Notes: on monuments and moments

By Christopher Cozier



Kurt Nahar’s 8 Dec 1982 installation at Fort Zeelandia; photo by Christopher Cozier


Often when I think of monuments in the Caribbean I think only of the commemoration of historically remote events, and most of the time in a passive and almost indifferent way. We think of a lost moment and of the attempt to preserve or project its value. These questions have been with me since my first visits to Paramaribo, observing the projects of artists Marcel Pinas and Kurt Nahar. There are so many commemorative statues and structures in this city. Somehow they seem to reduce rather than to expand or ignite curiosity. They just fit in, and the snow-cone cart, concert poster, or bus decoration seems to register more definitively or assertively on my mind. As in many other Caribbean locations, there remains a tension between formal and informal markers as you move around Paramaribo.




Concert poster, Paramaribo; photo by Christopher Cozier


Kurt Nahar’s project at Fort Zeelandia, 8 Dec 1982, refers to the date of what are called the December Killings. Fifteen people — trade unionists, journalists, academics, and soldiers — known to be opposed to the government, were rounded up, interrogated, tortured, and killed in this fort.

Marcel Pinas’s Moiwana monument commemorates the November 1986 massacre of over thirty men, women, and children during Suriname's civil war, at the actual site of the tragedy on the road between Moengo and Albina. This was the home of the rebel leader Ronnie Brunswijk.

Both artists bring up ideas about how or why we should remember in ways that are circumspect about nationhood’s promises. They bring up issues about the relationship between art and local politics in a fragile democracy. They take this on in an era very different from that of Waka Tjopu, for example, a moment traditionally associated with political engagement and the social value of visual production. A time when terms like “struggle” and “progressive” had a particular charge.

For Pinas and Nahar, these investigative works fuse ideas of personal and collective interests reaching beyond the immediate moment or place. They seek to interrogate the purpose of visual production and the strategies of articulating the challenges of contemporary Caribbean society. As a Ndjuka, Pinas has been articulating presence and visibility throughout his entire career by highlighting the visual language, culture, and social challenges of his community. Nahar, from an urban “creole” backgound, has incorporated this event into his practice. Through the dissonance of associative random fragments on the surface of his collages, he assembles an alternate view of our reality by abandoning the rational to rearrange and re-see. His ongoing interrogative stance and process collides with or arrives at this current political moment.

Optimistically and confidently, both artists test out the boundaries of visual and political propriety by referring to these events. It is counter-politics to the manufacture of fear by insecure aggressive regimes. The December Killings were intended to erase opposition while strategically inserting violated ghosts into the daily imagination of the political class. It generated silence while asserting itself into everyday consciousness. Nahar has worked with and around this once unmentionable moment, re-conjuring it to alter the value of how it resides in our memories.

The vengeful acts of Moiwana were aimed at a particular community then residing outside the coastal political embrace that stood in for what is politically called Suriname. Pinas has built a large-scale monument on the actual site in a forceful declarative manner. It is a site for personal rememberance of lost friends and relatives, for ethnic and national reflection, and also an aesthetic/experiential artistic site-specific-work.

Both artists list names and events in their projects. One gesture is temporal, hoping to trigger memory, undermine silence, and generate debate. The other is a permanent structure, monumental in scale, creating a new mapping of social history — a new site for all of us from the wider region to visit and to experience. The Afaka characters on the Moiwana monument (Kibii wi — “protect us”) refer to community and protection. They ask the rest of us why can’t we just live together. This is not a challenge in Suriname alone.




Marcel Pinas at his Moiwana monument; photo by Christopher Cozier


Both of these works talk about very recent and current experiences, events that are still raw and unresolved within living memory. They acknowledge and construct another narrative about the region by rethinking nation/culture and its construction. These gestures have to be seen within the wider narrative of the Caribbean’s social and political history, and also at the boundary of where it meets with that of South America. These works are aimed at political futures. Another election is coming, and the various players of these moments are still alive and among us. The artists want us to remember, but also to imagine a future that can resolve and transform the meaning and the value of these moments.






