1Marcel Pinas is a contemporary artist born in 1971,1 in the Pelgrim Kondré district of Marowijne, in Suriname. He belongs to the Ndyuka Maroons’ clan, one of the largest Maroon groups present in Suriname, along with the Saramaka clan.
2The artworks of Marcel Pinas have been shown internationally since the early 2000s. His projects include paintings, installations, and monumental art. This conversation took place after the exhibition “Marronage: The Art of Breaking the Chains” (2022) in Paris, France, at the Maison de l’Amérique latine, where Marcel Pinas’s paintings were shown in a collective art exhibition curated by Geneviève Wiels and Thomas Mouzard.
3Located in the northeast of Latin America, Suriname gained independence (1975) from the Dutch colonial empire that occupied the territory previously colonized by the English and Danish empires. The country is a member of CARICOM, Caribbean Community and Common Market, and participates in CARICOM’s annual Caribbean Festival of Arts, CARIFESTA, where each member country shows folkloric and contemporary performance and visual art.
4Suriname is the smallest country in Latin America, with a population of about 600,000 living on the Atlantic coast and in the rainforest. With French Guiana, it has the largest Maroon population in the world (Price & Price 2001). The term maroon comes from the Spanish Latino term “cimarrones” and was used for runaway enslaved people. Historically, the first escaped enslaved settlements in Suriname were established in the territory before the 1750s (Hoogbergen 1990, 1992). From the 18th century on, since the Maroons became the major threat to the slavery-plantation economy, the colonial power decided to recognize their freedom in exchange for a promise not to attack the plantation’s territories while receiving a tribute payment in the form of an annual cargo supply. Despite the peace agreements signed with the Dutch colonizers, by the Maroon tribes: the Ndyuka in 1760, the Saamaka in 1762 and the Matawai tribe in 1767 (de Groot 1977) on the base of the Maroons peace agreements of Jamaica (de Groot 1985), the Maroon dynamic in the territory continued until the abolition of slavery, 1863.
5While liberating themselves from the state of enslavement, the Maroons population maintained a condition of dependency on the colonial system for their economic subsistence. Logging, for example, was almost a Maroon monopoly in transactions with the colonizers (Van Stipriaan 2015). Historically, they were indispensable as planters’ guides and transporters, but were also considered obstacles and dangerous to the colony. Settled in the forest, Maroons and the indigenous population interacted with suspicion; their relationships were ambiguous since both groups served as guides for the colonial armies and were sometimes competitors in the same territories of the forests.
6Following the exploitative colonial approach, it was discovered that Suriname’s forests housed not only the Maroon and indigenous populations but also most of the country’s natural resources, including gold, minerals, bauxite, petroleum, and timber.
7In the 1960s, the colonial government of Suriname, in collaboration with Alcoa (the Aluminium Company of America), dispossessed many Maroons without consultation or compensation, subsequently constructing a hydroelectric dam on the land2 (Price & Price 2001) and fueling an exodus toward the urban space of the capital. The extractive nature of relations between international and national powers and the Maroon communities has always created tension as exemplified by the Saramaka Maroon community, which faced relocation due to the activities of the multinational Golden Star Resources of Denver, Colorado, and Cambior Inc. of Montreal, Canada. Despite favorable judgments on land rights in the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (2005-2007), validating the Maroons’ rights have been on the political agenda through many administrations and remain so nowadays (Apapoe 2020; Kambel 2006).
8After WWII, local political parties started to form based on ethnic and religious affiliations. Between the 1950s and the 1970s, the independence ideology focused on investing in anti-slavery actions, where the nationalists and anticolonialists of creole origins, descendants of enslaved people freed during the Emancipation, created a political narrative that was not inclusive of Maroon groups and segregated the other ethnicities present in the territory (Moomou 2020).
