A Blueprint of You
Een blauwdruk van jou
A Blueprint of You is an ongoing artistic research project by Dutch-Indonesian artist Eva Margaretha, exploring how personal and collective histories continue to shape us across generations.
Rooted in family archives, oral histories and lived experience, the project traces stories of migration, displacement, colonial history, identity and belonging, including what has been preserved, what has been forgotten, and what continues to be passed on.
The research unfolds through installation, cyanotype, portraiture, sound, writing and participatory projects. Each work reveals a fragment; together, they form an evolving blueprint of what we inherit, carry and pass on.
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EXPLORE A BLUEPRINT OF YOU
DE WITTE KEBAYA
MONUMENTAL INSTALATION
A walk-in textile installation inspired by the kebaya, bringing together cyanotype, family archives, sound and personal histories. Visitors enter the work and move among fragments of memory, inheritance and colonial history.
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V(R)OUWLIJNEN
PARTICIPATORY RESEARCH PROJECT
A participatory research project tracing stories across generations of women. Through conversations, family archives and shared memories, V(R)OUWLIJNEN explores what is inherited, remembered, silenced and passed on from woman to woman.
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BLUEPRINTS
CYANOTYPE WORKS
A growing series of cyanotype works on paper and textile, created from family photographs, archival material and traces gathered through research. Each work holds a fragment of a larger history, while existing as an artwork in its own right.
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THE STAMP
AMSTERDAM 750
A cyanotype created for Amsterdam’s 750th anniversary, based on a colonial postage stamp. The work connects the city’s history to the former Dutch East Indies and asks how colonial histories continue to shape the way we see ourselves today.
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WRITING
STORIES & ORAL HISTORIES
Writing forms an integral part of A Blueprint of You. Through interviews, oral histories and archival research, personal memories become stories that connect individual lives to larger histories of migration, colonialism, identity and belonging.
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KEMUNGKINAN
OPEN POSSIBILITIES
A Blueprint of You continues to grow through new stories, encounters and places. Kemungkinan, the Indonesian word for possibility, leaves space for what has not yet taken form: new research, collaborations and ways for the work to unfold.
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What do we inherit from those who came before us?
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PROJECT 01
De Witte Kebaya
Monumental installation, 2026
De Witte Kebaya (The White Kebaya) is a monumental walk-in installation within A Blueprint of You, shaped after the kebaya, a garment worn by women across Indonesia and deeply entangled with colonial and family histories.
The work brings together cyanotype, textile, family archives, personal stories and sound. Images and fragments from different generations appear across translucent fabrics, moving with light, wind and the presence of the visitor.
At its centre is the question that runs through A Blueprint of You: what do we inherit from those who came before us? De Witte Kebaya makes that inheritance physical. Visitors can enter the work and stand among traces of migration, displacement, loss, memory and belonging, becoming part of a space in which personal history and collective history meet.
The Installation
Visitors are invited to step inside De Witte Kebaya. The translucent fabrics form a space in which images, texts and family histories overlap. As daylight passes through the work and the textiles move with the wind, the installation is never experienced in exactly the same way.
Inside, voices become part of that space. An audio fragment reflects on the white kebaya itself and the histories carried by the garment.
Listen: KEBAYA
Henri
One of the histories carried within De Witte Kebaya is that of Henri François Ernest Rozenberg, my great-grandfather.
Born in Surabaya in 1901, Henri disappeared in 1944 when the Junyo Maru, the Japanese transport ship on which he was being held as a prisoner of war, was torpedoed off the coast of Sumatra. He never returned home.
For decades, what remained of him within our family were fragments: photographs, documents, a name, and the silence surrounding his disappearance.
His story became part of A Blueprint of You through my search within the family archive. Printed onto translucent textile, these fragments become present again not as a reconstruction of his life, but as traces of someone whose absence continued to travel through generations.
Listen: HENRI
De Witte Kebaya, 2026
Cyanotype on textile, archival imagery, sound, timber structure
Approx. 5 × 5 × 5 m
Part of A Blueprint of You
Presentations
Zomerlicht Festival, Noordwijk — June 2026
BIG ART, Rotterdam — September 2026
Construction
Timber support structure designed and constructed by Richard van Triest, Karakter Bouwadvies
