For 14 months, Te Chen has been living in the Piuma community, Taiwan, with his EMKP collaborator, Ljavuras Kadrangian, and his family. Together they have built a slate house through an intergenerational co-creating process. Whilst documenting the construction of the slate house, and the associated rituals, Te Chen partook in each step as an apprentice, and later became a family member, adopting a name from their lineage and celebrating this in a ceremonial dress sewn by the family. During this time, Te Chen mentioned the British Museum’s Paiwan collections, to which Ljavuras expressed interest in.

In June last year, Te Chen Lu, and his collaborator Ljavuras Kadrangian’s daughter, Maljeveljev, visited the Paiwan collections at the British Museum, with the assistance of Paula Granados García (Head, EMKP) and Ben Watts (Department of Asia).

The collections were placed on a table, where Ljavuras and Muni, his wife, joined via video call, allowing for a fruitful and meaningful dialogue based on Ljavuras’s extensive knowledge systems passed down from the chief family to which he belongs. Scholars and curators have contributed to the knowledge of these collections, however, there remains a lack of interpretation from the source communities, namely the Paiwan or Rukai. Through the dialogue between Te Chen, Maljeveljev, Ljavuras, Muni, and Ben, conversations arose regarding the types of materials used, the mobility of objects, how they are exchanged, absorbed, and intertwined with other cultures, and the making practices of these collections.

The use of technology here was prominent. Long distance collection study through video calling allows the collections to reconnect with source communities. As Ljavuras explained at the end of that day, “We are grateful to see those objects preserved from ancestors in our lifetime.”#

 

Banner image: A close-up view of the wood double cup (Photo: The Trustees of the British Museum; asset number: 479779001).