Owner of the Voyage

‘Owner of the Voyage’ is a key work in the oeuvre of the Dutch artist Roy Villevoye. The work shows, in two simultaneous video projections, the journey made by two Asmat to Amsrerdam and the story that this journey evokes for one of the tribe members who stayed at home. Villevoye first visited the Asmat in Papua, the former Dutch colony on New Guinea, in 1992, and since then the life of the Asmat has been an important source of inspiration in his artistic work. Artistic work that tries to restore the relationship with ‘real’ life and searches for authenticity. Not authenticity in the anthropological sense of a so-called ‘unspoiled’ culture, but more in the sense of a basic human entity or identity. An authenticity that, according to Villevoye, is not reserved to so-called ‘primitive people’, but instead, can actually be found everywhere. In fact, Villevoye often instigates a totally contradictory thought process, and also does this in ‘Owner of the Voyage’, the work the museum has acquired. In his work, Villevoye shows that the Asmat are also inhabitants of the global village. Just like everybody else, they are subject to all types of influences from outside, from other cultures, and are, according to Villevoye, also inhabitants of an ‘impure, multifaceted and contradictory world’.