Kurt Nahar’s 8 Dec 1982 installation at Fort Zeelandia; photo by Christopher Cozier


Nahar’s “agitational” mode jettison aesthetic concerns and consciously aims to be caustic — even obnoxious. The way the work is put together expresses an unease, discomfort, and even anger — it seems to be about denying pleasure. One minor concern could be the political implications of the commodification of the December Killings and the expedient usage of the event within electoral politics by interest groups and registered parties. Some have speculated that Nahar’s ongoing concern may also begin to condense the meaning and the possible value of the revolutionary in our historical narrative, and may then obscure what was otherwise accomplished and that may remain unresolved on the road out of colonialism.

Nahar is expressing his concern for the future of his country through highlighting one of its darkest and most challenging moments. He is asking how we can move forward from these unresolved moments. It is a feeling shared throughout the Caribbean, as during the 1980s a number of horrific acts of violence haunted our revolutionary movements and remain with us mostly in popular music, poetry, marginal academic texts, and now more and more through the visual.

Nahar’s strategic lack of composure becomes his way of expressing rage and outrage. The objects are roughly put together, and talk about fragmentation and disharmony and anxiety. Is he asserting that nothing beautiful can come of or from this moment, especially if it remains suppressed and virulent? The work expresses a grasping or gasping — an outburst from a prolonged silence. Unlike the works of previous generations, Nahar is not declaring or invoking an ideal — he is rubbing the lamp, acknowledging a festering reality.

Scattered between the trees around the Fort, which he refers to as “silent witnesses”, bright red posters with the bold initials of the assassinated individuals were nailed to their trunks like sacrificial figures. They looked like standard cheap election posters with their inelegant typography, but instead of smiling, promising faces and catchphrases we got lines of poetry and then just initials. The jarring red tone suggests the violence and the bloodletting of the early 80s as ideological engines, local and internationalist struggles began to simmer. I think of Grenada, Guyana, Trinidad, and Jamaica, as well as other parts of the continent. The internal struggles and the official reactions from Greenbay to Lopinot still haunt us. The heady brew of revolutionary rhetoric and dew breakers, hit squads acting with impunity to maintain the status quo or the Revo from the north to the south of Reagan’s back garden, what was called the Caribbean Basin, are all conjured.

How does a new generation deal with this odd and rapacious Oedipal mask? Does this work then betray the “value” of this revolutionary moment — limit or interrupt its passage into memory and understanding by overstating its darker manifestations, as it allegedly defended its process? Does it highlight the blood-thirsty rationalizations of its imposed optimism and unfulfilled promises?

One can say that the work does not ask about the past as much as it asks about the current moment and the future we are in the process of making — or, as some thinkers suggest, the past imagined futures in which we now reside. That these kinds of political artistic statements can be made now, in Paramaribo, asks an important question about the current state of Surinamese democracy. Will this moment last beyond the outcome of the next election? It also asks about the degree to which artistic expression is seen as agentive or as a large enough social concern. Is it seen as persuasive? It questions the troublesome and vicarious relationship with us, the curators, critics, and exchange artists, with foreign passports and return flights.




Marcel Pinas visiting his Moiwana monument; photo by Christopher Cozier


Pinas’s monument is also operating in this space of questioning. His calm and more composed spatial work looks towards creating an awareness of a newer, more current and pressing question. Ironically, the “creole” nationalist regimes of the region create monuments to rebellion and Emancipation and some even use Maroon culture to symbolise national and cultural resistance within these narratives. Regional monuments speak about the negotiated moment and the gift of freedom towards citizenship for owned entities, ex-slaves but still subjects of the various Crowns within the engine of Modernity.

Cuffy (in Guyana) rages as a primal mystical force, Makandal (in Haiti) blows his shell, Bussa (in Barbados) shakes his fist at the sky (with nice shorts). Two naked and pre-Black statues look at each other not yet aroused in Kingston, like the first steps after the customary drum roll of a Carifesta choreography. And so it goes. Pinas’s work declares a space for thinking, for reflection, rather than objectifying or caricaturing. Is there a way that these officially installed objects obscure or silence unresolved questions about the transformation we hurriedly celebrate in the Post-Independence space?

But the Moiwana monument asks a question or declares an intention about shared space and community. This is not a narrative of subjected fusion, but one about each cultural self remaining intact while connecting and communicating. The work also ventures into inscribing new regional monuments or moments for reflection — new sites of memory and commemoration.

