Diary: return to Pikinslee

The Saamaka Kondë museum in Pikinslee


Karel Doing and Mels van Zutphen are artists based in Rotterdam, and participants in the ArtRoPa programme. During their residencies in Suriname, they both visited the village of Pikinslee, on the Upper Suriname River. Their time there inspired the work they showed in the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition.

After the exhibition opening in late February, both artists returned to Pikinslee to share their projects with the community there. They send the following notes about this visit.


The opening of Paramaribo SPAN was not the end of activities for us. We both worked on time-based art (a 16mm film and a video installation) in Upper Suriname, in a village called Pikinslee. The Maroons that live in Pikinslee have just completed building a museum to preserve the fast-changing and disappearing Saramaccan culture for the next generations. The village promises to develop into an important cultural centre in the interior of Suriname in the coming years. Due to the activities and collaboration of the villagers and Maroon diaspora in the Netherlands and Paramaribo, there is a particular openness in Pikinslee, although it is situated in a still isolated region.

We were both very eager to show the films we made on our earlier visit. With the help of Kens Libbarth and the local artists' group Totomboti, we organised an event for the inhabitants of the village.






Members of the audience at the screening in Pikinslee


On Wednesday 3 March the people came in large numbers and waited full of anticipation for the screening to start. Because of a lack of working sound equipment, the first film we screened was Djoeka, a Dutch travelogue from 1927, recently digitised by Eye Film Institute. This travelogue consists of extensive footage shot on the Suriname River, around Botopasi and Asidonhopo (close to Pikinslee). Besides a journey by dugout canoe, the film shows many activities like music, dance, food preparation, hairdressing, religious ceremonies, and portraits of people and architecture.

Looking back onto their own history proved to be very exciting for the audience. There was a lot of commentary, laughter, and discussion during and after the film. The audience was amazed that the colonials did not have outboard motors on their boats and had to paddle for weeks before reaching their destination. Also they were struck by the dancing styles depicted, very different from today's style. The main title and intertitles of the film were considered crude and badly informed, reflecting the arrogance of the Dutch editors. Also, the audience could see how different the river was before the Afobaka dam was built. Many other comments were lost in translation somewhere between Saramaccan, Dutch, Sranan, and English, the languages spoken by the assembled public.




An excerpt from Looking for Apoekoe (2010; 16-mm film, 13 minutes), by Karel Doing


The next day, a sound installation was set up, and the screening continued. The crowd was as big as the day before, and during the screening more and more people gathered. During Karel’s Looking for Apoekoe the audience sat quietly, softly commenting on the strange but still familiar images they saw. Afterwards some astonished comments were heard. Karel’s film is a mysterious trip circling around the bush-spirit Apoekoe, a lively, smart figure taking various shapes and with many special features.






Installation views of Man in Gold (2010; video loop, 20 minutes), by Mels van Zutphen, at the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition


Next was Mels’s film Man in Gold, a film version of the video installation screened in Paramaribo. It depicts the building of a korjaal (dugout canoe), the shipping of two big golden objects from Paramaribo upstream on the Suriname River, and a man with a golden suit on a moped. It was shot with the help of local canoe engineers and the people from the Totomboti foundation.

Berry, nephew of canoe builder Bernard, was very exited to see if anyone would recognise him as the man in the golden suit, made by his aunt Joney. Children laughed out loud on seeing canoe builder Alfred, whose face was covered with dust caused by the chainsaw. Etje Doekoe, an artist from Totomboti who saw a rough cut of the film a few months earlier during a visit to Rotterdam, asked Mels about a particular shot that he didn’t see in the final version: a palm tree waving in the wind. Mels was fascinated by the fact that Etje missed this shot and not the others of himself that didn’t make it. It’s not a problem, Etje said, I just liked the waving palm trees a lot....




Etje Doekoe in the Saamaka Kondë museum


The next day we were scheduled to go back to the city, but on the invitation of Totomboti we decided to stay one more day. It turned out to be the most relaxed day of our trip, and inevitably we started making plans for new projects in Suriname’s rich interior.

