Doing research in Swiss museums, Sri Lankan artist Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige comes across objects in storage that were collected as evidence of the life of an Indigenous Adivasi community in her country. Even though Switzerland had no colonies, it benefited from the colonial system. Between 1883 and 1913, naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin organised expeditions to British Ceylon and the Dutch East Indies. They explored these areas – assisted by forced labourers – and brought exotic animals, plants and artefacts, as well as human skulls and skeletons to Basel: The result was one of the largest ethnological collections in German-speaking Europe – paradigmatic of colonial violence and Eurocentric scientific pretensions. Sri Lanka demanded their return as early as the 1970s, but Switzerland refused.
Deneth Piumakshi Veda Arachchige travels along the Sarasins’ route and, together with Adivasi representatives, campaigns once again for restitution. An obstacle course through bureaucracy and rigid museum structures begins. The film consistently follows the interdisciplinary artist and co-author of the script as she creatively and investigatively negotiates ownership issues, shedding a highly uncomfortable light on the colonial entanglements and their still existing blind spots in the global North.
“Can we be moved by the disappearance of rhinos if we have never experienced the feeling of a butterfly walking on our hand?” Marcel Barelli asks not without pathos, but hitting the mark, in his animated manifesto. He is quoting Daniel Pauly’s Shifting Baseline Syndrome Theory: We humans always measure normality by our own experience and not by historical changes and therefore tend to accept environmental destruction. This is not the only allusion in Barelli’s compact three-minute-film: He references the “sixth extinction”, the current human-caused extinction of the species, and the hourglass symbol of the Extinction Rebellion movement. His film, however, which should definitely be understood as a call for active resistance, embeds these reflections artistically.
With his evaporating water animation on paper, Barelli has chosen a simple and consistent animation technique whose ephemeral character perfectly captures species extinction and oblivion. Archive material is added. Unlike the “Cinétracts” pamphlet films from 1968 that he admires, but just as forceful, he has chosen a contemporary, personal approach. He touchingly weaves his theses into his own biography: Family pictures point to a time when Barelli himself “played with dinosaurs and ate chicken”.
