The Asmat in the Indonesian part of New Guinea (previously Dutch New Guinea) is a largely impassable mangrove swamp, roughly the same size as The Netherlands. The native inhabitants still live here, isolated from the rest of the world. Visual artist Roy Villevoye and photographer Koos Breukel visited the small hamlet of Tí together at the end of 2011. This small village is situated on the upper reaches of the Unir river in the northeastern part of the Asmat. Tí can be reached by sailing for three days upriver from the central small sea harbour Agats using a motorised canoe. The people of Tí have been living in the tropical rain forest completely isolated from the rest of the world for generations. However, Indonesia is encouraging the commercial exploitation of the area. For the time being T&iacut...
"In what can be seen as part of the ‘relational’ or social turn of art in the 1990s, Roy Villevoye moved from painting to a performative practice that foregrounded the social and economic structures from which the work emerges with rarely seen candour.
Rather than creating situations of seemingly carefree sociability under highly controlled (art-world) circumstances, Villevoye developed an art of exchange with people (and peoples) with whom relations are necessarily fraught with asymmetries and inequalities."
Sven Lütticken, Secret Publicity, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam, 2005...