Rotterdam, 16 March, 2010

Diary: SPAN meets street

Images of bus paintings installed in the Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen exhibition; photo by Ingrid Moesan


Paul Faber, co-author of Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen: Straatkunst in Suriname, reports on an “Art Conversation” which brought together some Paramaribo SPAN artists and various street artists best known for their paintings on buses, walls, and shopfronts

Sunday evening, 7 March, 7 pm. Location: the garden of DSB Bank in Paramaribo. Inside and outside the central pavilion the works of the SPAN artists have found their own environment. Tonight the exhibition receives some special guests, a group of painters who make their living by painting buses and walls.

These painters rarely visit art exhibitions. They are here by invitation, because they created works that will be presented in an exhibition of their own, Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen, at Fort Nieuw Amsterdam. Sirano Zalman gives a guided tour for the street artists and other visitors. He shows the works, gives explanations, introduces other participating artists, such as George Struikelblok.

At 7.30 the crowd gathers in the back garden near Roberto Tjon A Meeuw's Fatu Bangi, a nice piece of wooden art-furniture, in front of a big clump of bamboo. About seventy people are present: the artists from both exhibitions, other interested artists, and art lovers. Magnificent palm tress and flowering bushes illuminated by hundreds of lights form a wonderful setting.




Images of painted shaved-ice carts in the Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen exhibition; photo by Ingrid Moesan


Karin Lachmising leads the conversation that unfolds over the next hour. Can you have a meaningful conversation between seventy people? Amazingly, the answer is an outright yes. The underlying question of this conversation is to discover how these two groups relate to each other. They obviously move in different circles, hardly know each other, and their jobs are structured in different ways. On the other hand, they are all “visual workers”, as someone puts it, and are dedicated to their work: how do they see each other’s work and (how) can they learn from each other?

The conversation, moving from one artist to another, touches in a natural and respectful way on all relevant issues. One of these is the message of the work. Some of the SPAN artworks deal with complex issues like pollution of the environment, suicide, and orphans. The commentary given during the tour helps a lot to explain the thoughts behind them, Ghalied Khodabaks says. The SPAN artists were obviously involved in what they wanted to say. But, as several discussants state, the street artists have their message too, more specified and narrow, but very clear at the same time. The bus painters concentrate on stars and heroes, emblems of beauty, to attract people. The painters of advertisements depict all kinds of products, like tomatoes or beer, in a way that makes the onlooker very thirsty indeed. It is the art of seduction, someone suggests.

The origin of this difference in the character of the message can be found in the relation with the commission. As André Sontosoemarto explains, the street artists have to deal with the clients, often companies, who order the paintings, and have specific requirements. The freedom of choice is limited for the painters, but not nil. The margin shows in the continuous innovation and development of ideas, techniques, and motifs.

It depends also on the artist's reputation. The bus painters like Ramon Bruyning and the Khodabaks brothers are known for the quality of their work and often get a free hand in the choice of motifs. Sirano admires their skills: how did you learn to paint so well, he asks. André explains there is hardly proper schooling in advertisement painting. Ideas to do something about this are presented on the spot. The bus painters are largely self-taught. They learned their art by using their eyes and practising with their hands, over and over again. Their standard is exceptionally high, also by international standards. Another interesting difference comes to light: the stage and the audience. “The whole city is our exhibition hall!” the street painters state proudly.




Soeki Irodikromo looks at one of the specially commissioned paintings; photo by Ingrid Moesan


At this point, the input of several painters of the older generation is enlightening. René Tosari, Winston van der Bok, John Djojo, and Steve Ammersingh were part of the artists’ collective Waka Tjopu, founded in the early 1980s. They relate the discussion of tonight to the objectives and ideals of then. Waka Tjopu brought art into the street, went for direct communication, painted large billboards, and avoided the use of the word “art”.

