Project: Een Lekkers, by Ellen Ligteringen

An unidentified visitor to the SPAN exhibition reacts to Ellen Ligteringen's chocolate


By Nicholas Laughlin

Ellen Ligteringen's Een Lekkers project occupies two small rooms adjacent to the kitchen in the DSB Bank gardenhouse, the main SPAN exhibition venue. In the scullery, she has set up a gedachtentafel, or "table of thoughts", a sort of recreation in miniature of her studio, displaying the weird objects she makes from chicken leather. In the small pantry next door is a makeshift confectionary shop, with chocolate bonbons — concocted by Ligteringen, with cocoa she harvested herself — displayed in a refrigerated glass case.

Visitors to the exhibition are invited to sit down, taste Ligteringen's chocolates, and register their reactions via a special questionnaire. Small digital cameras mounted on four sides of the room record their facial expressions and body language. An audio recording in the reassuring voice of Odette de Miranda — one of Suriname's best-known radio announcers — explains the process to the wary. The project is documented on Ligteringen's website, Tan Bun.

Like George Struikelblok's Groei — a sculptural enclosure in which he is rearing two hundred chickens — and Pierre Bong A Jan's live tattooing session on the opening night of the exhibition, Ligteringen's project involves an installation of objects and an element of public performance, but it is also a process of investigation. She calls it research, and takes the whole thing seriously enough to have recruited the help of a professional psychologist in drafting the questionnaire to which her audience is subjected.




President Ronald Venetiaan of Suriname prepares to taste one of Ligteringen's chocolates on the opening night of the exhibition. Image captured by one of the video cameras installed by the artist and used with her permission


The chocolate is made from pure cocoa, cream, and sugar, but the proportions change in each batch. One day the bonbons are luxuriously rich, the next day so bitter they hardly taste like chocolate at all. The artist is genuinely interested in what her visitors think of the confectionary, but the chocolate is also, she explains, a way of catching her audience off guard. "Lekkers" is the Dutch word for a tasty treat, but in Surinamese usage it also refers to a kickback, a payoff, an illicit exchange to help sweeten a deal. Interspersed among queries about flavour and texture, Ligteringen slyly poses subtle questions to gauge her visitors' thoughts about this other kind of "lekkers": Bent u al in de ja-mood? "Are you in the yes-mood?" Hoe krijg ik u in de ja-mood? "How do I get you in the yes-mood?" "Does my taste threaten you? Should I keep my mouth shut?"

"I want to play with habits," Ligteringen says. "I'm not in the phase of giving answers or conclusions. It's more like an inventory, descriptive research."

This open-endedness is a challenge to many visitors' notions of the acceptable forms and purposes of an artwork, and is also Ligteringen's response to what she calls the "CV parade" of the Dutch art world. "Sometimes I work as an artist, sometimes not," she explained in an interview with Marieke Visser in 2009. "I want to give myself the freedom to work outside that domain." Een Lekkers straddles that ambivalence. "It is not totally clear that I'm part of the SPAN exhibition," she says. "Visitors are surprised on entering that it is an art project." Indeed, on the opening night, some who failed to notice the explanatory wall label assumed Ligteringen was one of the caterers. President Ronald Venetiaan, touring the exhibition, was sufficiently impressed by the chocolates to ask whether Ligteringen had considered export.

"I know exactly what I will do after the exhibition," she says. "I will start my little skratishop [Sranan for chocolate shop] at the Sunday market, next to a friend who is telling you the future. If you cannot handle your future you can eat a chocolate. I will expand the performance in a longer timeframe."




Elvira Rijsdijk, art critic for De Ware Tijd, tastes Ligteringen's chocolate

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

Notes: Rahied Abdoel’s gearsticks

Excerpts from notes by artist Ellen Ligteringen on the 2009 National Art Fair in Paramaribo

7 November, 2009



Wooden gearsticks by Rahied Abdoel, installed at the 2009 Suriname National Art Fair; photo by Ellen Ligteringen


The young artist Rahied Abdoel is participating in the National Art Fair of Suriname for the first time this year. His work is in the first area I visit in the exhibition hall. In a split second, the piece on the right-hand side, an arrangements of wooden gearsticks, takes my full attention and it stays there for a while.

The piece does not tell exactly what it is. It could be a display of functional handmade objects, or a nice poem about movement, but it could also be an altar for all the victims of traffic accidents in Suriname, more than two deaths a week lately. Or is it a display of objects to show off the status symbol of a car? Or is it just functional? The piece refuses to be an explanation of a single thought.




Wood carvings and other works by Rahied Abdoel; photo by Ellen Ligteringen


The artist is standing next to me as I talk to myself, obviously a little too loudly. So he introduces himself. He is self-taught. In the art fair catalogue, Rahied is listed as a painter. His work is installed in the painting section of the exhibition hall. I ask him why. He tells me his work started with charcoal drawings. This year he started to make wooden pieces. He draws with wood and on wood, making sculptures, clocks, wall pieces with text, walking sticks, and gearsticks. Every work is well-polished and covered with a layer of two-component varnish. For Rahied, it is even important that the back side of a two-dimensional wooden wall piece is polished well too, even though no one may see it.

He says he develops an idea for a work in close harmony with his parents and younger brother. You could say the process is almost democratic. The religious background of the family plays a key role in what he makes. Most of the work refers to the Koran, to his Islamic faith. His favorite three-dimensional piece is an assemblage of prayers in wood, presenting a man who confesses his faith.

I ask him about the gearsticks. This was his idea. He knows about handmade wooden gear sticks for the luxury cars. Outside Suriname this is a very niche product. He displays them together with his walking sticks for aesthetic reasons, and he prefers to show his wooden objects on a red surface.




Rahied Abdoel; photo by Ellen Ligteringen


I ask him what kind of work he plans to make next, after the art fair. Rahied says he wants to show his personal environment in a different way, or to transform his environment.

I’m very touched by the display.

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