From 2014 to 2017, the Indonesian photographer Muhammad Fadli and the writer Fatris MF travelled repeatedly to the Banda Islands, a dozen small specks of land in a vast and often violent sea. The archipelago had once been the world’s only source of nutmeg, and that monopoly drew Portuguese, Dutch and English ambitions across the globe, gave rise to the first multinational trading company, and left behind misery and a present-day backwater. The book takes that double inheritance — colonial history and contemporary island life — as its subject rather than its backdrop.

Fadli made the photographs across six journeys to and from the islands, working on film throughout. The resulting sequence is combined with Fatris MF’s writing, so the volume moves between image and text rather than resting on images alone. Its viewpoint is not the heroic one of trade history but the ordinary one of people who live among the ruins of that history: fishermen, families, and the textures of daily survival on remote islands that Indonesia’s growth figures never quite describe.

Jordan, jordan Édition, an independent publisher in Jakarta, issued the book in 2021 as a first edition of 240 pages in Indonesian and English. In the same year it was named a winner in the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation Photobook Awards, recognition that placed an Indonesian independent press and a Southeast Asian subject within an international conversation about the photobook as a form. The project had begun as a multimedia website that was never finished; the printed book became the more complete realisation of the same intention.

For a collector, the interest lies in that combination of long-term documentary commitment, the consequences of colonial extraction in a specific island community, and the meeting of photography with reportorial writing. It is a book about how the spice trade’s consequences are still lived, made by two practitioners who kept returning to the place they were describing.