The Art of Decolonization: Authorship as a Quiet Act

Kamila Batavia's Art of Decolonization (presented by The Cavalry of Batavia Archive Team)

Hamburg, 2 January 2025 — An essay on Kamila's approach to decolonization in art.

In Kamila Batavia’s practice, decolonization unfolds as a sustained act of authorship. It's quiet, deliberate, and grounded in care.

Rather than positioning decolonization as an oppositional gesture, Kamila approaches it as a process of re-entry: returning to history not to erase it, but to inhabit it fully, examine its weight, and reshape its meaning from within. Her work proposes that decolonization can exist beyond spectacle as an intimate, embodied, and ongoing negotiation with memory.

⸻

Reclaiming “Batavia” as a Self-Authored Territory

The name Batavia (the former colonial name of Indonesia’s capital city, now Jakarta) carries a dense and unresolved historical charge. It is a name once imposed, once administrative, and deeply entangled with colonial power.

Kamila Batavia doesn't reject this name, nor does she attempt to neutralize it. Instead, she reclaims it as a site of authorship. In her work, Batavia transforms into a self-authored territory: a symbolic kingdom shaped by an Indonesian woman who asserts agency over historical language that once excluded her.

This act reframes decolonization not as erasure, but as a conscious reorientation of meaning. Memory, grief, and authorship coexist, allowing history to be carried forward without being sanctified or denied.

⸻

Classical Music, History, and Access

Classical and Baroque musical traditions have long been framed as refined, institutional, and culturally distant. Historically, the Baroque era emerged during the height of European colonial expansion, situating its aesthetics within broader structures of power and exclusion.

Kamila engages these traditions not as fixed cultural monuments, but as emotional and expressive languages. She approaches classical and historical sound worlds as spaces that can be entered, translated, and reshaped.

By situating herself as a Southeast Asian woman within these sonic histories, Kamila quietly shifts their center of gravity. The work resists spectacle. Instead, it asks a persistent curatorial question:

Who is permitted to carry beauty, depth, and monumentality—and under what conditions?

⸻

The Body as Historical Evidence

Kamila Batavia’s presence is neither incidental nor symbolic. Her body, voice, and visual representation function as integral narrative elements within the work.

A woman from the Asian diaspora inhabiting historic soundscapes becomes post-colonial evidence that history isn't static. It continues to move, accumulate, and transform. Here, the body operates as an archive holding memory, tension, and continuity.

Presence, in this context, isn't representation. It is authorship.

⸻

Baroque Galactic: Time as a Collapsed Field

From this curatorial and artistic process emerges Baroque Galactic, a genre Kamila names and constructs herself.

Baroque Galactic collapses temporal boundaries by blending medieval and baroque musical sensibilities with contemporary production and cosmic imagination. Historical instruments, ornamentation, and timbres coexist with modern textures, allowing multiple timelines to operate simultaneously.

In this world, history isn't preserved behind glass. It becomes mobile—travelling across cultures, temporalities, and interior landscapes. Past, present, and future are held together as a single emotional field.

⸻

Closing Reflection

Decolonization, in Kamila Batavia’s work, is neither declarative nor performative. It is slow, intentional, and rooted in memory as a form of care.

Through music, imagery, and worldbuilding, Kamila creates a space where history is no longer passively inherited, but consciously re-authored. The work proposes continuity and this is lineage in motion.