So this gesture is both a personal and a community concern, national and transnational. It recognises those made absent not just in the massacre but in the social dynamics of the country itself. It speaks not just to Suriname but through its scale to all humanity when we falter. Recent events in Albina indicate the fragility of these relations, and the resentments shaped by a long history of neglect.






Marcel Pinas’s Moiwana monument; photos by Christopher Cozier


Pinas’s rising object with Afaka signs surrounded by smaller metal and concrete tablets inscribed with the names of those killed sits in a forest clearing. It is always seen against the sky or the heavens, accordingly. The sound of the wind and the sound and feel of the sharp chipped stone fragments under one’s feet create a harsh effect as you walk around the clearing looking at the names. The sound of the gravel makes one keenly aware of one’s individual presence at this site, and also one’s vulnerability. The meeting point of metal, concrete, and stone rising out of the forest clearing creates a sombre tone, as one tries to conjure the moment in a small rural village setting. Again the trees in the forest are like silent witnesses surrounding the site.

The state has recognised these injustices and investigations, and court cases continue while the artists process these memories and feelings. The artists are not seeking justice or retribution, but to excavate these memories for illumination and reconciliation. Ultimately, Pinas and Nahar seek to alter the emotional and political value of these moments.

Postscript:

While writing this note, I saw a series of images by photographer Harvey Lisse, posted on Facebook. Titled “Black Beauties”, the photos simply use Fort Zeelandia as a backdrop or texture to capture the beauty and lightheartedness of a young Surinamese woman. It’s a glamour series, the stereotypical kind of images that young guys with cameras take of beautiful young women. The urban cool of the era of Vibe magazine is conjured. Even though conventional in terms of how women may traditionally reside within the frame, some of the images take in a non-conventional implication when one thinks of the chosen location. In an image called “against the wall”, a young woman leans against the wall of the fort looking back at the viewer. One has to stop and wonder: is the artist winking or just oblivious? Either is critically interesting, as a vantage point or step along the way from previous readings of the site. In these images, the black body or self is not a violated presence but a celebrated one. In this way, Lisse’s images may be heading to yet another reading of the site, taking us one step further as two historical moments, a colonial fort and a postcolonial dungeon, become merely the backdrop for another creative moment.

Notes: on Art of Survival

Image courtesy the Tropenmuseum


The exhibition Art of Survival: Maroon Culture from Suriname opened at the Tropenmuseum (Tropical Museum) in Amsterdam on 6 November, 2009, and runs until 9 May, 2010. Patricia Kaersenhout, an artist with Surinamese roots, based in Amsterdam, made the following notes after visiting the exhibition.

7 January, 2010

I do not have a love-hate relationship with the Tropenmuseum. On the contrary, I like spending hours there. Most of the time, the exhibitions are clear and the materials of high quality, sometimes shown with latest interactive stuff. Maybe I like it because it brings back a memory of the unknown.

In a way it reminds me of the covered tropical beach in Japan, complete with sunset, salt water, waves, sand, palm trees, and a horizon — but covered with a glass roof. An artificial world.

The Tropenmuseum represents an artificial tropical world which, to me — a child of immigrants from Suriname, but raised in a Western European climate — gives a bit of a sense of belonging. I only go there during the winter, when temperatures are low, skies are grey, and streets are wet.

The first thing I noticed entering Art of Survival was the overload of information. I immediately got discouraged, and had to supress the feeling to walk to the bookshop, buy the catalogue, walk to the restaurant, buy a coffee and sandwich, and start reading. I controlled myself, because I had a mission.

When there’s so much information, what sticks in your mind? Where to start? At the beginning, one might say — but it was not so clear where that was. Maybe it was of no importance. I just started somewhere. A touchscreen with a lot of videos and old photographs. The design of the video programme was very good. The explanation clear. It was easy to skip from one film to another. So as a viewer you’re not forced to see the whole film through. One could interrupt the film and go back and repeat an interesting scene.