These stories link tonight’s conversation with a broader and deeper tradition in the Surinamese world of “visual workers”. A passionate speech by grand old man Soeki Irodikromo, whose daughter Sri participates in Paramaribo SPAN, rounds up this highly interesting evening. He implores people to continue this exchange, suggested that the painters leave some permanent mark in Fort Nieuw Amsterdam.

Tonight the street artists were confronted with a number of new ideas and possibilities, but also with respect and appreciation from new-found colleagues. Next Friday a nicely painted bus will leave from the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition venue for Fort Nieuw Amsterdam and the opening of Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen. After a quick family meeting, the Khodabaks brothers announce that they will provide the bus, which is bound to be a high-class example of their Bollywood style. It is a nice thought to be able to travel inside an artwork to an opening.




Images of wall paintings in the Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen exhibition; photo by Ingrid Moesan


Schaafijs en Wilde Bussen, an exhibition of Surinamese street art (including specially commissioned works) runs from 13 March to 2 May in the Open Air Museum of Fort Nieuw Amsterdam in the Commewijne district.

Diary: looking for the red lights

A young woman poses with Ken Doorson’s Tipple Box on Van Sommelsdijckstraat, 26 February, 2010; photo by Richard Rawlins


By Nicholas Laughlin

26 February, 2010

Ken Doorson’s Tipple Box project is a series of three-sided red plexiglass boxes — illuminated from within and etched with the suggestive silhouettes of women — intended to be installed on the streets of Paramaribo. A motion sensor atop each box triggers the internal light as pedestrians or cars pass by, alerting both ordinary passers-by and those with less innocent intentions that they have entered one of the city’s red-light districts.

On the opening night of the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition, one of the Tipple Boxes was nestled rather incongruously in a grove of flowering shrubs in the DSB Bank garden, its red glow ceaselessly activated by the crowd of wine-sipping and hors d’oeuvre-nibbling guests. Near midnight, as the party wound down, a few of us decided to search out a companion box we knew was installed on one of the streets north of the Palmentuin. As we strolled through the neighbourhood, we were almost run over by an SUV full of determined-looking men, making a U-turn in the street to pull up next to a scantily clad young woman.




The Tipple Box on Van Sommelsdijckstraat, outside a nondescript commercial building; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


We found the Tipple Box on Van Sommelsdijckstraat, a block from the Torarica Hotel. On a corner outside an anonymous commercial building, it unexpectedly blended in with the illuminated signs for bars and nightclubs further down the strip. Doorson was DJing in a small bar just across the street. We stopped for a drink, and sat at a table outdoors, where we could keep an eye on the box and note the reactions of pedestrians.

Most kept their distance, perhaps wondering what it was advertising. But one young woman — dressed for a night out and accompanied by an older companion who could have been her mother or aunt — was intrigued. She stopped, stared, then tried to imitate the pose of the silhouette on the box: handbag over the arm just so, hand raised to caress her hair, weight shifted to her right leg. She was happy to be photographed, and gave us the name of the nightclub she was heading to.

SUVs cruised past.




Another view of the Tipple Box on Van Sommelsdijckstraat; photo by Richard Rawlins

Diary: three days to the opening

Detail of Ravi Rajcoomar's SPAN installation


With three days remaining until the opening of the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition, all the members of the SPAN curatorial and organising team are now in Paramaribo, and installation of the artists' works is almost complete at the main exhibition venue, the DSB garden.




Roddney Tjon Poen Gie working on his installation at the DSB garden. His project is a collaboration with photographer Sirano Zalman


The former director's villa and extensive grounds behind De Surinaamsche Bank's headquarters provide numerous indoor and outdoor spaces for works by twenty-nine Surinamese and Dutch artists, some of them created specifically for these sites. On opening night, Friday 26 February, the DSB garden will be illuminated by thousands of lights as guests encounter works including painting, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and several performance projects.




