Musée All that Solid is Melting into The Air, But not Memory

The question of identity and the changing environment in my immediate surrounding has brought me to conduct research about history of Barus, a place where my family come from. Barus is located in the heart of the dense and lush rainforest of Sumatra. It is a tiny coastal town that has played a significant role in the context of colonialism and plantations. At one point, it served as a melting point for international trade, serving as a hub for the exchange of goods such as spices, textiles, and precious metals. One of the most valuable natural sources from the area was the camphor tree.
 
Barus and its camphor had been known for a long time in various writings and research.[1] Ptolomaeus in his writings for instance, already mentioned Barus as a port of Sriwijaya as far back as the 10th century.[2] It has been used for a variety of purposes, including medicine, religious ceremonies, and even warfare. It is being said that people in Egypt were importing camphor as raw materials to mummificate the corpses of Pharaohs.
 
During the colonial era, the Dutch and the British, among other European power, established control over the production of camphor in Sumatra, Borneo, and Malaysia which they saw camphor as a valuable commodity. This led to the establishment of plantations in the surrounding areas. The profits from the camphor trade were immense, and Barus became a vital part of the colonial economy. However, this exploitation came at a significant cost to the local and the environment. The intensive cultivation of camphor trees led has brought a lot of changes for the villager’s life.
 
The villagers used to subsist mainly through small-scale agriculture and gathering food and medicinal plants from the forest. A few of them remain to live as shamans and traditional healers, helping others to treat diseases. Some of the villagers still living in the interior part of the forest, and often developed kinship with the more-than-human beings inside the forest. It is still reflected and expressed through their ritual, religious beliefs, and myths, all of which became part of an identity presently we have known as indigenous or customary communities (masyarakat adat).[3]
 
After the loss of the camphor tree, for many years, rubber and palm oil has become central to the villagers. It has been replacing the landscape that used to be diverse. Some of them are labourers in the palm oil plantation while the rest of them must give up their land because they have limited choices. Farmers who own more lands than others, have been influenced by major corporations to shift their land use from agriculture into plantations.[4] With limited knowledge on the production and distribution, many of them chose to follow the big stream. However, the limited knowledge on these new crops leads them to run their plantation in the only way they know; slash-and-burn, which often leads to forest fire.
 
The villagers have been living in limbo. Frictions between plantation owners and the traditional community over collective identity and values, ownership of the lands, healthy water and dusty air have become common scenes that are inevitable in the village. Over the years, the villagers have been shifted their land use for the plantations and mining the soil in the river.
 
The legacy of colonialism and plantations has left a lasting impact on Barus and the surrounding areas, highlighting the complex and often devastating consequences of colonialism and its economic exploitation. The decline of the camphor due to colonial exploitation has also resulted in the loss of traditional knowledge and practices. For some of the villagers, harvesting of camphor was an essential part of their culture and rituals. The loss of this tradition and value has left many feelings disconnected from their roots and struggling to maintain their identity and sense of community.
 
The loss of camphor tree in Sumatra become the gate for me to about the history of colonial plantation in Indonesia, especially in Sumatra. The source of this research is through family history, literature and archives from various institutions in the UK and The Netherlands, such as The Royal Botanical Garden Kew Garden, British Library, British Film Institute, Hortus Botanicus, Wageningen University Research, National Archive the Hague, They Eye Museum and Collection, Institute of Sound and Visual Hilversum, and Leiden University Library. In addition to oral history, literature, and archives. I also met historian, activists, scholars who focusing their concern on ecology and plantations in Sumatra.