S.O. Goenoengsari. Kunstwerk overgang S.S. 30-4-27. 1927

This photograph, taken on April 30, 1927 by an anonymous photographer, shows a drainage culvert for the State Railway in Goenoengsari, Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia. The image presents a paradox. On the one hand it's a utilitarian structure, and on the other, it is presented as a Kunstwerk, an artwork. This hints at the complex relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, between the industrial and the natural, and between the functional and the aesthetic. The Dutch colonial project depended on infrastructure to extract resources and exert control, literally shaping the landscape. But here the photograph is a self-conscious act of documentation, an attempt to portray that infrastructural project as something beautiful and enduring. Understanding this photograph requires historical research into Dutch colonial practices, as well as the politics of infrastructure and the relationship between art and power. The meaning of this image is not inherent but contingent on its historical, social and institutional context.