Sri Irodikromo installing her work in the DSB garden



Sunil Puljhun helps install Irodikromo's work

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

Diary: Daniel Djojoatmo's Republiek

By Christopher Cozier

27 June, 2009



Republiek (2009, oil on canvas), by Daniel Djojoatmo, in the artist's studio. Photo by Christopher Cozier

Visiting Daniel Djojoatmo at his house in Commewijne, east of Paramaribo, I was at first drawn to his watercolurs of decaying cars, the detritus of modernity, trade routes, and “foreign used” vehicles, dumped all over the Caribbean from Japan, now being absorbed by the jungle. The images of these vehicles rusting and being enveloped by vines discuss the predicament of certain narratives of development which are, at their inception, ill-fated and at the disposal of the jungle.

Then in Danny’s studio I saw a large, obsessively constructed photo-realist painting called Republiek. It was a very grand and meticulous rendering of an obscure little section of tropical forest floor, looking almost like a botanical sample. The connection between the grand-sounding title and scale and the obscure perhaps personal moment said something about the shifted and shifting subject.

Republiek, I discovered, is a popular weekend and holiday location south of Paramaribo, a place for a family outing or for dating couples. But in this painting the sight, or accepted or familiar view or scene, is not obviously illustrated in the way we are accustomed to from the era of topographical nationalist and or touristic rendering. We are left to wonder what kind of sly commentary is at hand, or adjusted sense of value of the location.

Because of the over-commodification and overloaded symbolic register of the local landscape, Danny is involved in rethinking from a personal level his interests and relationship to place. By zooming into fragments of the landscape, he makes them unfamiliar, and interrogates the idea of public space.

Diary: meeting Pierre Bong A Jan

By Nicholas Laughlin

26 June, 2009

Paramaribo's northern suburbs are orderly in their sprawl: streets laid out in a careful grid, neighbourhoods separated by drainage canals. The flat terrain with few large landmarks is confusing to visitors--even after several visits to this area I still feel like we're going round in circles--and apparently even taxi drivers can get lost.

Chris and I are fascinated and puzzled by this topography. In most Trinidadian suburbs, you can guess when the land was developed by the predominant architectural style of the houses, which subsequent renovations and remodellings can't completely disguise. But here there is a sense of the temporally haphazard. On a single street we see an old wooden house on stilts--what Chris calls a Guyana house--that could date back to the 1930s or 40s, right next to a 70s bungalow and a spanking new mini-mansion, then an empty lot overgrown with razor grass that to our sensibilities suggests "country".

After several wrong turns on the part of the taxi driver, we finally arrive at Pierre Bong A Jan's house, one of the new-looking ones, facing south onto a broad canal. Bong A Jan waves to us from an upper window, then comes down to escort us past a phalanx of excited big dogs. He is one of the younger artists we've met in Paramaribo, quiet and confident, with a scraggly beard, a necklace of wooden beads, and a series of blue-black tattoos on his left shoulder and upper arm.




Pierre Bong A Jan in his tattoo studio. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin


The house is neat, airy, tastefully furnished. A large canvas, perhaps six feet wide, is propped against the wall of the front hallway. It depicts a monstrous semi-human creature pouncing on a nubile young woman. The creature's shoulder emerges from the canvas as a piece of wood carving. It makes me think simultaneously of comic book illustration and a stylised Erté poster. The painting is one of a series, Bong A Jan explains, exploring a figure from Surinamese folklore: the bakru, a half-flesh, half-wood forest spirit which does the bidding of its obeahman master.

Bong A Jan takes us up a flight of stairs to a spacious, light-filled loft that runs the full length of the house. This is his main studio, with finished paintings arrayed along one side, pots full of paintbrushes, and an airbrush compressor next to a draftsman's table. He shows us another large painting of a nude young woman, floating against a geometrical background. Both her shoulders are covered with tattoo-like markings, which on closer inspection turn out to be clusters of faya lobi, or ixora flowers--the national flower of Suriname. Beside it is a painting of pairs of eyes glowing out of a deep blackness, like a dream of being lost in the bush at night.