9Paramaribo became the capital of independent Suriname, 1975. That same period had consequences for the Maroons’ territorial sovereignty since government policy toward the Maroons was adversarial despite the fact that they constituted 20% of the total urban Surinamese population (Kambel 2006). In 1986, a civil war broke out between the national creole-military coup leader Desi Bouterse and the rebel group led by the Maroon Ronnie Brunswijk. The civil war ended in 1992 with the signature of a Reconciliation and Development Act (Mama Bobi & Roy 2020). The complexity of the territory has been further increased by illegal migration, especially for mining extraction and for the narco-trafficking business between Colombian guerrilla groups and the European drug trade (Price & Price 2001).
10The artist Marcel Pinas was a teenager when the civil war started; he moved to the capital Paramaribo, where today, he has his art studio. After becoming a well-recognized watercolor artist using indigenous motifs, he continued his studies at the College of Visual and Performing Arts in Jamaica (WI). This experience, according to the artist, became a turning point in his creative and artistic research, a development that he decided to take back to his home country.
11In conversation with Marcel Pinas, my first question was about this specific moment in time when he moved abroad for his education and which visibly shaped his contemporary artistic research.
Marcel Pinas [MP]: Before going to Jamaica, I was struggling a bit; I knew about my identity, but I did not feel ready to expose it or share it. I had a feeling of concern due to the perception of our history and its relation to slavery. The Maroon and the indigenous people, such as the Carib and the Arawaks, belong to minority groups; because we are living in the forest, there is the stereotypical prejudice that we don’t know anything [because they are still associated with “primitive” and denigrating backwardness].3 Since I moved “from the forest to the capital” [he made a quotation sign with his hands], which we call locally: “Town,” I have encountered many comments about how stupid Maroons are because they live in the forest.
So, at that time, right before traveling and studying in Jamaica, I was struggling more with the idea of moving to an urban identity. When I went to Jamaica I realized that I had a story to tell, which is the opposite of what I previously knew in Suriname.
I think that due to the fact of being in Jamaica, in a foreign black country... and as you know, they are a very nationalistic country where people are proud of their own culture, I started to question myself and the concept of my own identity.
Maica Gugolati [MG]: In the Caribbean region, Maroons are, generally speaking, the symbol of the anti-establishment, they embody a rebellious anti-colonial value, sometimes with a little romantic innuendo. In fact, from the 20th century, the figure of the Maroons occupied the imaginations of artists, in theater, visual arts, cinema, and literature; works such as Édouard Glissant’s Monsieur Toussaint (1961), or the sculpture Le Marron inconnu (1967) by Albert Mangonès, La Última Cena by Tomás Gutiérrez (1976), among others (Paul 2014), are some of the artistic works that connect with this historical figure. But in Suriname, Maroons seem to remain in a neglected condition.
MP: Yes, we are still going through that process. From 1999 to now (23 years ago), there have started to be some changes. So, we are in a process first of self-recognition.
MG: The figure of the Maroons is ambivalent in Suriname. Historically they were able to reject colonial subjection and dominance while dealing with the masters of the plantation whenever it was economically useful (Van Stipriaan 2015). Do you think it is for this reason that the Maroon community, even nowadays, has a lot of complexity in terms of identity?
MP: Indeed, that is a problem we are going through. And the Dutch colonial power always wanted to keep the different communities divided. I’m not active in any political party; you know… now there are Maroons in the government, but when you reach that position of power, paradoxically, you lose agency. [Pause] My job is to make people aware of their value and to let them feel free to decide themselves what is good for them. To have all the tools they need to make a good decision.
You have to trust yourself and to do so, you have to know what makes you proud of yourself. What I feel is the need to develop, and to understand who are the people who will support you. People from the community [he means the Maroon communities] have to unite because together, we are much stronger; stronger to fight for what we believe in. In my experience, people are slowly starting to understand this process.
You know, you have to continue talking about the same things in order to make people understand. This is one of the issues of Maroon people. Being united means respecting each other. I think we have to start with a small group, then open up to a bigger group, and then expand to all the black people in Suriname, and to the rest of Surinamese people. There are different steps to undertake at the proper time.
