific and solid material infrastructures. Attending to the contemporary transformations of bunkers as part of these infrastructures, the seminar will focus on this figure, object, and space to unfold the ways in which knowledge is materialized today; and will ask what these materializations do to modernity, and how playing and tinkering with them might allow us to undo modernity.

SESSIONS

The first three sessions (reading sessions) will be dedicated to building a shared conceptual infrastructure to approach this theme. We will read accounts and explorations of the convergence of ideas and practices of knowledge, design, security and access that will help us elaborate a theoretical toolkit to approach bunkers. Following this conceptual phase, three more sessions (PRAXX sessions) will be devoted to specific cases - also with the help of invited speakers. These will emerge from the discussions and interests of the group, but will also include cases like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, CyberBunker, the bunkers of the UvA collections, or other examples of encounters between data and bunkers. Aim of the seminar is to develop the conceptual and material tools to rethink the articulations of knowing, designing, protecting, accessing and bunkering. Our thoughts, experiments, examples and collaborations will ultimately be assembled in a collaborative virtual exhibit-repository and be discussed in a one-day seminar in autumn 2018.

PRAXXstudio

PRAXXstudio : greenhouse for alternate practices and histories was initiated by Filippo Bertoni, Tjitske Holtrop and Jeltsje Stobbe and kindly hosted by the Central Library of the University of Amsterdam in 2017-2018. Although in a dormant state at the moment we are always happy to think and practice along with similar initiatives.