Our Colonial Inheritance
A campaign to create awareness for the exhibition ‘Our Colonial Inheritance’
Challenge
Colonialism is not a thing of the past; it persists to this day. It has molded everyone’s world in the Netherlands—physically, mentally, and personally. How can we encourage people to delve into this shared history by visiting the exhibition?
Community insights
The colonial past is a shared history for all Dutch people, closely linked with the present. However, not everyone is fully aware of this connection to today’s society. Therefore, it is particularly important to share the underrepresented narrative and encourage people to visit the exhibition to better understand and comprehend the past that concerns us all.
Campaign idea
“Our Colonial Inheritance” is an exhibition that narrates multiple facets of the complex history of colonialism. The goal for the campaign image was to reflect this diversity. To achieve this, we approached the design process from various perspectives. The creative team comprised four individuals, each contributing their unique viewpoint, shaped in part by their roots in the colonised regions.
Three distinct representations were crafted, each offering a different perspective. In each portrayal, we observe individuals of Dutch heritage with ties to a (former) Dutch-colonized area: Aruban, Bonairian, Curaçaoan, Surinamese, Indonesian, or Moluccan roots. Everyone is depicted as resilient and proud. The layered textile patterns in the background convey a unique story in each image, linked to the respective region.
The curator’s perspectives
Next to the campaign image, we developed videos that took a deep dive into the exhibition by sharing the perspectives of the different curators who created the exhibition.
