”Kibri a Kulturu”

Marcel Pinas; teaching the former motherland…

 ‘Un de ete’ (We are still here), 72.000 spoons and wire, 2009

There is still a lot left unsaid about the history that lies between the Netherlands and their former colony Surinam. Let alone that in Holland one often speaks of the Maroon people that live deep in the forests of the interior. The Municipality Museum of The Hague invited Surinam artist Marcel Pinas (b.1971) for an exhibition in their satellite space called ‘Gemak’ in the center of the residential city of the Netherlands. As a member of the Maroon community, the Ndyuka from the Eastern parts of Surinam, Marcel Pinas seems to be on a mission to tell the world about his culture, his people and his view on the distressing situations they have been through.
Entering the exhibition space you struck immediately by the wide range but clearly set out range of signs and symbols. I see spoons. Exactly 7200 pieces hanging from the ceiling, I read  ‘Un de ete’ on the sign[1]. Each spoon symbolizing one of the 72.000 Maroon people still living in Surinam at this moment. They are all carefully engraved with an Afaka symbol, the Ndyuka script. Here past and present are put together: the signs that came from their West African ancestors and the current state of the people living deep in the forests, deprived of everything they should have gained over the centuries.
In several works I recognize the traditional plaid fabric that was once introduced by the Dutch as a fabric for the slaves to make clothing for themselves. Now it is a typically Surinam Maroon attribute. Marcel Pinas uses it as a canvas to paint on but also to wrap ‘harmless’ little white dolls in, to symbolize the Maroon children threatened by modern culture that is advancing [2]. I see the black and white plaid fabric Hammocks with which the Maroon people cover themselves when they are mourning over a lost relative or friend[3] .

The name Maroon stems from the Spanish word for runaway cattle: Cimarrón, the fled animals that live a free life up in the mountains. The word can be found all throughout the Americas and the Caribbean region to name the African slaves that once freed themselves from their owners and the life at the plantations. They survived, their culture survived, sometimes under very difficult conditions as Marcel Pinas is showing us in this exhibition. Although the initial connotation of the word Maroon is not a very positive one, to say at the least, it has become a honorary nickname. This exhibition does make me wonder how people so strong can be ignored by so many.

Marcel is taking the visitors by the hand, explaining his world to us, the threats and fears they have, through telling ‘their’ stories. Thinking of the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, I feel myself being swayed between the real and the symbolic stage. The third stage, the imaginary, I feel is still left behind a little, although it is also challenged because of the many name tags within this exhibition that are over-explaining what we are seeing.

The work ‘Winsi san e pasa’ (Whatever Happens) consisting of hundreds of catapults, like a deep and impenetrable wood, doesn’t need a sign to tell me that this work is about the struggle and fights their ancestors delivered for their freedom. On the other hand, signs and symbols from “other” cultures are so many times lost in translation. Although, as Sally Price tries to show us in her article on Maroon culture in the American Ethnologist, there might not be as much meaning in the carvings and symbols I am seeing as it has become sort of a myth from which people are making money[4].  As I see Marcel using the traditional Maroon art quite loosely and decoratively, as faded patterns found on school desks and kitchen cupboards, but at the same time making every day materials into meaningful objects that symbolize new times, that might very well be true.

At one moment I am confronted with reality, with video images of former dictator Desi Bouterse and the leader of the opposing jungle commando, Ronnie Brunswijk. Old material from the Surinam evening news showing me, from both sides, the damage these so called ‘leaders’ have done to the land and the people.  For example, the killing 38 Ndyuka people in the Maroon village Moiwana on November 29th 1986.
In another part of the exhibition I find the traditional Maroon woodcarving, loosely applied to Plyboard in some of his installations. He seems to be putting forward that he is a part of this culture but with one foot outside in the modern world. He has distance. The almost graphic way Pinas uses the carvings and the language patterns seems to make a connection with the way we dissociate ourselves from traditions, same as the distorted way he uses the traditional painting. Our ‘western’ world, of which he is also a part, he is criticizing strongly as they are threatening his people with pollution, disease and personal gain by any means necessary. The people living in the capital city of Paramaribo seem to be a part of that world and do not care about the conditions in which the Maroon people are living.

When the work takes us to a little school in the village of Pelgrim Kondre, where one can only get by boat over the Cottica river, he is asking us: What is the future of my people?   He lets us take place in their situation: the old school desks, the faded books that are still being used, oil lamps on the tables, hardly any modern schooling materials, hardly any material at all. The only modern object there is the flat screen TV that shows us a film of the real school of Pelgrim Kondre. Not a hopeful sight.
As a Dutch citizen you cannot help wondering - what have we left these people with when Surinam became independent from the Netherlands in 1975. Did we leave too many loose ends out there? Or should we never aim for a situation like French Guyana, where the Maroon people were completely integrated in society and their culture was preserved and used to make ‘ a cultural product’? Although all these nametags might want to explain too much and start to irritate me, I also realize that some things may still need to be said and some things still need to be explained - over and over again. Until we get sick of it. Marcel Pinas has drawn us into his World, but also drew his own world inside out. I hope it can continue to soar above its threats and remain as exciting as it is right now…

The exhibition ‘Kibri a Kulturu’ by Marcel Pinas can be seen at ‘Gemak’ in Den Haag, The Netherlands (www.gemak.org) from April 25th until June 21st 2009.

Nancy Hoffmann
1 May 2009

1- ‘Un de ete’ (We are still here), 72.000 spoons and wire, 2009
2-‘Kaba’ (Stop), installation of toy dolls, 2009
3-‘Duumi na amaka’ (Sleeping), 2007
4-American Ethnologist, vol. 34, No.4, p.p. 603-620, Into the Mainstream

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