News and Info

On January 31, 2010 Viktor Kaisiëpo passed away at the age of 61 in his hometown Amersfoort. He had been seriously ill for some time. This Papuan rights activist will be sorely missed by many. PACE (Papua Heritage Foundation) has worked with him on a number of occasions and is truly thankful for his input. Viktor initiated and set up a framework for  Papua Pride Day held on 28 November 2009, gave us advice and was a speaker at PACE meetings.

On Saturday afternoon,  August 15, 2009, the day the Japanese capitulation is commemorated, State Secretary Jet Bussemaker was informed about the state of affairs, the realisation and the location of the web portal ‘Indië in Oorlog’ (The East Indies at war). This portal combines information about World War II in the Dutch East Indies from various heritage institutions and will be managed by Indisch Herinneringscentrum (East Indies Memorial Centre) Bronbeek.

The monthly PACE (Papua Heritage Fund) meeting  known as ‘the Pig Salon’ is open to the wider community and on 11 October 2009 there was a presentation of the Oral History Project ‘Papuans in Diaspora’. An increasing number of Papuans really want their life stories to be passed on to future generations.  The Project has been sponsored by the Ministry of Health, Well-being and Sport (VWS) and 25 people were interviewed. Many of them lived through World War II events that occurred in Former Dutch New Guinea ( during the Japanese invasion). Thirty-one conversations were recorded ,which amounts to a total of about seventy hours of interview time.

Until January 10, 2010, a large retrospective exhibition ‘Beyond the Dutch’ is on show at Centraal Museum in Utrecht.  Art works by more than forty artists, among them Roy Villevoye and Fiona Tan with art work from Papua, show the interaction between Dutch and Indonesian fine arts. On the last day of the exhibition, an afternoon meeting on the theme ‘Beyond Java’ will be organised at the Moluks (Moluccan) Museum, in cooperation with PACE and Kosmopolis. Roy Villevoye, among others, will be a guest there.

In January 2009 Papua Heritage Foundation (PACE) began digitisation of its library. The first phase (books and documents from before 1950) is being realised with the subsidy from Metamorfoze. A subsidy application for the   second phase (1950-1962) has been made as part of a  War Heritage Project with the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. Although rejected earlier this year, after a renewed application (in March 2009) funds were made available. PACE receives  €78.000 to digitise documents from the post-war period.

Recently, a new category is to be found on the website of PACE ( Papua Heritage Foundation)   It is called PACE TV and it is part of YouTube. On PACE TV, short films can be seen that have a relation with PACE and/or West  Papua, former Dutch New Guinea. So far films have been inserted, such as those made by the Dutch photographer/filmer Wim van Oijen in Papua.

From August 29, 2009 an exhibition about Papua has been organised on Saturdays and Sundays in the Dutch Reformed Church in the Frisian village Goënga,  about three kilometers from Sneek. Papua Heritage Foundation (PACE) and the organisation Help To Papuans In Distress (HAPIN) have provided the actual content of the exhibition. Besides the exhibition about Papua, there is a ‘statues tour’ showing the work of contemporary Frisian artists.

An additional result of the cultural heritage project Linking back to Lombok is the discovery that the name Sapoerahof in the Lombok area of Utrecht has been spelled incorrectly.  During a walk, Wim Manuhutu, former manager of Museum Malaku, noticed that the name of this side street of  the Molukkenstraat is incorrect. The street is named after the Indonesian island Saparua. The initiators of establishing Linking back to Lombok, one of which is the  Papua heritage Foundation, have brought this to the attention of the Utrecht City Council. The council admitted that that a mistake had been made in the past by the street-naming committee responsible.

On 6 May 2009,Cineblend held a panel discussion about the use of images and sound as a form of cultural heritage, with the collection of the Papua Heritage Foundation (PACE-the Dutch acronym) as its main focus. Cineblend, the monthly evening meeting by SAVAN (Foundation Audio-visual Anthropology Netherlands), is organised in collaboration with PACE and the Association of Beeld en Geluid (Image and Sound).