Faya Lobi (2008), by Pierre Bong A Jan. Photo by Marieke Visser


His second studio is a much smaller space, tucked beneath the loft. This is where Bong A Jan works at his day-job: he is a tattoo artist. He shows us his equipment, the padded table where clients lie, and the gun-like tattoo machine. I ask him who did the tattoos on his own shoulder. He smiles. He did them himself, he says--that's why they're on one side only.

Chris asks to see some photos of his other tattoo work. Bong A Jan pulls up a slideshow on his laptop. Some of the images depict standard fare: pseudo-Celtic knots and the like. Others incorporate recognisably Surinamese visual elements, some derived from traditional Maroon carving. One spectacular large tattoo seems to combine Botticelli's Venus with a many-armed Hindu goddess. A few years ago, Bong A Jan tells us, most of his clients asked for standard images and forms you could pick out of any pattern book, but recently there's been more interest in imagery that speaks to a Surinamese identity.

We can see how Bong A Jan's work sets up a creative dialogue between these two media, painting and tattoos, at a meeting-point of conventional "fine" art and bodily adornment, folklore and science fiction, international youth culture and personal self-expression. How might we incorporate this dialogue into the wider conversation of Paramaribo SPAN? Bong A Jan wonders aloud whether he could build a temporary structure, part studio, part installation, and find someone willing to be tattooed in front of an audience--the tattoo as a performance, in multiple senses.

"It won't be me," Chris says, laughing.




Bong A Jan's painting studio. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin

Diary: in Ellen Ligteringen's studio

By Nicholas Laughlin

27 June, 2009

Ellen Ligteringen works in a small bungalow in a quiet suburban neighbourhood north of central Paramaribo. The first sign that this is not simply a respectable middle-class house is the wooden rack in the paved driveway, hung with net sacks of what look like--

"Duck feathers," she says. "It's raining so much these days, they aren't drying properly."

Yet more sacks of feathers are hung around the enclosed verandah, and despite the excellent ventilation there is a definite fowlyard whiff in the air. Next to the kitchen door is a small washing machine, which Ligteringen uses to clean the feathers when they arrive from the duck farm.

Inside, the house is set up like a cross between a factory workshop and a science laboratory, with a long worktable down the middle of what probably used to be a living room. Steel shelves on either side are packed with boxes and plastic storage crates, neatly labelled. Lengths of wood and metal wire and an assortment of tools are neatly lined up on the table, alongside bowls and baskets of botanical specimens like seed pods and twigs. In one corner of the room is a heap of small green leaves, withered but not yet dried. On the kitchen counter, sealed glass jars are filled with a nearly opaque brown liquid, and what look like pieces of--

"Chicken skin. I'm experimenting with chicken leather."



Artist Ellen Ligteringen. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin


Of all the artists we have met on this trip to Paramaribo, Ligteringen is the one working with the oddest materials, and in the most open-ended, process-driven mode. Her current projects are investigative in an almost old-fashioned way. She seems fascinated with natural materials commonly thought to have little value--hence feathers and skin that are by-products of the poultry industry, and leaves, bark, and twigs from wild plants that would normally be considered "bush" needing to be cleared away.

Born in the Netherlands, but half-Surinamese (on her mother's side), Ligteringen moved to Suriname some years back. On the one hand, her work demonstrates a strong ecological consciousness. On the other, it seems to grapple with various cultural discomforts and shocks. She shows us a strange object that for want of a better word you might call sculpture: a pouch of brown chicken leather, roughly triangular in shape, filled with uncooked rice. It looks something like a pincushion, something like a piece of offal (a stomach?). "I call it Chicken and Rice," says Ligteringen, a wry reference to Suriname's national dish, which she says she got sick of eating over and over again. It is a weirdly fascinating object, both witty and rather morbid, simultaneously attracting and repulsing tactile investigation. You don't know if you want to touch it or not. (I didn't.)