MG: How did you think it was better to approach your idea of “appreciation of your own culture” to your community? I read that in Suriname, even though the primary school is free, it is difficult to access due to a parental contribution that has to be paid, and in precarious areas where also Maroon communities are numerous, a lot of local families cannot afford it (Kambel 2006). Moreover, I guess that this disparity compared to other Surinamese groups of people, is added to the difficulties of the area they live in, where there are problems with drinking water due to the uncontrolled mercury contamination caused by gold mining and the extractive enterprises in general (ibid.). I guess these conditions drive the community into survival mode and make them suspicious about the community’s “outsiders.”
MP: Going back to your own community while recognizing and valuing your culture goes hand in hand with the concept of education. When I went back, I had the feeling that I had to educate my people about the value of our own culture.
To do so, I think you have to visualize what to value.
So, when I came back from Jamaica, I created just a simple art exhibition in Moengo, in the Maroon area where I am from. Then, I realized that I had to activate the community to have a proper response from them; I realized that they need to be active in the process I was offering, to become part of the process, in order to let them understand what I was doing and why I was doing it. It took a while before they understood what I wanted to say. If you want to be in the process, you have to be in the community, you have to be with them to recognize that everybody needs to get something out of the process, otherwise, it is not attractive to them. You have to find different ways to let them become involved in the process, till when suddenly they realize: “oh, ok! This is important.” It is not only working with them; you have to push further.
- 4 Moengo was an extractive center for Alcoa, Aluminum Company of America.
- 5 See Doorson 2015.
- 6 See Kibido, Pinault & Schocron 2016.
MG: Moengo is the city where you decided to go back to create and do your residency and art center. The city is undergoing a transformation from “bauxite4 to art and tourism”5 and it is the location of your festival.6
MP: Yes, the Moengo Project!7 When I left Jamaica in 1999, I went back to Suriname and started to work with the community, but they didn’t visit art exhibitions, so that is why I decided to do collective things with them. From 2007 to 2009, I was in Holland, and there I developed the idea of a multi-structure to stimulate talent of local young people: an art center (the Tembe Art Studio)8, a school, an outdoor sculpture park, a Guesthouse, a restaurant called Masanga, a training facility at Ofia Olo, and a residency program between the community and international artists and researchers. When I was in Amsterdam for my art career, the people in Holland did not want me to go back, so I started to have meetings with the director, where I explained what my plan was for Moengo. So that is where they offered me to start with some funding.
MG: In 1916, Moengo was the center of Alcoa’s mining operations; at the time, the village became the base for its expat workers. It changed drastically with the civil war from 1986 to 1992. It seems that your project has had multiple meanings and purposes: one of monumentality where Moengo became a site for remembrance of history, for ethnic and national thought, and an experimental site of artwork where visual and creative language becomes clear to the community and its aims.
Tembe Art Studio and its visitors, 2019
© Marcel Pinas
MP: Yes, I started this project in 2009; the first festival was in 2013. It began with visual art, and then I realized that the community had additional talents. I always used art as a tool to solve problems; so, I asked myself: what can we do to change things with the tools that I know?
You have to be active in the community to do projects in the community. That is why the Moengo Project is essential for me: you do dance, you do theater, you do visual art, and craft: everybody is important in the project. And, above all, everybody gets benefits from it in one way or another.
When we [the members of the festival and art center] started the project, we had a lot of problems with the churches. [Suriname was subjected to intensive indoctrination from Christian missionaries, Protestant and Catholic, from the mid-19th century (Green 1978), and more recently from the Evangelical churches.] When artists made projects with the community and in the community, in public places, there were a lot of protests. [For example, one artist from the art residency could not place their artworks in public spaces because of the pressure the churches were opposing to the Mayor of Moengo who gives us permission to install them.]
- 9 According to the artist there has been a temporal tension for his artistic practice in Moengo; mos (...)
Since then, I think it is important to get more than 50% of the community involved in the project. I was asking myself how to convince these people of what you are doing if there are at least 15 churches and half of the community goes to church?9 So that is why the festival arrived as a concept of a platform for the locals. Three months before the festival, we have musicians from the USA and Paramaibo, from French Guiana, and then we have three days of the festival where 60% of the performances are local bands [that play different music genres from reggae to rock to traditional localized ones, aleke and seketi Maroon music (Bilby 2001)], and along the way, we have seen changes.
