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Nutmeg and mace (the aril that surrounds the nut) have a bloody history. On 8 May 1621, the Dutch East India Company initiated a genocide on the Moluccan Banda Islands in order to secure a monopoly on these spices. Forty-four local leaders were beheaded, and a large part of the population was killed. Yara Jimmink (1990), born on 8 May, engages with this history and with themes such as migration, colonialism and collective memory. Drawing on her own family history, she explores personal and public archives; her grandmother was born on Banda Neira. She translates this research into layered installations.
The installation 8 mei (2026) focuses on the botanical garden as a silent witness to colonial appropriation, violence and displacement. Jimmink approaches the garden as a form of botanical imperialism, in which plants and expertise are appropriated and relocated in the service of European trade and science. The history of nutmeg and mace demonstrates how violent this process could be.
The artist’s own photographs, archival material, historical prints and ceramics together tell a story. Jimmink combines photographs of nutmeg trees at the Hortus Botanicus Amsterdam with a botanical photograph from the National Museum of World Cultures archive, depicting an Indigenous man presenting a tree. This archival image reveals how local populations were often enlisted to demonstrate plants for Western science. Details from G.E. Rumphius’ Amboinsche Kruidboek (1741) enter into dialogue with ceramic forms that refer to the elegance of mace, but whose blood-red fleshiness also alludes to genocidal violence. In this way, Jimmink makes tangible how beauty, violence, science and power are intertwined, and how displacement reverberates through body, landscape and memory.
Written by Sarah van Binsbergen