Meanwhile: Richard Rawlins’s Alice Bangi

Richard Rawlins’s design sketches for the Alice Bangi


Artist and designer Richard Rawlins was a member of the Trinidadian contingent at the opening of the Paramaribo SPAN exhibition at the end of February. On his return to Trinidad, inspired by Roberto Tjon A Meeuw’s Fatu Bangi project, Rawlins designed and built his own version of a traditional Surinamese fatu bangi at Alice Yard, the arts space run by architect Sean Leonard in collaboration with Christopher Cozier and Nicholas Laughlin.

The Alice Bangi, now installed in Alice Yard's outdoor space, is decorated with stenciled graphics documenting various events and artists' projects from the past year.




Painted graphics on the Alice Bangi


Read Rawlins's notes on the project and see photos documenting the construction of the bangi at the Alice Yard blog.

(Rawlins is also the publisher of the e-magazine Draconian Switch, which covers art and design in Trinidad and the Caribbean. A special issue responding to and documenting Paramaribo SPAN will be published later this month.)

Project: Fatu Bangi, by Roberto Tjon A Meeuw

Roberto Tjon A Meeuw installing his fatu bangi on the front lawn of the Surinaamsche Bank building in Paramaribo


A fatu bangi — literally, “fat bench” — is a piece of roadside furniture commonly found along major thoroughfares in Suriname, especially outside Paramaribo. Often made from rough planks or pieces of scrap wood, the fatu bangi is a location for relaxation, conversation, observation.

Roberto Tjon A Meeuw’s SPAN project is a series of fatu bangis positioned in and around the chief SPAN exhibition venue, the Surinaamsche Bank building on Henck Arron Straat.

Christopher Cozier writes:

Roberto’s fatu bangi becomes part of our vernacular visual vocabulary. He articulates this through his T-shirts and through his found-object sculpture.

The artist works with what we either discard or disregard. His work taunts or makes fun of our self-conscious and conservative tendencies; our limited notions of respectability and self-important seriousness. A fertile tension between the formal and the informal plays out in his work.

On the surface, this may look like good old boy-fun, prankish and irreverent, but on another level it is a serious investigation of the relationship between our ideas of artistic expression and the popular.

On my first visits to Suriname, I was taken by the design of these benches and the way they allowed people to spend the evenings looking out at the cars and other people going by. Is sitting on this bench sleepy indolent native behaviour, or is this active and agentive identification and engagement of community and the world around us?

I was intrigued by their modest and practical design. But the last place one would expect to see a fatu bangi is downtown in front of the bank. Placing a fatu bangi here relocates the bank and the bench. It talks about the bank’s relationship to contemporary experimentation and enquiry and the everyday. It alters the value we place on this type of bench by seeing it in this location. One looks out at the world from a fatu bangi. Maybe also to be span.

Look out, Rotterdam.

Elsewhere: November 2009 issue of De Surinoemer

The November 2009 issue of De Surinoemer has been released online. It features interviews with artist Roberto Tjon A Meeuw and theatre practitioner Alida Neslo, a poem by Karin Lachmising, and Dutch artist Risk Hazekamp's Let Them Talk.

De Surinoemer is a free journal published at irregular intervals, documenting the ArtRoPa project. It is distributed in Paramaribo in a limited-edition printed version, and online in various formats (text, PDF, JPEG) at www.desurinoemer.net.

Diary: meeting Roberto Tjon A Meeuw

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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