Blad 42 uit Stamboek van de leerlingen der Koloniale School voor Meisjes en Vrouwen te 's-Gravenhage deel II (1930-1949) Possibly 1932 - 1938

This page from the ‘Register of Students of the Colonial School for Girls and Women in The Hague,’ which dates from between 1930 and 1949, is like a painted grid made of ink and paper. I imagine someone carefully inking the lines, filling in names, places, and notes, while trying to keep it all neat, then adding tiny photos. Did they have any sense of how strange and compelling this document would be in the future? I’m especially drawn to the way the handwritten words sit in a strange tension with the mechanically reproduced photographs. It's like these women are caught between the personal and the institutional, frozen in time within this matrix of bureaucratic inscription. I can see the individuality and humanity of each face staring back at me and it makes me wonder about their stories. Each element here is a trace of a human gesture: the looping signature, the snapshot, the act of note-taking. Each mark speaks to an act of witnessing, a record of someone passing through the world. And these gestures and marks all seem to want to speak to one another, or perhaps to us, across time.