Hier. moves seamlessly between politically charged reflections and personal memories. Amid the renovation of Museum Arnhem – a place of conservation in transition – five young women express themselves in poetry, music, and conversation. They explore themes of hybridity, transnationality, and diasporic sensitivity: essentially, the political instrumentalization of identity and cultural renewal in light of colonial history within contemporary society. The location is also a ‘voice’; built in the late nineteenth century as an ‘outdoors club’; a gentlemen's club founded by those who could not gain membership to the centrally located Groote Sociëteit. It has been a municipal museum of modern and contemporary art since 1920, when its first collection was donated by a prominent colonial family. The museum has pursued an emancipating (acquisition) policy since the 1980s.

In the film, the building is stripped down to its foundations: worn concrete and elegant art nouveau features sit next to each other. Within this contrasting site of rubble and potential, the cast consists of FRED band members Lyana Usa, Thirza Hiwat, and Josephine Spit, who split since their 2015 founding and now pursue, respectively, electrical engineering, information science, and architecture. Other cast members are poet Adejumo Pelumi, whose practice extends to fiction and poetry, and art historian Lara Nuberg, who researches, writes, and speaks about the colonial pasts of the Netherlands and Indonesia in a decolonial way. These three groupings form the film’s three ‘sonic lines’: FRED improvises traditional kroncong music before moving into their own contemporary song; Adejumo reads a text that results from their conversations; and Nuberg spontaneously reacts to various documents, statements, the music and the building. In editing the work, these three lines became interwoven and communicated with each other.

With music and poetry, there is not only sociopolitical urgency, but existential and vulnerable themes that lend themselves to the tender confidence with which the protagonists discuss love, the sorrow that comes with it, questions, and certainties – the basis for a changing possible future.