In Ellen Ligteringen's studio. The triangular object to the left is Chicken and Rice. Beside it are samples of chicken leather. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin


She tells us how she taught herself to turn chicken skin into leather, researching the tanning process and devising a formula for a sort of tannin broth made from leaves and bark. Those murky jars on the kitchen counter are the next few batches of leather in progress. When she brings us cups of tea, the hot brown liquid exactly the same colour as the stuff in the tanning jars, I take a cautious sniff before I sip.

Next she shows us another sculptural object, a large dragonfly, a foot long, made from bent wire and scraps of wood. Fragments of bone, beetle wings, snakeskin, who knows what else, wait to be incorporated into the insect sculpture. I can't help thinking of Maria Sibylla Merian, the German artist-naturalist who spent two years in Suriname at the end of the 17th century, studying insect metamorphosis and recording the natural history of the country in vivid watercolours. Merian caught butterflies and moths in her kitchen garden, reared caterpillars in her parlour, and preserved small reptiles in casks of brandy.

Ligteringen's experiments are far removed from Merian's in intention, but her zestful curiosity is perhaps not so different, and her work similarly hovers at an unresolved intersection of art, science, and domestic craft. I am utterly fascinated, but can't say I entirely understand what she's looking for, or trying to make or prove or do.

By now she's moved on, and is telling us about her attempts to manufacture small batches of chocolate--she brings us yet another dark brown jar--and the cocoa trees she's planted outside, to eventually provide her raw materials. And the Surinamese Carib dancer she's been observing, fascinated by his working process. Her plans to use those duck feathers to stuff cushions of chicken leather....

Except the neighbours don't like her using her front verandah as a feather drying-room, she says as she shows us out. They don't like the smell. And maybe--she laughs--they wonder what she's really doing with them, and with all the other strange materials she collects. This small, sharp-eyed woman with her baskets of leaves and sacks of seed pods and bits of bone--is she an artist, or is she working some other kind of magic?



In Ellen Ligteringen's studio. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin

Diary: meeting Roberto Tjon A Meeuw

=
By Marieke Visser

22 July, 2009

Roberto Tjon A Meeuw (born Paramaribo, 1969) is the first visual artist I interview for Paramaribo SPAN. He will be in Rotterdam from the end of July till October, as an artist in residence. I am familiar with his work, but have never really spoken with him about his art. He is self-educated, and definitely not mainstream. An independent.

I meet him just two days before he's off to the Netherlands. With the family: his wife Hester and his sons Idris and Sonny. Of course with his family, because that's what it's all about. "I am easily filled and overflowing with love", Roberto says. "Even awakening in the morning is Walhalla to me. I feel thankful because I have woken today, my wife is lying next to me, my kids are there."

The atmosphere in his colourful house, where we have our talk, is pleasant. All around us: art. By the children, by friends, by Tjon A Meeuw himself. And lots of records (he is a DJ too, DJ Prepmatic), lots of books. He is not pretentious--no intellectual highbrow conversations here. But the work which surrounds us speaks for itself. It is clearly influenced by graffiti and hiphop elements, never limited to a canvas in a regular frame. Pieces of window panes, broken furniture, old electricity poles: Tjon A Meeuw uses "garbage" as his medium. He literally starts from "scratch".



Roberto Tjon A Meeuw in his backyard, with one of his sculptures. Photo by Thomas Meijer zu Schlochtern

"Do you consider yourself an artist?" I ask him. "I am an interpreter," he says. "I translate the messages I receive from the universe any way I can: through the art I make, through the music I play. I am a mailman. And the message I bring is love, pure love. So yes: I am an artist who delivers the mail."

It sounds a bit hippie-ish maybe. But his mischieveous grin gives me the idea that he is for real. What sets Tjon A Meeuw apart, among other things of course, is that he is the first artist I've met participating in an exchange programme who is not talking in a grateful and humble tone about what he hopes to learn from this experience. No, Roberto Tjon A Meeuw is a man on a mission. He is going to get more ammo, to spread the word that a lot of good stuff is happening here in Suriname, and he's going to show the world just so.

