The ‘Buitenpost’ series is based on a study trip made by Jasper de Beijer (1973) to Indonesia in 2002. During his tour, the artist documented the traces surviving of the country’s Dutch colonial era. De Beijer used these pictures, together with a variety of photographic material contemporary to the period, to develop a storyboard that served as the starting point for a visual reconstruction within the confines of his studio.
The reconstruction is the result of a variety of technical approaches. The artist built a scale model of a colonial country estate, which was subsequently photographed from different angles. These images were then combined with pictures of paper masks, actual people and computer-generated landscapes. This process has given the series an emphatically constructed and artificial character, underlining the alienation that the residents of this outpost must feel in this unfamiliar environment.