Sanfika

source: marcelpinas

Marcel pinas, is afstammeling van de surinaamse bosnegers N’dyuka, ook wel Aucaners genoemd. Zijn kunst gaat over ervaringen uit het verleden, het handelt over de vernietiging van de N’dyuka-cultuur in Suriname. In zijn werk brengt hij die situatie tot uitdrukking, waardoor tevens aandacht wordt geschonken aan de bescherming van culturen in het algemeen: Kibri a cultuur of “behoud de cultuur’. Dit thema vormt dus de ziel van het oeuvre van Marcel Pinas: “De symbolen die in mijn werk een rol spelen, zijn de motieven die gebruikt worden door de N’dyuka.” De canvassen, die de hoofdmoot vormen van Pinas’ werk, onderstrepen zijn intentie om elementen uit de N’dyaka-cultuur ooik in de huidige tijd te behouden. Kleuren, die veelal hun oorsprong in de bontgeschakeerde Surinaamse natuur vinden, worden gul op het doek aangebracht. Beteknisvolle symbolen, den van gebruiksvoorwerpen, stukjes stof; het werk van Marcel Pinas heeft altijd iets extra’s. De rijkdom van de cultuur wordt weerspiegeld op het schilderslinnen en laat zijn sporen na op de ‘objets d’art’.

Voorbij het canvas
De laatste jaren is er bij Pinas een toenemende behoefte merkbaar om zich niet langer tot het canvas het beperken, maar met steeds grotere installaties voor de dag te komen. Aanvankelijk was er vooral sprake van ‘iets extra’s’ bij de reguliere tentoonstellingen. Zo gebruikte hij in 2003 bij de tentoonstelling Tembè grote delen van een korjaal als aandachttrekker, en in 2005 tijdens de Sanfika-expo waren er uitvergrote en soms vervormde gebruiksvoorwerpen uitgestald: en grotesk langgerekte ‘wasuma’ (wasbord) en een absurd hoog krukje. Andere ‘show pièces’ tijdens deze spraakmakende tentoonstelling waren een enorm groot keukenrek en ijzeren kooien met gebruiksvoorwerpen erin. Zijn kritische visie op de maatschappij werd goed zichtbaar in een reeks ‘mixed media’ werken waarin aluminium lepels de natie symboliseren die steeds verder onder de rode draad van normen en waarden wegzakt. ‘Sanfika’, de naam van de expositie, betekend: ‘wat is overgebleven’. Dat is de vraag die Pinas zichzelf steeds indringender lijkt te stellen, maar ook zijn publiek. En nog meer: hoe gaan we om met wat is overgebleven?

Het publiek
Wat de toeschouwer van zijn werk vindt, is in zoverre belangrijk voor Marcel Pinas dat hij de mening is toegedaan dat kunst een reactie moet oproepen; het oet iets losmaken bij het publiek. Kunst is voor Pinas een communicatiemiddel;’Ik lèèf in de samenleving, ik maak er deel van uit. Mijn persoonlijk gevoel daarover, dat probeer ik te uiten en daar gebruik ik mijn kunst voor.’ De dialoog die Marcel Pinas met de samenleving is aangegaan is er een die voortduurt. Al blijft zijn thema constant, de dynamiek van de maatschappij houdt de creatieve spirit van Pinas continu in beweging en verzekert het publiek daarmee van een immer boeien oeuvre dat steeds opnieuw verrast. Pinas ‘Het werk wordt elke keer rijker. Eigenlijk groei je als kunstenaar steeds door.’ Zo worden werken en maker gezamenlijk volwassen. De kunst wint steeds aan diepgang, zonder aan speelsheid te boeten.

Afaka Schrift
Wanneer het precies was, is niet bekend, maar het gebeurde in de oerwouden van Suriname waarschijnlijk in 1908. Op zeker nacht kreeg de Ndyuka Bosneger Afaka, een droom waarin hem de geest van een blanke vercheen. Deze geest droeg hem op een schrift te ontwerpen voor zijn stamgenoten die tot op dat moment analfabeet waren.

