Oksigen audio walk offers an impressive journey through the colonial past ★★★★☆

Theater group Firma Mes sends its audience with the theatrical audio walk Oksigen not just into the Archipelbuurt in The Hague, also known as the Indische Buurt. We walk past large buildings from the end of the 19th century and then towards the Scheveningse Bosjes. What starts as a simple architecture walk, slowly turns into a critical, inescapable vision of the colonial past of the Netherlands in Indonesia.

In small groups we walk through the city with headphones on, with guides who keep a steady pace. The fine soundtrack by Kaspar Schellingerhout turns the city into a cinematic backdrop. We hear fragments of interviews with Dutch people with a family history in the former Dutch East Indies: elderly people who still remember how they got off the boat and settled in the Archipelbuurt, young people who now belong to the third generation and wonder what it means now to be Indo.

For some time, the quotes seem a bit snappy and noncommittal edited together. But then the acceleration is started in a surprising way, literally and figuratively. It would be a shame to divulge exactly how this works. But the story also changes tone on the headphones. The music becomes more menacing. One Patty Broese van Groenou, from a noble family with roots in (and money from) the Dutch East Indies, tells her contrasting story and we are steadily led to ‘one of the most expensive houses in The Hague’ on Parkweg, where a moving text by Reggie Baay unparalleledly confronts the unsuspecting walker with the still largely concealed history of the Dutch in Indonesia. An impressive journey.