Book launch of Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambigous memories

Publication launch: Saturday 12 September | 14:30 @ KIOSK Rotterdam
Waves of Ternate: Collecting ambigous memories
by A Pearl Diver without a name
Sarojini Lewis @sarojini.lewis [www.instagram.com/sarojini.lewis/]

In a conversation with Setareh Noorani @unfolding_something [www.instagram.com/unfolding_something/] , Matt Plezier @r.ndomzine [www.instagram.com/r.ndomzine/] , and Stencilwerck @stencilwerck [www.instagram.com/stencilwerck/] we like to invite
you for this presentation in the Kiosk.

Artist and researcher Sarojini Lewis adopts the view of an unnamed pearl diver from a letter
about the North Moluccan Island of Ternate in Indonesia. Waves of Ternate: Collecting
ambiguous memories by a Pearl Diver without a name is an artist book that contains a
visual narrative, a dialogue of colour, paper and archives created by Lewis in collaboration
with designer Edwin van Gelder and risographs printed by Stencilwerck.

Lewis traces three generations of women in Ternate in the 19 th century, reflecting on
genealogy, gender and colonial memory, as she evokes family memories through the diver’s
eyes. In her visual narrative she embodies missing and erased ‘local’ knowledge, she
documents family objects New York, and describes ambiguous memories.

Currents of unfamiliar navigations in the Indian Ocean led to emotional layered landscapes,
the line drawings of Lewis’ her daughter, and her embodiment refers to pearls as hidden
knowledge that shapes us. Page by page this narrative of Ternate uses various archival
collections of the Rijksmuseum, University of Leiden, women divers in Uraguchi Kusukazu’s
archive and a family archive with collaborator Nelson Harst in New York. Romanticized
landscapes and photographs, containing a predominant male gaze are overlayered with her
body. They transition with a notion in a letter:
A note with ink, a pearl diver and my body collide. Mirroring my own body and searching for
yours. I was missing your reflection in the mirror. Am I writing this letter for you?