Adaka gaf gehoor aan de droom. In de dagen daarna ontwierp hij zijn schrift. Iedere twee of drie dagen ontwierp hij een teken, 56 in totaal. het waren lettergreeptekens en met die 56 syllabe-tekens is het mogelijk alle Ndyuka-woorden te schrijven. In het begin hield Afaka zijn uitvinding voor zichzelf, maar de verschijning van de komeet van Hally in 1910 was voor hem een teken dat hij de kennis van het schrift moest verbreiden. Afaka had contacten met katholieke missionarissen die rond die tijd pogingen deden de ‘heidense’ Ndyuka tot het katholicisme te bekeren. De missie zag onmiddellijk het belang in van Afaka’s schrift voor de kerstening van de bosnegers, maar de belangrijkste opperhoofden moesten niets van het Afakaschrift weten. Binnen de Ndyuka-samenleving is evenwel altijd een kleine groep actief gebleven die het Afaka-schrift leerde en de kennis ervan doorgaf.

Over Marcel Pinas

Marcel pinas, is afstammeling van de surinaamse bosnegers N’dyuka, ook wel Aucaners genoemd. Zijn kunst gaat over ervaringen uit het verleden, het handelt over de vernietiging van de N’dyuka-cultuur in Suriname. In zijn werk brengt hij die situatie tot uitdrukking, waardoor tevens aandacht wordt geschonken aan de bescherming van culturen in het algemeen: Kibri a cultuur of “behoud de cultuur’.
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source: caribbean-beat

Pinas’s earliest work included a series of large hung or suspended wall assemblages which undermined traditional boundaries between painting and sculpture. They anticipated the suspended forms of Pinas’s current installations, and simultaneously processed the influences of Modernist painters like the Dutch Karol Appel, or the gestural approaches of Irish artist Rex Dixon, whose work Pinas encountered in Kingston. (Significantly, his mature works now seem more in conversation with the symbolic systems and “continental Caribbean” approaches to scale and composition of the Guyanese painter Aubrey Williams.)

These works referenced his Maroon heritage. Their surfaces consisted of large collaged fragments of pangi, the traditional cloths associated with Maroon identity, and inscriptions in Afaka script — named after its inventor, Afaka Atumisi, who in 1910 devised a syllabary of fifty-six characters to write the Ndjuka language. Like Afaka, Pinas is Ndjuka — one of the six Maroon peoples of Suriname — and comes from the Marowijne district in the eastern part of the country.

But Pinas’s work does not “represent” Maroon culture in any reductive way. Rather, he is in the process of reconstructing its presence and meaning. It is a very personal concern that takes on wider political commitments. As a contemporary artist, Pinas does not see himself in conflict with tradition. His work is not iconoclastic in any way. His idea of tradition is perpetually in the present tense, already adapting, always anticipating the next step.

Sitting in a canoe, going up the Cottica River with Pinas in 2005, was an unforgettable experience. An islander in a boat, but without an ocean horizon, overwhelmed by the scale of the river and the thickness of the surrounding vegetation, I was completely disoriented.

Pinas is very much a man of business, as committed to his creative investigations as he is to adapting, reconstructing, and positioning his Maroon heritage, and rebuilding the Ndjuka community. This was clear when, five years after that river trip, I returned with him to Moengo, the small town sixty miles east of Paramaribo where Pinas’s Tembe Art Studio is located. Here he has created not only an art school for young people of Moengo, but an outdoor sculpture park, featuring his own works alongside those of other artists, and a residency programme that brings international artists to work both in and with the Moengo community.

Within Pinas’s practice, a gesture such as opening a locally owned restaurant, or building a small stage for musicians to perform, has to be understood as part of his creative process, artistic vision, and sense of purpose. His leadership and participation in the rebuilding of Moengo is itself a site-specific artwork. And his installation works, using traditional elements and artifacts of Maroon culture, whether placed in Paramaribo or galleries in Europe, become guided tours — not for cultural display, or “difference” as entertainment, but as sense-based reconstructions of presence and memory.

You could say Pinas is blurring the traditional boundary between artist and curator. Each new configuration — each new life given to these altered objects — tells a story of survival which we all carry or internalise through engaging the work. We become collaborators through what we produce by experiencing the work.

