Seen: Masters of the Game, by Jurgen Lisse

Masters of the Game from Jurgen Lisse on Vimeo.

Masters of the Game is a short video piece by filmmaker Jurgen Lisse, featuring the nimble footwork of a group of young street football players. Using camerawork and editing techniques familiar from music videos, set to a hard-driving soundtrack, it is an artifact of an international urban sensibility with various Paramaribo landmarks as backdrops.

Lisse writes:

“A few boys came to me and asked if I could help them with an intro for their team, Streetskillerz. These talented boys are still in school, and besides school they enjoy and challenge each other with passion and the quickest moves.”

See more of Lisse's short video works at Vimeo.

Seen: param@ribo, by Maartje Jaquet

Maartje Jaquet is a video artist, photographer, and graphic designer based in Amsterdam. She writes:

My art is about seeing the wonder of daily life in simple things that other people may overlook. It's simple-with-a-twist. I like to share the poetry, wonder and humour of life, being strange enough as it is in itself.

In January 2009, Jaquet visited Suriname to lead a series of oneminute video workshops at AHKCO in collaboration with the Nola Hatterman Art Academy. She documented her time there in a series of photos and videos posted in a Flickr set titled param@ribo.

These still and moving images suggest a fascination with Paramaribo's urban texture: the proliferation of signage, the way people move through public spaces, fragments of buildings or machinery that function almost like pieces of found sculpture.

View Jaquet's Suriname images here.

Seen: Trefossa, by Ida Does

Opening sequences from Trefossa: Mi a No Mi (2008), directed by Ida Does


Mi a no mi
solanga mi brudu
fu yu a n'e trubu
na ini den dusun titei fu mi

I am not myself
until my blood
is infused with you
in all of my veins

— From "Gronmama" ("Earthmother"); English translation by Quinton Zondervan

If Suriname has a national poet, Henri Frans de Ziel (1916-1975), who wrote under the pseudonym Trefossa, is perhaps the leading candidate. His groundbreaking 1957 book Trotji, the first published collection of Sranan poems, has been called "the big bang of Surinamese literature." Thousands of Surinamese schoolchildren sing his verse daily — he wrote the Sranan part of the national anthem.

Trefossa: Mi a No Mi (2008), a documentary by filmmakers Ida Does and Paul van den Bos, uses interviews, historic film footage, and Trefossa's own words — from his published poems and unpublished diaries — to tell his story, chart his influence on two generations of Surinamese writers, and investigate how the power of his poems helped legitimise Sranan Tongo in both Suriname and the Netherlands.




Portrait of Trefossa courtesy the DBNL


The text of Ala Poewema foe Trefossa ("Collected Poems of Trefossa", 1977) is available online at the Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren.

Seen: Suriname, Inside-Out, by Reshma Kirpalani

Photographer Reshma Kirpalani was born in Suriname but grew up in the United States. She is currently based in Florida. In 2007 she returned to Suriname and found, as she puts it, "a country full of cultural contradictions, swelling potential, woeful corruption, spiritualism, and spooky small towns with all-time high suicide rates."

The photographic project she started then is documented both on her blog Tatata and in a carefully curated selection of black-and-white images posted in a Flickr photoset, accompanied by a brief essay.

"I discovered Suriname," she writes. "No longer the resting my place of vague, childhood memories, this country is instead sometimes charming, sometimes alarming, always home. And yet, even as I enjoy citizenship status in this country, I am not wholly accepted as a 'local.' Rather, I am pointed to as the small American with the oversized camera....

"I no longer seek to 'sum-up' Suriname. Rather, I intend to explore this country just as it exists, at this point in time: on the eve of an election year, on the brink of progress, in the ebb and flow of inevitability."

See selections from Kirpalani's Suriname images here and here.

Seen: Suriname, by Jurgen Lisse

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Jurgen Lisse is a young filmmaker based in Paramaribo, working as a cameraman and editor for commercial projects — music videos, documentaries — while pursuing his own creative experiments. (He was recently commissioned to edit a series of short films for Art of Survival, an exhibition on Maroon culture that opens at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in November 2009.)

Suriname is a short video piece Lisse made in 2008 to demonstrate his camerawork and editing technique to prospective clients, and posted at YouTube. It is a sort of meditation on one of Paramaribo's residential neighbourhoods, slightly unsettling in its close-up observation of unexpected details of the landscape, with hints of urban ennui conveyed through time-lapse photography.



See more of Lisse's video work at his YouTube page.