"Shoot some flares, bomb da place, we gaan gewoon law!"--"we'll just go crazy!" And again, that smile. Yeah, he knows Rotterdam was bombarded during the Second World War, and that you should be very careful with the words you choose. And then I grin, thinking about the words he chose for one of his t-shirt prints: "pang pang".* High quality pieces of clothing, very stylish design, and words from the gutter. The mailman delivering his message.

* pang pang: Sranan term for female genitalia, often used as an insult



Tjon A Meeuw models one of his "pang pang" t-shirts; image courtesy Roberto Tjon A Meeuw

Diary: visiting Soeki Irodikromo

25 June, 2009

We begin our round of studio visits, appropriately, by calling on Soeki Irodikromo, one of the elder figures of the Surinamese art scene. His paintings, ceramics, and batik work draw on Javanese myth and visual traditions but also on the methods and style of the COBRA movement, which he studied at close quarters when he was an art student in the Netherlands in the 1960s. For forty years, Soeki--everyone in Paramaribo refers to him by his first name--has thoughtfully but undogmatically explored notions of Suriname's cultural diversity and hybridity, and the country's uncertain place within the Caribbean cultural zone.



Soeki Irodikromo, 25 June, 2009. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin

Chris visited Soeki's studio last time he was in Suriname, and remembers being fascinated by a large painting created for Carifesta 2006. He hopes to see it again.

Soeki's wife greets us at the front gate and shows us past a collection of small cacti (sheltered by a big striped umbrella) into an airy verandah screened by palms and other potted plants. Just above us a nervous small songbird flits about its bamboo cage. Soeki appears in the doorway, smiling, hands clasped. He asks if we will have coffee, then ducks inside to fetch it.

"He's so fit!" Chris says. Soeki is small, wiry, energetic, dressed in a batik t-shirt. Chris remembers on his previous visit they spoke about fishing in the mouth of the Suriname River.

Soeki appears again, with little cups of coffee, and we sit around a low table made from the section of a massive tree trunk. Chris asks about the caged bird. It is a twa twa, Soeki says--"the best kind of bird in Suriname." The picolet is second best. Last week someone stole his picolet from the verandah. Now he keeps the front gate locked.

Thomas talks about our project, the exhibition and book. Soeki listens gravely. Chris asks about the Carifesta painting he saw five years ago. It was sold to a collector in the Netherlands, Soeki says, like much of his work. He opens a copy of the catalogue of his work published in 2005 and leafs through to the final section. The painting Chris remembers isn't in the book, but others from the series are.

Eventually we ask if we can see some of his most recent work, and Soeki shows us inside. Hanging on his living room wall is a new painting called Ontmoeting--"The Meeting"--finished just "yesterday", Soeki says. Chris is immediately intrigued. While he talks to Soeki about the work, I slip into his studio at the back of the house, behind the kitchen. Several canvases-in-progress stand on easels, or propped on a ledge along the wall. Soeki, Chris, and Thomas follow me into the room. Chris has shared the idea of the bridge as a thematic construct for the project. Soeki, warming to the idea, is talking about the Javanese community as a bridge between Afro- and Indo-Surinamese.



Soeki's studio, 25 June, 2009. Photo by Nicholas Laughlin

In the taxi, heading back to central Paramaribo, Chris muses over the coincidental appropriateness of finding Ontmoeting prominently displayed in Soeki's house. Because of course a bridge is a kind of meeting, and Soeki's work is a bridge between late European Modernism and a cultural discourse particular to Suriname. Can we find, Chris wonders, a bridge between ideas about the role of painting among artists of Soeki's generation, and the work of contemporary Surinamese artists working in the medium of paint on canvas?

Other resources:
= Article on Soeki Irodikromo in Dutch Wikipedia
= Article on Soeki at Readytex Gallery website
= Marieke Visser on Soeki's 2005 show at the Readytex Gallery