HAINUWELE

Seventy-five years after the arrival of the first Moluccan families in the Netherlands, BACK TO NATURE looks beyond migration, colonial history and national borders.

Back to the islands.
Back to the earth.
Back to Hainuwele.

Rooted in the Moluccan origin myth of Hainuwele, this exhibition explores the enduring relationship between people, nature and ancestral knowledge. A relationship carried through stories, plants, craft traditions and cultural memory, across generations and across oceans. The history of the Moluccas is inseparable from the natural world. Cloves, nutmeg and mace connected the archipelago to global trade routes and reshaped the course of history. Yet beneath these histories lies a much older story: one of reciprocity, stewardship, interconnectedness and respect for all living things.

For BACK TO NATURE, HAINUWELE Gallery brings together four artists whose practices engage with plants, natural materials, pigments, textiles and experimental processes. Through artistic research they explore transformation, regeneration and the knowledge embedded in the living world. Rather than looking back with nostalgia, BACK TO NATURE asks what ancestral knowledge can teach us about the future.

How do we reconnect with the ecosystems that sustain us?

What wisdom survives displacement, extraction and time?

And what becomes possible when we learn to listen again?

Exhibition Information
BACK TO NATURE – Ancestral Futures, presented by HAINUWELE Gallery | 1 July – 31 December 2026 | Pharos, Utrecht, The Netherlands | Featuring artists: Hainuwele van Oortmarssen, Maureen Nahumury – Studio DPNA, Mirjam Manusama and Monica Akihary. | Open by appointment only. For visits, please contact miriam@hainuwele.com

Ancestral Futures invites us to imagine new ways of being rooted with each other, with the earth and with the generations yet to come.