After scrolling through some films, my eyes got captured by Obu/Wosu: A Life in French Guiana, by Felix de Rooy. The story tells about a Maroon sculptor, Kenneth Soleg Charvein, who lost most of his family at the tragedy of Moiwana. He talks about traditions in his work which he learned from his father. He prefers to work in a group of sculptors, because the world is bigger than we can imagine. “What you didn’t think of yourself will be created by the other.” Very impressive, because it’s in flat contradiction to the individualistic art tradition in which I was educated.

De Jongste Loot is a 1989 documentary by Frank Zichem. It tells the story of a soldier from the national army, Wigo Benton, who is captured by Ronnie Brunswijk. He is an eyewitness to some horrific events, and decides after he’s liberated to go to Holland. It turns out that he doesn’t exist there, because he doesn’t have official documents. One of the things he does to survive is listen to the birds and check if the soil of his little garden is fertile, so he can grow flowers and vegetables. Zooming in on his personal story penetrates the traumatic things that happened during that time in the interior of Suriname, deep in the consciousness of the viewer.

Next to many films and audio presentations, there were beautiful carved wood chairs and combs, woven cloths, and more objects which I won’t try to describe, because there were so many, and I have an ambivalent feeling about exhibiting utilitarian objects, even if they are from another culture. Even though they are well made, it seems rather odd to place them in a museum, looking at them with the serious eye of an interested visitor. Every culture has its right to privacy. I don’t like to peek into someone’s kitchen knowing that the other will never get a chance to see mine.

Among those objects which were supposed to give us an insight into daily life among the Maroons were two very strong artworks by Marcel Pinas. Here the exhibition shows its weakest point. Hanging contemporary art between arts and crafts just doesn’t work. I really like arts and crafts and I really like contemporary art. I just don’t want them to be shown together in such a way that they don’t uplift each other, but take each other down. Efforts to bring those two together often don’t do either of them any good. They are two disciplines which stand on their own. They can influence or inspire each other, but their approach in expression and ideas remains different.

Walking out of the museum, I was confronted by the exhibition poster on a billboard: an image of a black guy photographed half-faced. He’s wearing mirrored sunglasses. They reflect an image of trees and a river. I guess it’s in the interior of Suriname. To me it reflects a longing to be there. To flee from the hell of the European climate into a warm tropical paradise. A longing which Europeans have had since the fifteenth century. The paradox is that the Maroons have to “survive” in what we still see as paradise. But as soon as one has to survive instead of living one’s life, paradise is lost.




Video tour of Art of Survival, courtesy the Tropenmuseum

Diary: a visit to Moengo

Outside the Masanga Restaurant in Moengo, where the Paramaribo SPAN artists met over lunch; photo by Christopher Cozier.


On Tuesday 15 December, 2009, members of the Paramaribo SPAN team — curator Christopher Cozier, writers Chandra van Binnendijk and Marieke Visser, and coordinator Ann Hermelijn — accompanied by a group of Paramaribo-based artists, made a day-trip to the town of Moengo and the nearby village of Moiwana, a couple hours’ drive east of the capital. Moengo is the site of a cultural centre which artist Marcel Pinas is working to establish — long-term plans include a residency programme for visiting artists to work with members of the community. Moengo will also be a satellite site for the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition, opening in February 2010.




A group of artists walking through Moengo; photo by Hedwig de la Fuente


Ellen Ligteringen was one of the artists on the trip. A few days later, she wrote the following note:

“The trip to Moengo and especially the meeting and interacting was really cool (Chris’s word). Listening and responding in a very open way, just the artists’ projects. The meeting felt fertile, like the soil of Suriname. Moengo was a perfect location for this meeting, created by Marcel. We became a part of his project.

“Even on the drive back in the bus we did not stop discussing the projects; we shaped them further, their content and their appearance. Ken Doorson’s project, looking at the red-light area in Paramaribo, was discussed very widely from the men’s point of view, with a lot of jokes. The jokes are a common way to discuss issues, like satire on television in other parts of the world. I’ve never experienced such laughing from the heart in any art programme.”




