Expedition Content

In 1961, filmmaker Robert Gardner organized the Harvard Peabody Expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (now West Papua), funded by the Dutch colonial government. For five months, the expedition settled in the Baliem Valley among the Hubula people, armed with 16mm cameras, still photography equipment and tape recorders. Michael Rockefeller, heir to the Standard Oil dynasty, was tasked with capturing images and sound from within the Hubula world.

Expedition Content is an augmented sound work for cinema, composed from 37 hours of archival recordings documenting the strange encounter between the expedition and the Hubula people. The piece reflects on the entangled histories of multimodal anthropology, the lives of the Hubula and of Michael Rockefeller, and the ongoing history of colonialism in West Papua.