Moengo Festival, 2013
© Marcel Pinas
- 10 In 2015, for example, the festival hosted about eighty works of art, created by almost fifty inter (...)
We train people in theater and dance, and in 2015 we had visual art10. The last one was in 2018. In 2013 we had, like, 1,500 visitors; in 2018, 10,000 visitors; in 2017, normally two weeks before the festival, there was a music group from the church who asked to perform in the festival, and the pastor sent them to perform. Do you know why? Because the pastor is a taxi driver and he understands that the festival brings in income, and his wife sells food, and so on. Between 1986-1992, Moengo was a no-go zone for tourists due to the war; we are making a political statement with this festival. The largest festival in Suriname is now in Moengo; it has become a cultural center, and it is a statement because it is a Maroon area, and most of the people that are involved in the process are Maroons.
MG: The museum was a hospital for expats working for the bauxite company. It sounds like a re-occupation process of a Maroon space.
MP: Yes, we started with one spare room in the hospital, and after one year, they told us that we could take more space, one thing led to another. The Dutch Embassy and the French Embassy gave us some support. So, we both do and don’t rely on external help. The project is ongoing and will continue even in the case of the absence of funding. It might go slower, but we will continue doing it. This festival offers the possibility of creating self-confidence that the kids then transfer to their daily life, at school, etc.
- 11 Afaka is an indigenous writing system of South America, which was created in the early years of th (...)
MG: You created the Moiwana monument [it means: “Protect Us”], which commemorates the November 1986 massacre of over thirty men, women, and children during Suriname’s civil war (Surinamese Interior War), located at the actual site of the tragedy on the road between Moengo and Albina. This was the home of the rebel leader Ronnie Brunswijk. Located in a field indicating the victims’ presence, there are thirty-eight columns inscribed with their names written in Afaka.11 In the center is a column that symbolizes the community’s supreme chief, the authority of each Maroon clan (Parris 2004). According to the Caribbean artist Christopher Cozier (2010, 2013), with monumental art, you create a process of reconstructing the presence and meaning of memory without simply representing it. He defines your way of considering tradition as “in a present tense” that keeps adapting for the future.
Moiwana Monument, 2007 – Metal, bricks
© Marcel Pinas
MP: Yes, because you keep searching. These themes are not taught in school because in education, they teach you Dutch culture; all the children know about snow, for example. And that is why repetition is important, and that is why the festival is important. I offered music activities first, theater and dance after. After the first attempt with the visual arts, we decided to include them in the festival as the last art practice. Because the other disciplines were good, the festival started to be appealing and well attended as well.
Can art and culture influence a change in the community, precisely that of Moengo? That, [the Moengo Project]12 is my best “installation.” And then, thanks to the festival and the residency, the other artists participated in this big “installation-plan.” Most of the artists that came to Moengo after three months tell me how the project itself has changed them. There must be an exchange in one way or another, and both the international artists and the local population experience this exchange.
MG: So basically, you stimulate the community through the festival and, as far as I know, also through your personal art projects while using Maroons’ material culture in most of your installations; one example is the use of Pangi Maroon fabric (Price 2020), used here in the installation: Tjai A Ede (2008).
Tjai A Ede, 2008 – Mixed media on wood
© Marcel Pinas
By letting the community participate in making your installations, I guess they “relearn” or re-question how to consider what they have.
MP: As an artist, I keep my studio separate from the festival. I grew up in Town, and my studio is in Town; when I am in Moengo I work with the community. What I see in the villages, their social interactions, the debates and activities that take place in the community, and their problems... I transfer them to become my own art pieces. Most of the time, the community participates if they are able to do so, or I do ask some professionals. I get inspiration from working with the community. For example, in 2005, I went to the community in the school where I had studied when I was a child, and then I realized that they didn’t have books, pencils, and shoes. At that time, the crime rate in Suriname increased, and more than 50% of the people who were imprisoned were Maroons. But the government does not invest in education; so, from my savings, I went to the school, and for all these kids, I gave them new shoes, exchanging them for their old ones. I want them to feel important, to motivate them, with the message to share what we have to help each other. And that was one of the projects I made. [The artist is referring here to his artwork Pe we Go, 2009.]