Bicycle at the side of the road, Moengo; photo by Christopher Cozier



Group shot of the Paramaribo SPAN team and artists; photo by Hedwig de la Fuente



Marcel Pinas at the Moiwana Monument, which he designed to commemorate members of the community killed in the 1986 Moiwana Massacre; photo by Christopher Cozier

Document: Afaka's first letter

ke mi gadu | mi masa | mi bigi na ini a ulotu | fu a papila di yu be gi afaka...


It's estimated there are 25,000 to 30,000 speakers of Djuka (or Ndyuka), one of the Maroon languages of Suriname and French Guiana. Derived from English and several West African languages, Djuka has three distinct spoken dialects as well as a written form, called Afaka script after its creator.

Afaka Atumisi was a Djuka from the Tapanahony region of south-eastern Suriname. Circa 1910 -- inspired, he said, by a dream or vision -- he invented a syllabary of 56 characters which allowed Djuka texts to be recorded and transmitted in writing. Afaka died in 1918, but by 1920 it was reported that over a hundred people in the Tapanahony area could read and write his script.




Detail of one of Marcel Pinas's Kibi Wi totems, made from oil drums decorated with aluminium Afaka characters; Fort Zeelandia, Paramaribo, April 2009. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin


In later decades, the number of fluent readers and writers declined -- an article in the Suriname Museum journal in 1975 estimated that "most probably there remain only five." But more recently Afaka script, like other elements of Maroon culture, has been increasingly adopted (and adapted) as a symbol of Surinamese national identity, and the script is not an unfamiliar sight in Paramaribo. Afaka characters are a recurring and assertive motif in the work of Marcel Pinas, a member of the Djuka community in Moengo, but Surinamese artists from other ethnic backgrounds -- including Roddney Tjon Poen Gie and Sri Irodikromo -- also use the script in their exploration of the country's ethnic intricacies.




Air Borne (acrylic on canvas, 67 x 100 cm, 2009), by Roddney Tjon Poen Gie; photo by William Tsang, courtesy Readytex Art Gallery.


"Tjon Poen Gie is well known for using his own visual language, which is based upon the letter symbols of his ancestors," says the Readytex Gallery website." He draws the characters and symbols three-dimensionally and thus produces a playful abstraction of Chinese letters and Afro Surinamese Afaka symbols in his artwork."

The document reproduced at the top of this post is one of the earliest surviving texts written in Afaka script -- a letter by Afaka Atumisi which reports on his unsuccessful trip to the hospital in Paramaribo in search of treatment. Read a full translation here.

Meanwhile: July and August 2009

=
Notes on other current and upcoming art events in Suriname and elsewhere



Kon u Taki (mixed media on canvas, 148 x 197 cm, 2009), by Marcel Pinas. Photo by William Tsang, courtesy Readytex Art Gallery


= Double Feature: Marcel Pinas and Sri Irodikromo
Readytex Art Gallery, Paramaribo; July 15 to July 25, 2009

Separate collections by two very different artists, each with a distinctive and unique style, although they each choose a strikingly bright colour palette, regularly use pangi textiles, and work from strong culturally inspired themes.

= The Time: solo exhibition by Robbert Enfield
Royal House of Art, Paramaribo; July 25 to August 8, 2009

“Everybody is affected by the time we are living in. But most of them act as if it doesn’t affect them at all. I want to open people’s eyes, tell the spectators: ‘Don’t hide, don’t pretend.’” --Robbert Enfield, July 2009

= Eat the Frame: with work from René Tosari, Carl Pope, Gean Moreno, Jean Bernard Koeman, Anton Vrede, Hamid el Kanbouhi, Dwight Marica, Eric Reding, Miek Hoekzema, Mirjam Kort, Kaleb de Groot and Moshekwa Langa; curator Michael Tedja
Galerie Nouvelles Images, The Hague, the Netherlands; 27 June to August 22, 2009

As the exhibition Eat the Frame was developing, curator Michael Tedja wrote a fictitious story, Hosselen ("to hustle"). The main character is a young curator busy preparing an international exhibition. His path through life is marked by various twists and turns. The novel is written in facets. Like a diamond, a brilliant which has 58 facets, the book is composed of 58 chapters, each telling a story about art and the art world in the Netherlands. By the end of the book, the young curator steps out of the framework of the story and so exits the fiction. The exhibition is being hosted by Nouvelles Images and the catalogue of the exhibition is the final chapter of Hosselen. Eat the Frame is now a reality

