Rosa Verhoeve

 

My father is Dutch, my mother is an Indo, a Dutch East Indies native. I am a daughter of two worlds. What does it mean to be a mix of East and West? With this question in mind, I started my project Kopi Susu (coffee with milk in Indonesian), exactly fifty years after my parents crammed their East Indies’ lives into a couple of trunks and made a forced exit to the Netherlands.

I was born in the Netherlands. But everything in our house breathed the Dutch East Indies: the bare-breasted woman figurines on the teak sideboard; my mother’s snakeskin pumps in the linen closet, jars of home-made hot pepper paste, like red beacons on the kitchen shelf. As a young girl, I spent hours leafing through faded leather photo-albums of my parent’s life in the tropics.

But I also grew up in the shattered dreams of my family. Their lingering shame about their colonial background, their hidden grief about the loss of loved ones and birthplace, cast a gloomy shadow over my childhood. My parents wore their sorrow in silence. I started to photograph what it means to be both Kopi and Susu. When my mother became seriously ill and died, I included the delicate process of mourning in my series.

Kopi Susu is a poetic personal collection of images about the impact of mixed descent and colonial history. But it also raises more general questions about identity and ethnicity – native versus immigrant – angst about “the other” – in these times of rising xenophobia.

 

After graduating from the Dutch Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Rosa Verhoeve started photographing long-term documentary projects in Europe, Africa and Indonesia. She was granted one of the prestigious Dutch Zilveren Camera awards for the series Salto Vitale, about Ethiopian youth circuses. Her project TB+, about tuberculosis patients in South-Sudan, was selected by Christian Caujolle (Agence VU) for the international exhibition Stop TB. While on the road, she teaches visual storytelling to young photography students in Kenya, Ethiopia and Indonesia. Currently, Verhoeve teaches photography and art history at the Dutch Fotovakschool.