As awareness of colonial collections in the Netherlands grows, the significance of spatial dynamics in processes of extraction, exchange, and accumulation has remained overlooked. Celebratory histories of Modernist Dutch architecture often omit its role in colonial exploitation, as seen in designs like the Van Nelle Factory and Amsterdam Commodity Exchange which facilitated the processing and trade of colonial resources. This research takes sources in the Nieuwe Instituut’s archive as starting point to unpack histories of extraction infrastructure and logistics, while considering the gaps, absences and erasures produced by such archives. The project investigates the construction of infrastructure within the colonial project of extraction, focusing on the legacy of railways and train stations in South Africa connected to De Nederlandsche Zuid-Afrikaansche Spoorweg Maatschappy as a strategic element of spatial division and resource extraction in the colonial city, and the wider continent. The archival objects are examined through threefold lens - as document, as building, Park Station, that physically moved from the Netherlands to South Africa, and as movement of material resources from South Africa to the Netherlands, together surfacing asymmetrical flows of epistemology, statehood, labour and resources. The research proposes the methods of visual ethnography, cartographic analysis and documentary film as a means to study often overlooked and unseen spatial practices, while expanding formal archives by bringing these historical narratives into dialogue with potential ‘alternate’ archives, including the railway-sited photography of Santu Mofokeng and David Goldblatt, that may offer subversive meanings of railway infrastructure in colonial and postcolonial South Africa. The investigation is grounded in a broader research interest of the main applicant and Nieuwe Instituut in developing subaltern archives that question how to disrupt and extend western and colonial knowledge frameworks, and open up a space of epistemic justice where ‘other knowledges‘ can thrive.