= Licht aan Zee AA: with work from Remy Jungerman, Iris Kensmil, Marcel Pinas, Kurt Nahar, David Bade, Tirzo Martha, Papa Adama, Luan Nel, Vitshois Mwilambwe and Meshac Gaba; curator Georges Hanna, guestcurator Remy Jungerman
De Kunstuitleen, Den Helder, The Netherlands; 1 May to August 29, 2009

The theme of Licht aan Zee AA is culture and cultural differences, with a focus on Africa and the Antilles. Guest curator Remy Jungerman, together with Iris Kensmil and Kurt Nahar, has presented a collection under the title "Born on Wednesday", following the Afro-Surinamese tradition of naming babies after the day they are born.

= Togetherness: solo exhibition by Raimen Bijlhout
Cultureel Centrum Suriname (CCS), Paramaribo; August 7 to 13, 2009

Togetherness is about the "unity of the culture of the Afro-Surinamese urban population and the maroon people in the interior". Bijlhout completed his art education at the Nola Hatterman Art Academy in 2006. In 2008 he had his second solo exhibition, New Beginnings, in the Instituto Venezolano para la Cultura y la Cooperacíon (IVCC).

-- Compiled by Marieke Visser and Priscilla Tosari

Conversation: bridges and silences

=
Brug

Auto's daveren
over de brug
maar de kreek
voert uit het bos
nieuwe stilten aan

-- Eddy Pinas


Bridge

Vehicles thunder
over the bridge
but the creek
brings new silences
from the forest

-- trans. Marieke Visser


Marieke Visser: The idea is clear: the fact that a bridge can bring worlds together is not necessarily a blessing. It should not be taken lightly.

The bridge over the Suriname River is to me also a strong reminder of the May demonstrations in 1999, when many of us went out on the streets to protest the presidency of Jules Wijdenbosch. He was the one who built this visible bridge, this symbol of hope, of growth, of expansion. We shouted: "We don't want bread with bridge!" But after a few days everything went back to normal. And now, now and then, I notice thoughts in my own head like: "Well, at least he built something tangible for the country!"

Chandra van Binnendijk: I am intrigued by this little poem. Not only because of its simple beauty, but because the poet refers to "silences", indicating there is more than just one silence. The creek supplies us with new silences, he says--and I wonder: Are these more of the same, or do we get a variety, will we get different kinds of silences each time the creek brings them to us?

When playing around with these questions, my image of the bridge changed, it widened the scope of how we could look at a bridge. It is not just a construction which links one bank of a river to the other, but it also has something above it--air--and something underneath it--water or ground. The water brings new silences, but the water itself has many layers--there are the bubbles and the waves on the surface, but there are also the undercurrents. The same goes for the air above the bridge. So looking at a bridge in a wider sense we could see it as one (horizontal) layer of many in its wider surroundings. What does one see when looking at the surroundings while standing on the bridge?

MV: I think of a friend, the visual artist René Tosari, the man behind Waka Tjopu. More than anyone I know, he is at home in both worlds: the artists in the diaspora and the artists at "home", but also the worlds of the older generation and the younger generation. I don't see him as a bridge builder or a bridge--it is more like that he is a person on the bridge, accepted by both worlds as someone who "belongs" to their world.

When I think about this image, a man standing on the bridge, walking to both sides, sharing with people on both sides, I see how this is how I myself feel. That is also why the Wakaman Project was so exciting. It transcends that issue of home or away, of that recurring--and sometimes very irritating and time-consuming--question of which world we belong to. I don't want to choose, I am not willing to defend one world over another. But I do speak both languages, and I do miscommunicate in both languages as well. On both ends of the bridge are sources of inspiration, which I feel free to be inspired by.

I have the feeling that more people are moving in that direction, and I see how the bridge can be a way to get out of a place that has become too limited, and maybe later on it is a means to return with new stuff in your suitcase. But also the bridge itself means a new freedom--it is like an opened window (to the future but also to the past). It is an opportunity to connect and to re-connect and to cut loose (disconnect) as well.



Untitled (1998), by René Tosari; photo by Roy Tjin