A new research project on Indonesian repatriated heritage, entitled “Exploring New Futures for Indonesian Objects: Dismantling Colonial Knowledge Production and Recovering Lost Histories and Memories” was officially launched on 25 January 2025. Supported by the Dutch Research Agenda (NWA), this project is a three-year initiative co-led by Professor Bambang Purwanto (Department of History, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada) and Professor Ihab Saloul (Amsterdam School for Heritage, Memory, and Material Culture, Universiteit van Amsterdam).
This research emerges as a critical and timely response to the unresolved challenges of decolonizing heritage practices, particularly in the context of repatriation. In many existing cases, repatriation is still largely understood as a legal or logistical transfer of ownership from one institution or country to another. However, such approaches often fail to engage with the deeper questions of what is actually being returned: What are the histories, functions, and cultural meanings of these objects? What do they represent for the communities to which they once belonged? In response, this project seeks to move beyond repatriation as a symbolic or administrative gesture. It reframes repatriation as an epistemological process, a return not only of objects but of knowledge, memory, and cultural authority.
Through an international consortium, comprising the Universiteit van Amsterdam, the Wereldmuseum, the Rijksmuseum, Universitas Gadjah Mada, and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Indonesia, this initiative aspires to unsettle inherited colonial narratives that continue to shape how Indonesian heritage is catalogued, displayed, and theorized. By focusing on the collection known as Lombok Treasures that looted from Cakranegara Palace in Lombok in 1894, this project not only investigates the circumstances of their removal and circulation, but also asks how these objects were used, valued, and remembered before and after their displacement, and how they might live again within contemporary Indonesian cultural life in the present and the future.
In alignment with its mission to foreground local knowledge systems, this project actively cultivates partnerships with key stakeholders, such as local communities, museums, cultural institutions, and government bodies. This project also forms a foundational part of a cutting-edge educational research program in critical heritage studies. The team includes two postdoctoral researchers, one PhD candidate, and one MA student, all engaged in an integrated academic trajectory between Universitas Gadjah Mada and the Universiteit van Amsterdam under a sandwich program. Their work will not only contribute to the intellectual core of the project but also represents the next generation of scholars committed to decolonial heritage practice.
Ultimately, Exploring New Futures for Indonesian Objects is not merely a research initiative. It is a transformative intellectual and cultural undertaking that challenges us to confront the legacies of colonialism embedded in heritage practices. By reimagining repatriation as a starting point rather than an end, this project opens up new pathways for knowledge recovery, historical justice, and cultural revitalization. It invites scholars, institutions, and communities to engage in a more honest, inclusive, and dialogical process of understanding what heritage truly means, not just as artifacts of the past, but as living entities with relevance for the present and visions for the future.
