[janet gunter]

I loved visiting my friend’s house – which is light, clean and spacious. Things I now associate with wealth. But there was one part that made me feel uncomfortable. There is a wooden southern African sculpture with loads of rusted nails in it. Like all over its body. It watches over a dining table that seems to get used for jigsaw puzzles.

What is this doing here I ask myself repeatedly. How did it get here?

I mean I know her partner bought it. But how did it get to somebody selling it for loads of cash? I have no reason to believe that the sculpture was ill-gotten.

I couldn't help but think of my friend Pedro Lebre, who lived just outside of Dili running a small guesthouse. He’s been helping malais (foreigners) visit East Timor since the Portuguese times, when they used to fly in from Australia to Baucau, with its massive airfield.

He was a collector of Timorese sculpture during the Indonesian occupation. By the late 90s, he had accumulated quite a collection of tall, totemic sculpture pieces, many from Ataúro Island, just north of Timor’s capital Dili. When the Indonesians scorched everything during their violent departure in 1999, they were sure to steal and sell off sculptures.

I remember Pedro telling me he saw pieces like the ones he used to own for sale on eBay from sellers in Bali. This was a crime in the open for all to see. How many hands did these sculptures pass through from a burning Dili to eBay sellers in Bali. We’ll never know.

Only the wooden objects themselves know.

The fact the sculptures had even reached Pedro seemed significant, given they were intended to be a link with ancestors. But the early part of the Indonesian occupation was a desperate time, there was a lot of food insecurity. (In fact, Ataúro was used as a prison island by the Indonesians, and another friend was starved there as a child, but that is another story.)

Now I have a couple of tabs open from the Met Museum, Queensland Art Gallery, and one called “Art of the Ancestors”.

I find a Sotheby’s auction, bidding closed, for Ataúro sculptures. Estimate: 70,000-100,000 euros. Provenance: “Acquis dans les années 1980 auprès d'un collectionneur natif de Timor”. (1980s Timor was occupied by the Indonesian military. Were they considered “natif” by Sotheby’s?)

Christies. Estimate: 700-100 euros. Price realised: 5,292 euros. Provenance: Philippe Guimiot (1927-2021), Bruxelles. Collection Line et Hippoliet Verbeemen, Bonheiden. This 10 centimetre man has a neutral look on his face, and a smaller man stuck to his torso, clearly a nod to ancestral ties.

Here’s a pair of “Itara ancestor figure” sculptures for sale by “tribalarthouse” in Netherlands, on eBay. Buy it now price: $850. They claim these are from “Atauro, Indonesia”. The figurines are “wearing” cloth, which my cursory research tells me dates them from after the 1930s, when Dutch Calvinist missionaries arrived on the small island. But they look quite different – suspiciously different – than other sculptures I’ve seen. Tribalarthouse is selling loads of once-sacred items from India to the Solomon Islands.

What happens to these once-powerful sculptures when they become JPEGs, museum pieces or decorative pieces in the houses of the rich? Are they frozen like Han Solo and Chewbacca? Could they become powerful again in if returned to the right hands?

One of the pieces I read about Ataúro sculptures said that many sculptures had been hidden away as early as the 30s to save from European missionary scrutiny. Some were or are probably still in sacred houses and caves of Ataúro.

And some of Pedro’s collection survived – he hid it away in anticipation of the Indonesian destruction. My last tab is a UNESCO video showing a current day Ataúro sculptor at work talking about he learned from his father who learned from his father.

It's consoling to know that the sculpting skills survived colonialism, genocide, and commodification. (And also to remember that now there is a cooperative of women who make rag dolls intentionally for sale to tourists and for export, to complement the male carvers.)