Examines the interconnectedness between the ornamented material and the ornamented body, proposing ornamentation as an archival methodology and a tool for healing. A point of departure is the entanglement of the modernist project and the colonial project, in particular Adolf Loos’s influential polemic Ornament and Crime. In this polemic, Loos equates ornamentation, and herein tattoos, with cultural inferiority, particularly referring to Papuan tattoo tradition in a degrading way. By equating the act of tattooing the body and ornamenting material, the rejection of ornament becomes not merely an attempt to establish a cultural hierarchy and, by mere association, a hierarchy of peoples, but was a direct devaluation of racialized bodies. This rethoric fell in line with ideologies that essentialized tattoos as a "non-Western Savage" practice, a distinctive signifier from the European "modern" man.

Yet, the deep interconnectedness of ornamented bodies and material is not merely a narrative to support the colonial project, but this conception is also a profound part of Indigenous epistimologies. Oftentimes, patterns that were tattooed on the body, could also be found in tapestries, woodcarved pillars, pottery and so on. This is also evident in the current global revival and revitalization movement led by Indigenous revivalists of the 1990s. Often working without written or photographic records, many practitioners rely on the ornamentation on ancestral objects and architecture to reconstruct erased tattoo traditions, making it a vital methodology for the transnational movement. Moreover, this movement not only recover these practices from eradication, but also propose a new meaning to the tradition: to heal from trauma as an aftermath of colonialism

MISTAKE THESE WALLS FOR SKIN