In 1933, Ringel Goslinga’s grandfather arrived in Central Celebes, now Sulawesi, as a missionary doctor. Two decades earlier, a Dutch mission had already reached the Toraja, and its story was marked early by violence: the killing of the first missionary, A. A. van de Loosdrecht. Aluk to Dolo takes that entanglement of family and colonial history as its starting point. Goslinga’s photographs, made on return visits to Sulawesi, encounter Toraja communities today, alongside the customs and objects that persist despite missionary teaching and its long aftermath.
The project began as an inquiry into where ancestor worship meets missionary work, then shifted. What held Goslinga’s attention was weaving: the natural-fibre utensils still in use, and the symbolic objects, devil banishers and medicine boxes among them, that fell out of use after conversion. Much of the Toraja’s weaving knowledge has since been lost, and many woven objects were sent to the Netherlands for research in earlier decades. Goslinga learned the craft’s grammar in order to record patterns and forms that are close to disappearing. Photographs of the present are set beside material from the past, and Goslinga also weaves, so that the book’s making and its subject share a method.
Robin Uleman shaped the editorial concept and design, with Sandra Rabenou advising; Uleman and Goslinga selected the images, and Uleman edited. The result is a deliberately layered object: 344 pages in a softcover with dust jacket, at 170 × 240 mm, published by Eriskay Connection in a Dutch-language edition. The sequence asks for slow reading rather than a quick survey, and its crossing of registers rewards a collector interested in how photographic research can hold archival fragments, personal lineage and living practice in one frame of reference.
The book’s value lies in that structure. It does not illustrate a thesis so much as let different orders of evidence sit together and complicate one another, at a moment when the colonial history of the former Dutch East Indies is being re-examined across several fields. For collections concerned with documentary practice, Indonesia, or the afterlives of mission work, it is a considered addition, and it is best understood as an artist’s book in which photography, craft and design are inseparable.