Shoes for the artwork Pe We Go, 2009 – Video installation, old shoes.
© Marcel Pinas
As I previously said, if the community does not get something from the activities, it is unimportant to me.
MG: What about your installation, Kibi Wi Koni? Looking at it there is a predominant sense of collective labor. Some questions arise, such as the vernacularity of the bottles, for example, and the specific fabric they are wrapped in for protection. It evokes the possibility of Obea magic, beneficial divine-sent medicinal preparation from particular spirits (Green 1978). In your projects, did you use the material culture and cultural motifs from the Maroons because…
Kibi Wi Koni, 2009 – Bottles, wood, acrylic, plastic, fabric
© Marcel Pinas
MP: As I said, the main goal is to let people become aware of who they are, and to give them a voice. To let them know how important identity is. Kibi Wi Koni is about the Maroon medicines that have been created in the forest. It is something that we don’t preserve. This idea of relying on your own culture is a way of being more autonomous from the western world, which is keeping us dependent and manipulating us. You think that what you have is not important and you don’t realize that for 100 years your family was living in the traditional ways. And economically, they get the benefit of being dependent on them. Preservation is the way to keep this alive because that makes you different from others, and you can have economic empowerment. What do you see in the installation? You see an art object. The Maroons beautify everything they make, and this is something that has to be maintained and kept going. These bottles are filled with life, [they are] pieces of wood, and they put inside a unique combination, and they cover these bottles with the traditional cloths against the sunlight because it changes the medicine. So, these people hold a special knowledge, and doing these bottles with the kids in the community… we had to explain the way they are made like that and who knows about them, so the culture is passed from one generation to the next, and the people are the part of the process because they wrapped the bottles, and when I present the bottles they feel they are part of the project. This project was part of a workshop in the museum, and every year the kids have to come to that space, so I work with them.
MG: What about Piekien Kukuu? How did the project of considering displaced kitchen shelves come about?
Piekien Kukuu, 2016 – Mixed Media on wood (Gallery Kunst Kan…, Amsterdam)
© Marcel Pinas
MP: In Moengo we have one 20 meter-kitchen. When the kids come, we ask them to bring something that they want to share with the world; it can be a spoon, a cup, or a plate, but also something personal related to the kitchen. [Here, the artist evokes another of his art installations: Sanfika (2009), made of 10,000 spoons.]
Sanfika, 2009 – Spoons Installation
© Marcel Pinas
I asked the kids to share something they feel is special about the place they live in and to share it with the world. And that becomes the artwork. You bring something to the art object, and you think you have to add something and not replace something with your object. This is a way to learn to respect each other. In a playful way, you teach them their identity and not to be ashamed of who they are, and to be part of a big world.
MG: Do you have local artists who want to follow this way of working and your creative process?
MP: There is a little bit of everything. You have younger people as artists, others who are involved in the management team that can continue the process, so a whole organization. Because of Covid-19, we stopped some of the activities, but the project is ongoing. We have been influencers in the political environment. Did I tell you that the vice president is now a Maroon? I have also been working with Brazil’s anthropologists, who are doing all the documentation.
MG: Looking at your career, it seems that your project aims to reach a sense of identity recognition that crosses a clan, national, and international sense of representation and belonging. You collaborate a lot with foreign countries, Holland for example…
MP: I see Holland as a vehicle; it is important to use it to realize your dreams. I had a lot of comments from the past president, who was a dictator and was asking me about my relations with Holland. I always answered him that if the government would help me, I would not go to them [Holland]. I also recently understood that I do not want to depend on companies and funding; I want to work with small supporters that become members of the organization. […] [Marcel Pinas evokes a desire for a change of strategy that fits the contemporary political scene in the country.] We have been expecting that because the political situation changed, and the vice president of Suriname is now from one Maroon community… we thought it would be different. Still, I think that political influence makes things difficult even if we are in power.
