SPARK Session: Giving Space for Grandma: Digital Restitutionary Work of Indonesian Colonial Collections

We are delighted to invite you to our upcoming MACCH Spark Session on digital restitutionary work with Made Naraya Sumaniaka on Friday 17th October 2025, 15.30-16.45 at The Plant (Grote Gracht 76, ground floor). Please feel free to share the invite in your network.

Giving Space for Grandma: Digital Restitutionary Work of Indonesian Colonial Collections 

 The Dutch–Indonesia restitution policy on colonial collections remains colonial through sidelining the interests of source communities, while digitised records continue to reproduce colonial legacies through Eurocentric categories and inaccuracies. In this Spark Session Made Naraya Sumaniaka presents his thesis work, which recentres community agency by examining how digital spaces enable participation and contestation using the newly established Colonial Collections Datahub and TikTok as case studies. Drawing on focus group discussions with communities from Aceh, Bali, and Surabaya as well as experimental digital ethnography, it finds that digital platforms function as knowledge entry points, transforming communities from passive recipients into active agents of intervention. Such interventions work to address epistemic and historical injustices, even within persistent structural asymmetries. To capture these dynamics, the thesis introduces “digital restitutionary work” as a conceptual framework for future research and practice on colonial collections within digital transformations.

About the speaker:
Made Naraya is an independent researcher and cultural worker with interest in colonial heritage, politics of decolonisation and public policy. He recently obtained his MA in Arts and Heritage: Policy, Management and Education at Maastricht University. His master's thesis revolves around digital spaces of colonial collections where he collaborated closely with diverse communities across Indonesia and offered alternative ways for communities to involve in restitutionary work beyond the state to state regime. He seeks to contribute to a more inclusive and decolonial approach to restitution policy.

We hope you can join us for Nara’s presentation and reflections on his research journey. Please email us at macch@maastrichtuniversity.nl to confirm that you will be attending. We look forward to seeing you there!

All our best,
Claartje Rasterhoff and Maria Andreou 
on behalf of the MACCH team