Topography: walking fingers, Domineestraat

Sticker graphic from artist Jeroen Jongeleen’s project influenza/a little movement, on a shopfront in downtown Paramaribo, 24 February, 2010; photo by Nicholas Laughlin

Project: Jeroen Jongeleen’s “culture hacking”

“Site & Content Specific Art (Practice)”, graffiti by Jeroen Jongeleen in the Palmentuin, Paramaribo; photo courtesy the artist


The Rotterdam-based artist Jeroen Jongeleen, one of the participants in the ArtRoPa exchange programme, spent several weeks in Paramaribo in late 2007 and early 2008. Here the Dutch critic Siebe Thissen describes Jongeleen’s work in Paramaribo, in an excerpt from a longer essay in the Paramaribo SPAN catalogue.

Jeroen Jongeleen’s work in Paramaribo staged an encounter between street images and the visual arts. Jongeleen plastered graffiti slogans in the city where he had spent his youth. With not a little irony, he sprayed the words “art in public spaces” on a neglected little concrete structure in the Palmentuin [Palm Gardens] — a nocturnal haunt for Paramaribo’s junkies.



“Buiten Kunst uit Rotterdam” (“Public Art from Rotterdam”), graffiti by Jeroen Jongeleen in Paramaribo; photo courtesy the artist


Jongeleen also added a monumental feature at the corner of Wanicastraat and Sophie Redmondstraat, close to the US Embassy. UNESCO may have declared Paramaribo’s old, well-preserved city centre a world heritage site, but small wooden workers’ houses, many of which have been neglected, do not enjoy that protection. Jongeleen painted one of those unlisted houses completely white, with window frames in light blue — the colour of UNESCO. His action introduced a new element into the visual culture of Paramaribo: “culture hacking”, or the power of art to react to and comment on the surrounding visual culture.



Painted house at 59 Wanicastraat; photo courtesy the artist

Conjunction: street posters/Ravi Rajcoomar

By Nicholas Laughlin




Battle of Hispagnola posters along Kleine Waterstraat, Paramaribo, 28 June, 2009; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


An urban landscape is defined not only by buildings and squares and streets, but also by the people who inhabit and pass through them, their vehicles and equipment and merchandise, and the ephemeral traces they leave behind in the form of signs, graffiti, and posters.

Walking around Paramaribo, I noticed there were specific locations — the walls of abandoned buildings, temporary fences and hoardings — where event promoters advertise their parties, concerts, or sports tournaments, sticking up posters in overlapping dozens or even scores to achieve maximum visibility. In late June 2009, three events dominated this urban wallpaper: a "Battle of Hispagnola" boxing tournament, pitting Surinamese fighters against a team from the Dominican Republic; a concert by the visiting Congolese performer Djouna "Big One" Mumbafu; and the Lustig Festival, a big party organised by private promoters at a river beach inland from Paramaribo.




Djouna Big One and Lustig Festival posters along the Waterkant, Paramaribo, 24 June, 2009; photo by Nicholas Laughlin


Of the three, the Lustig Festival posters were the most arrestingly surreal. They emphasised the white sand of the beach location, and the event's tagline — "A Caribbean Fusion of Fantasies" — achieved visual form in a montage of stock photos. A flamingo, an alligator, three pots of gold, a monkey, colourful tree frogs, a bottle of Champagne, a toucan, and a young woman with Latin features — wearing a tiny bikini — burst forth from a pirate's treasure chest. You could write a whole dissertation on what this assemblage of images in this context says about Suriname's relationship to the Caribbean, or to ideas of "Caribbeanness".




Behind the Mask (mixed media, 120 x 145 cm, 2008) by Ravi Rajcoomar; image courtesy the artist


Ravi Rajcoomar's recent paintings, with their bold colours, graphic deployment of text, stencilled silhouettes, and palimpsestic collages, make explicit reference to street posters, graffiti, and the accidental, evolving "murals" created by layers of paint, paper, and glue on Paramaribo's urban surfaces. Their mirror-reversed text fragments and ambiguously gesturing human figures suggest stymied communication: a dream diary, a narrative without a key, a map missing its legend. He writes that these works explore "the mystery, the unknown, the untold, the unspoken, and the unsaid" of human interaction.

More immediately and subtly than a traditional topographical view — a rendering of a picturesque building or bustling market scene — Rajcoomar's paintings record the city of Paramaribo, close up and at street level. Words depicted as graphic forms overlap like voices from a crowd. Chaos plays against order, energy against melancholy, as in urban landscapes anywhere in the world, but letterforms hinting at Afaka script ground these works in Suriname, in Paramaribo.




Rajcoomar at work in his studio during his recent residency in Rotterdam; image courtesy the artist


See more of Rajcoomar's recent works at his website.