Other works similarly transform domestic artifacts: enamel kitchenware, old-fashioned metal oil lamps, or the long, cylindrical baskets used to squeeze the poisonous juice from grated cassava. School at Pelgrim Kondre uses antiquated school desks and a blackboard to recreate a childhood classroom. These items are familiar to us: we have seen them put to other uses before, either practical and utilitarian, or in cultural displays about national diversity. But now they speak more broadly and with another voice.

Another series of installations uses aluminium spoons, each engraved with a Ndjuka symbol and suspended in various configurations — hovering between their daily function and their status as signs within Pinas’s visual language, altering our sense of the value of our everyday lives. Some versions of the installation include close to ten thousand spoons. The sound of them knocking against each other in the wind is as awe-inspiring as the number of them suspended.

First developed on a smaller scale outdoors at a residency in Germany, the work was later shown at the 2009 Havana Biennial. Perhaps the point about artists like Pinas working between locations is key. Where do the spoons come from? Probably from small Chinese emporiums. Where did the aluminium they are made of come from, and how does this link to the history of Moengo as a bauxite town? And even though we’re talking about Moengo, we are also talking about the mobility of the artist’s practice, which can be manifested in unexpected ways. I recall a story told by the South African curator Tumelo Mosaka, who included Pinas’s work in the Infinite Island exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 2007. The installation, using objects assembled in Suriname, had previously been staged in the Netherlands, and was now reconstructed in New York. As the objects were unpacked in the gallery, Mosaka recalled, tiny tropical creatures walked out of the bundles of palm fronds, having survived the intercontinental journey — causing panic among the museum’s conservators.

Pinas’s installation works require that we keep faith in our traditions, but also a shift in perspective towards how we can make them meaningful to the current moment. They ask questions about the value of memory, as both a personal and a community concern. The same is true of the large-scale Moiwana Monument Pinas has built at the site of a massacre during Suriname’s civil war. In 1986, not long after the oubreak of hostilities, the Surinamese army attacked the Ndjuka village of Moiwana, home of the rebel leader Ronnie Brunswijk. Thirty-nine villagers, mostly women, children, and the elderly, were killed, and the community was dispersed.

At the centre of Pinas’s monument, in a forest clearing, is a rising object like a truncated obelisk, surmounted by Afaka script spelling kibii wi — “protect us” — stark against the background of the sky. It is surrounded by smaller metal and concrete tablets inscribed with the names of those killed. The sharp chipped-stone fragments under your feet create a harsh effect as you walk around the clearing reading the names. The sound of the gravel makes you keenly aware of your individual presence at this site, and also your vulnerability. The trees in the forest are like silent witnesses.

The vengeful acts of Moiwana were aimed at a particular community then residing outside Suriname’s coastal political embrace. The monument is a site for personal remembrance of lost friends and relatives, for ethnic and national reflection, and also an aesthetic and experiential site-specific artwork. The artist wants us to remember, but also to imagine a future that can resolve and transform the meaning and the value of these moments. The monument is also operating in a space of questioning. It asks the rest of us why can’t we just live together. It speaks not only to Suriname, but through its scale to all humanity, when we falter.

When speaking about his work and career, Pinas’s tone is calm, confiding, and direct, with short sentences in which he declares an objective in a very matter-of-fact manner. “I want to build a school here . . .” You say to yourself, yes, this makes sense, and before you know it, you have been enlisted.

As I was, later in 2011, when I travelled to Suriname again to assist with and observe the installation of Kibii Wi Koni (“protect our knowledge”), Pinas’s major retrospective exhibition. Beginning in Paramaribo, and later transferred to Moengo, the show gave an ambitious overview of Pinas’s career to date. Watching it come into shape. I observed my fellow “conscripts,” invested in this moment.

To produce the exhibition, Pinas had assembled a base of supporters and collaborators, including Paramaribo’s Readytex Gallery, the Surinamese government, the Dutch embassy and the Dutch publisher of a new book about his work, and the local arts producer Ann Hermelijn. Meanwhile, as the works were constructed and installed, a stream of colleagues came by to assist: fellow artists, former teachers and students. All of us were in the exhibition space hanging spoons and arranging bottles wrapped in pangi. Few artists of Pinas’s generation in the Caribbean can bring such diverse interest groups to one table, or match that scale and level of production. In some way, Pinas’s success was theirs also, but for different reasons that make up the complex relationships of Surinamese society: generational, ethnic, school, national, or regional pride, or art, business, and political interests.