MG: What about the wider organization of the space? You have a guest house and the art residency as well.
MP: I visualize how to make the world aware of the value of the Maroons. Also, to work on solutions and to find possibilities, how to change. Working with young people, you have to maintain continuation and repetition.
One way of generating income is housing; we have a guest house with 20 rooms, and we rent it to local tourists in order to create an income to pay for residency, maybe to pay a professional to come. The idea is to learn how to manage with less. Usually, people from Suriname don’t want to go to Moengo because it is still associated with being a war zone.
With the artists… they come to make an exchange with us. You stay with us, you just pay for your ticket, food is not expensive, and you work with the community while collaborating with daily life in the community. So, we created a low-budget platform for this exchange. If you are a visual artist, you can collaborate with designers, painters, or craftspeople that can be involved with you, and you train them. We collaborate with different villages; it can be a film, a storytelling, or any form of project; but the artist has to realize that you have to be in the community, observing and finding what is missing in the community and what the community needs. We have a conversation together, and what is coming out and its production is between you and the local professionals. That is why we guarantee that everybody has to be part of the process. This joint involvement is also very good protection against vandalism because of community’s participation. There is trust and collaboration to maintain a sense of safety.
MG: This project sounds like a process-investment that will continue even when “Marcel Pinas” is not in this world anymore…
MP: Yes! This is the way the reality of Maroons in Suriname shaped it, each place works differently. We work bottom up, from the community’s needs. We don’t plan what they need; this is a different process that does not want a top-down imposition.
MG: Thinking about the vernacular knowledge you focus on, as it is the material culture of the Maroons, I wonder why it is not transmitted by grandparents or by a local inter-generational process. It sounds like there is friction in the transmission beyond institutional education in school; is that possible?
MP: There is always less of that… The environment changed rapidly during the civil war. In 1996 most of the people had to flee from Moengo to French Guiana and elsewhere, and when they came back, life became very hard; so, most of the parents don’t have the time to really watch the kids after school. In 1992-1993-1994, there was almost an escalation between the Maroons and the rest of the population; the crime rate increased, and everybody was affected. I, too, have been beaten up by the police because, as a Maroon, I was mistaken for somebody else. So that is why I said that the process is very slow.
Till now, we have had six festivals. Before the last festival, the team member said that we had succeeded because it became the biggest festival in Suriname. However, I don’t believe so because it was still a global festival, with maybe just 10% of the music and products coming from the Maroons.
Before “Corona,” we started a collaboration with a research center that shared materials with the local schools. They [the students] identified what they wanted to do: cooking, dancing, etc., and in collaboration with the University of Brussels, we decided to train them on how to transform their wishes and information or how to archive that information.
MG: Thank you, Marcel. I have one last question for this conversation: about your position on the issue you raised about memory. I think specifically about the act of erasure of memory, even for survival that could happen when facing war, and how the traditions are getting back to the present revival but through a transformative process. How do you conceive the preservation of vernacularism as a leitmotif of evolution?
MP: Mmm… Let’s take the Afaka script as an example. I took it from the tradition, and then I use it digitally to find new ways to create new things. So, I use it in my art, and now I also make jewelry out of it. So, use things to create newness for the present, not to get stuck in the past. It is a process of reviving what has been forbidden and neglected to create something new. Preservation and collaboration with other people; to think of how to make new things within the traditions.
Afáka jewelry, 2011.
© Marcel Pinas
12Our conversation ended with us sharing about memory in relation to the multiple complexities of survival amnesia and reenactment of traditions, which, however, do not limit creativity; on the contrary, they evolve thanks to the patterns of international collaborative multi-disciplinary projects with the goal of mutual sustainability and profit.
13We had this conversation in English, the language we both share, despite it not being our native one. During our online chat, Marcel Pinas referred tacitly to many of his art projects. In writing up the interview, I therefore opted to show some of the works he was referring to without explicitly mentioning them. The Afaka symbols, for example, have been used in many of his sculptures and installations.