Fragments of a Past That Is Not Past
On Hill Station and A Person of the Forest
Lilly Markaki
Hill Station
Director
EDWARD LAWRENSON
Year
2025
Country UK
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A Person of the Forest
Director
MIRANDA PENNELL
Year
2026
Country UK, NETHERLANDS
The term ‘archive’ derives from the Greek arkhē: rule and origin, power and beginning. It shares its root with the verb arkhō, ‘to govern’ and ‘to begin’, binding authority to inception. Originally, the archive named a place—a magistrate’s residence, a public building where official documents were kept—before expanding to signify the contents of the archive itself. Both senses of the term are at work in Miranda Pennell’s A Person of the Forest Hill Station: the archive as site, as structure; and the archive as trace.
In 1899, the newly established Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine dispatched an expedition to Freetown to investigate malaria prevention. Long one of the deadliest diseases in the tropics, malaria shaped colonial perceptions of the environment; that Sierra Leone was known as “the White Man’s Grave” (a phrase first recorded in 1822) epitomised this fear. On the expedition was Scottish doctor and researcher Ronald Ross, who had demonstrated in 1897 that malaria was transmitted, not by “bad air”, but by the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. The discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in 1902. At the expedition’s conclusion, Ross proposed a series of preventative measures, among them the construction of “houses for Europeans” on elevated ground. What emerged, therefore, was not simply a medical recommendation, but a spatial policy, too. In 1901, the British colonial administration adopted residential segregation for European civil servants, culminating in the construction, in 1904, of Hill Station: a bungalow compound overlooking Freetown, situated 250 metres above sea level. Though framed in official discourse as a rational, “objective” response to disease, later scholarship reveals a more complex set of motivations. Segregation was shaped as much by economic calculation and colonial anxieties as by scientific reasoning. It reduced the financial burden of maintaining empire—lowering the salaries required to attract European personnel fearful of the threat of malaria—while recasting Sierra Leone as a habitable, even desirable, posting. Hill Station was thus imagined as a “health resort […] where comfort, rest, change, and sea breezes are to be enjoyed”: an architectural solution to both biological and psychological conditions.
Lawrenson’s film does not explicitly rehearse these underlying motivations, yet its formal strategies render visible the entanglement of science, commerce, and architecture in the colonial project. In a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce in November 1899, referenced in the film, Ross casts himself in the lineage of imperial explorers and declares: “the success of imperialism will be found to depend very largely upon our success with the microscope.” Here, scientific knowledge becomes an instrument of expansion. In his analysis of colonial spatial organisation, Frantz Fanon observed that colonial powers “divided [the world] into compartments […] inhabited by two different species,” parcelled out by “the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race.” Prefabricated in Liverpool and “planted” above Freetown, the buildings of Hill Station are an archive in the original meaning: material inscriptions of power, specifically, colonial rule. Measures rejected by the Colonial Office—mosquito eradication, swamp drainage, quinine prophylaxis—might have benefited all indigenous African, Creole, and European populations. Segregation, by contrast, served only the latter. The built environment bears witness to both deeds and denials.
As Achille Mbembe reminds us, the archive assembles “pieces of time” into a coherent narrative—but one that always leaves something out. Miranda Pennell’s A Person of the Forest, stylistically very different to Lawrenson’s film, works against this logic, reconfiguring archival materials to expose the violence they conceal. The film approaches the archive through fragments—images, specimens, and documents from the collections of the EYE Filmmuseum, the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, and the Artis Zoological Museum—to examine the Dutch colonial “cultivation system” in Indonesia. Narrated by the ghost of an orangutan, one among many primates forcibly removed from their native habitats and transported to Europe as objects of scientific curiosity, the film gives voice to what the archive excludes. “I will never return home and this was the end of my world,” the narrator reflects, recalling a history of dispossession and colonial extraction. Unlike the mosquitoes in Hill Station, appearing as contained threats, specimens to be studied and controlled, the orangutan is a “coveted import”, desired and displayed, yet equally subject to violence. The protagonist wanders through the corridors of the Zoological Museum in search of her taxidermied body, now displaced, stored, removed from display. As a child, and even now as an adult, I have been fascinated by this state of suspended movement, this “temporal limbo,” in which museum animals are captured—creatures whose living counterparts I may never encounter. “All taxidermy is marked by human longing,” writes Rachel Poliquin. Yet how can longing breed so much death?
Watching Pennell’s film, I found myself overcome by grief; how many worlds have ended before, under the same colonial, genocidal drive that continues to shape our present? In this film, the end never finishes beginning. Pennell’s reassembly of archival fragments does not simply foreground ecological devastation, but also the entanglement of human and non-human histories. The personal history and fate of the narrator-specimen is inseparable from that of the land and of the anonymous labourers, whose lives the colonial record distorts, and whose resistance it silences, in an effort to establish order. Pennell’s fable masterfully employs fragments from the colonial archive, enabling us to hear this silence in the (broken) record. Sound and narration lend the film a spectral quality, animating the archive as a space haunted by interrupted worlds and their unrealised futures. The archive is presented not as a neutral repository, but an active force, one that shapes the record even as it conceals its own operations. “We, who live outside of time, must return,” the narrator declares, “to disturb the future of this past.”
Placing Pennell’s and Lawrenson’s films in dialogue, this programme proposes the archive as both instrument and site of contestation. In Hill Station, architecture materialises an imperial logic that divides, extracts, and protects. In A Person of the Forest, the archive is reanimated and revoiced, its fragments rearranged to reveal what it cannot fully contain. If the archive binds origin to authority, the films show it also opens the possibility of rupture. A call concealed in Pennell’s narrative, working like an incantation, echoes in my mind as the film draws to a close: “Regardless of the damage already done, the crew in the global engine room can still take up their hammers and finish the job, in kinship with all those who have resisted.” And just like that, a wild hope sneaks in … for another world beginning where this one ends.