While Readytex hosted an installation of new paintings at De Hal, its adjunct exhibition space, the main “gallery” site — the Kamer van Koophandel en Fabrieken — was a nondescript building usually rented out for trade fairs and product launches. Now this industrial-looking space had become a factory for constructing possibility, or manufacturing hope, and in the process altered our sense of what is possible.

Once again, Pinas had asked a question, and his colleagues locally and internationally responded. In some way, the artist had filled in a blank space with a proposal about the value of what we have in our midst, which we have been tricked into believing is very little. It’s as if he was saying, look at what we can do.

Kibri a kulturu
East of Paramaribo, on the Cottica River, Moengo was once a small village surrounded by rainforest. In 1916, bauxite prospectors arrived, searching for deposits of the ore used to make aluminium, and within a few years Moengo was the centre of Alcoa’s mining operations in Suriname. The company turned the village into a base for its expat staff, with rows of bungalows, a hospital and school, even a golf course.

Moengo’s fortunes changed again, dramatically, in 1986, with the outbreak of a bloody civil war between Suriname’s government and a Maroon guerilla army. In the brutal fighting, dozens of Ndjuka villages were destroyed, along with the region’s infrastructure — everything from roads to power lines to health clinics. Moengo’s bauxite operations were shut down and the staff evacuated as the area descended into chaos. Much of northeastern Suriname’s Maroon population fled the region — either across the border to French Guiana, or to Paramaribo.

The wave of refugees included the family of Marcel Pinas, whose home was the village of Pelgrim Kondre. Pinas was fifteen when the war broke out, and his family sent him to the capital. There he began classes at the Nola Hatterman Art Institute, Suriname’s main art school, graduating in 1990. After several years teaching at the institute, in 1997 Pinas won a government scholarship to attend the Edna Manley College for the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica.

Pinas first came to critical attention for his boldly composed paintings and mixed-media collages, which used Ndjuka elements and symbols to elaborate a personal visual vocabulary, meditating on history, memory, and survival. Later, exposed to the medium of installation in Jamaica and during trips to Europe, he began experimenting with using domestic artifacts collected from Maroon communities to create first sculptural objects, and eventually large-scale installation works.

In an effort to engage with a broader audience in Suriname, he also began conceptualising and creating large outdoor works for public locations. His Kibii Wi totems, for instance, turn black-painted oil drums and giant Afaka characters into guardian monuments of Suriname’s main towns and ports.

With his work increasingly being shown in international exhibitions — Pinas has had several solo shows in the Netherlands and France, and participated in numerous group shows, including the Havana Biennial — in 2007 he began a two-year residency at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. And on his return to Suriname, Pinas launched the Kibii Wi Foundation and Tembe Art Studio in Moengo.

Since the end of the civil war in 1992, Moengo has once more become a chiefly Maroon community, absorbing former residents of villages (like Pelgrim Kondre) destroyed in the hostilities. But even twenty years later, basic infrastructure has not yet been fully restored, and the people of Moengo remain relatively isolated from the capital, a few hours’ bumpy drive away, on a still damaged road. Through the Kibii Wi Foundation, Pinas and his collaborators — who include his Paramaribo gallery, Readytex — are attempting to use art activity to help regenerate the town and the surrounding Marowijne district. Visiting artists teach community classes and create site-specific works for a sculpture park, which Pinas hopes will eventually attract art tourists to the vicinity. Former Alcoa buildings have been adapted to make studio, teaching, and exhibition spaces, and a new Moengo Jazz Festival, featuring musicians from both the community and outside, will launch in September 2013.

Pinas’s work was recognised by the World Economic Forum in 2010, when he was named a Young Global Leader. In 2011, a major retrospective in Paramaribo provided a comprehensive survey of his twenty-year career, accompanied by the monograph Marcel Pinas: Artist, More than an Artist.

The Ndjuka phrase kibri a kulturu — “protect the culture” — is Pinas’s motto, his overarching theme, and his modus operandi. The “culture” is Suriname’s Maroon heritage. For Pinas, to protect that heritage means going far beyond the notion of conservation or documentation: it requires ambitious acts of re-imagination that assert the Maroon community’s place in Suriname and the wider region, now and in the future.