The Hamburg Colonial Institute, which later became the city's University, was founded in 1909 expressly to give colonialism a “scholarly” foundation. Thus, it exemplifies the close ties between academia and colonialism at the turn of the century, which in the trading city of Hamburg were also determined by economic interests. The film reconstructs that history from the perspective of today, traversing the university's archives and collections, its greenhouses and laboratories, to find the remnant traces of colonialism. The very voices that were silenced by science are now also allowed to be heard. The collecting and observing, registering, mapping, organising and hierarchising of academia and science have always been a technique of domination – without that, colonialism would never have been able to exercise its power.