Lilly Markaki is a writer, curator and lecturer, working in the Dept. of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Hill Station + A Person of the Forest at Bertha DocHouse, 15 April 2026.
In 1899, the newly established Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine dispatched an expedition to Freetown to investigate malaria prevention. Long one of the deadliest diseases in the tropics, malaria shaped colonial perceptions of the environment; that Sierra Leone was known as “the White Man’s Grave” (a phrase first recorded in 1822) epitomised this fear. On the expedition was Scottish doctor and researcher Ronald Ross, who had demonstrated in 1897 that malaria was transmitted, not by “bad air”, but by the bite of the Anopheles mosquito. The discovery earned him the Nobel Prize in 1902. At the expedition’s conclusion, Ross proposed a series of preventative measures, among them the construction of “houses for Europeans” on elevated ground. What emerged, therefore, was not simply a medical recommendation, but a spatial policy, too. In 1901, the British colonial administration adopted residential segregation for European civil servants, culminating in the construction, in 1904, of Hill Station: a bungalow compound overlooking Freetown, situated 250 metres above sea level. Though framed in official discourse as a rational, “objective” response to disease, later scholarship reveals a more complex set of motivations. Segregation was shaped as much by economic calculation and colonial anxieties as by scientific reasoning. It reduced the financial burden of maintaining empire—lowering the salaries required to attract European personnel fearful of the threat of malaria—while recasting Sierra Leone as a habitable, even desirable, posting. Hill Station was thus imagined as a “health resort […] where comfort, rest, change, and sea breezes are to be enjoyed”: an architectural solution to both biological and psychological conditions.
Lawrenson’s film does not explicitly rehearse these underlying motivations, yet its formal strategies render visible the entanglement of science, commerce, and architecture in the colonial project. In a lecture to the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce in November 1899, referenced in the film, Ross casts himself in the lineage of imperial explorers and declares: “the success of imperialism will be found to depend very largely upon our success with the microscope.” Here, scientific knowledge becomes an instrument of expansion. In his analysis of colonial spatial organisation, Frantz Fanon observed that colonial powers “divided [the world] into compartments […] inhabited by two different species,” parcelled out by “the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race.” Prefabricated in Liverpool and “planted” above Freetown, the buildings of Hill Station are an archive in the original meaning: material inscriptions of power, specifically, colonial rule. Measures rejected by the Colonial Office—mosquito eradication, swamp drainage, quinine prophylaxis—might have benefited all indigenous African, Creole, and European populations. Segregation, by contrast, served only the latter. The built environment bears witness to both deeds and denials.
As Achille Mbembe reminds us, the archive assembles “pieces of time” into a coherent narrative—but one that always leaves something out. Miranda Pennell’s A Person of the Forest, stylistically very different to Lawrenson’s film, works against this logic, reconfiguring archival materials to expose the violence they conceal. The film approaches the archive through fragments—images, specimens, and documents from the collections of the EYE Filmmuseum, the Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, and the Artis Zoological Museum—to examine the Dutch colonial “cultivation system” in Indonesia. Narrated by the ghost of an orangutan, one among many primates forcibly removed from their native habitats and transported to Europe as objects of scientific curiosity, the film gives voice to what the archive excludes. “I will never return home and this was the end of my world,” the narrator reflects, recalling a history of dispossession and colonial extraction. Unlike the mosquitoes in Hill Station, appearing as contained threats, specimens to be studied and controlled, the orangutan is a “coveted import”, desired and displayed, yet equally subject to violence. The protagonist wanders through the corridors of the Zoological Museum in search of her taxidermied body, now displaced, stored, removed from display. As a child, and even now as an adult, I have been fascinated by this state of suspended movement, this “temporal limbo,” in which museum animals are captured—creatures whose living counterparts I may never encounter. “All taxidermy is marked by human longing,” writes Rachel Poliquin. Yet how can longing breed so much death?
Watching Pennell’s film, I found myself overcome by grief; how many worlds have ended before, under the same colonial, genocidal drive that continues to shape our present? In this film, the end never finishes beginning. Pennell’s reassembly of archival fragments does not simply foreground ecological devastation, but also the entanglement of human and non-human histories. The personal history and fate of the narrator-specimen is inseparable from that of the land and of the anonymous labourers, whose lives the colonial record distorts, and whose resistance it silences, in an effort to establish order. Pennell’s fable masterfully employs fragments from the colonial archive, enabling us to hear this silence in the (broken) record. Sound and narration lend the film a spectral quality, animating the archive as a space haunted by interrupted worlds and their unrealised futures. The archive is presented not as a neutral repository, but an active force, one that shapes the record even as it conceals its own operations. “We, who live outside of time, must return,” the narrator declares, “to disturb the future of this past.”
Placing Pennell’s and Lawrenson’s films in dialogue, this programme proposes the archive as both instrument and site of contestation. In Hill Station, architecture materialises an imperial logic that divides, extracts, and protects. In A Person of the Forest, the archive is reanimated and revoiced, its fragments rearranged to reveal what it cannot fully contain. If the archive binds origin to authority, the films show it also opens the possibility of rupture. A call concealed in Pennell’s narrative, working like an incantation, echoes in my mind as the film draws to a close: “Regardless of the damage already done, the crew in the global engine room can still take up their hammers and finish the job, in kinship with all those who have resisted.” And just like that, a wild hope sneaks in … for another world beginning where this one ends.
Lilly Markaki is a writer, curator and lecturer, working in the Dept. of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London.
This text was commissioned by Open City Documentary Festival to accompany the screening of Hill Station + A Person of the Forest at Bertha DocHouse, 15 April 2026.