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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture The Art of Survival: What does it mean to be Maroon today?

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27/11/2009The Art of Survival: What does it mean to be Maroon today?

The Art of Survival: What does it mean to be Maroon today? The first large-scale exhibition about Maroon culture, on display at Amsterdam's Tropenmuseum this winter, is a visual feast but also invites us to consider whether and how Maroon culture can survive in the 21st century.

Visitors to Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum this winter are in for a treat. Taking pride of place in the museum’s cavernous Lichthal, the ‘Art of Survival’ (Kunst van Overleven) is the first large-scale exhibition in the Netherlands about Maroon culture from Suriname.

Maroons are the descendants of Africans taken forcibly by slave traders to work in plantations in Suriname, where they escaped from slavery and settled in the jungle, creating a new life and culture along the rivers there.

Professor Alex van Stipriaan, specialist in Maroon and slave history, was impressed by the Tropenmuseum’s Maroon collection when he became curator there four years ago. When artist and filmmaker Felix de Rooij then proposed an exhibition on the subject, the result was the ‘Art of Survival’.

The exhibition makes a truly stunning visual display. Over 700 objects from Maroon life are on display, for the first time in the Netherlands. There are finely carved benches, bowls, combs and paddles of up to a hundred and fifty years old; colourful textiles with complex patterns; traditional and contemporary art; and music artefacts from traditional instruments to CDs by modern Maroon performers.
Maroon wood sculpture
While some objects are the focus of individual attention, others are arranged in seemingly endless cascades, hanging from the hall’s high ceiling. Together, they provide a picture of changing Maroon aesthetics.

Exhibition maker Marijke Besselink’s personal highlight is an art installation by Maroon artist Marcel Pinas (1971) entitled ‘Talking oil drum’, beneath whose bright colours lies an appeal to preserve the world’s natural resources.

The exhibition takes visitors back in time via six themed pavilions which track how every aspect of Maroon culture has evolved over the years.  Some say Maroons are the best preserved piece of African culture outside of the continent itself, yet from the formation of the earliest Maroon groups in the 17th century, the Maroon way of life grew apart from its African roots.

The indigenous Amerindians, who had already lived in the forest for centuries, were a source of great inspiration for the Maroons, who adopted some of their customs. The language of one Maroon group, the Saramacca, is drawn from Portuguese, English and Dutch as well as African languages; the African component accounts for only five percent of the total. Indeed, Saramaccan is remarkable to linguists because of its unusual divergence from its source languages.

At each turn, we are shown how Maroon life—once hidden in the Suriname interior, estranged from the outside world—has been gradually influenced by outside forces, and asked to think about what this means for Maroon culture and its future.
Maroons in Suriname


Now that railways, roads, radio and mobile phones have all reached the hinterland, and Internet will soon be available too, money has become essential but there is little employment in the interior. Today the majority of the Maroons no longer live in the forests of Suriname but in Paramaribo, in neighbouring French Guyana and in the Netherlands, with flourishing communities in Amsterdam, Utrecht and Tilburg. Is this the beginning of the end of Maroon culture?

This is the central question to the ‘Art of Survival’; how can a small culture such as that of the Maroons still survive in this age of rapid globalisation? The exhibition looks for the answer among carvings and hip hop, forest and city, gods and gaaman chiefs, and women, men and children. Besselink hopes that visitors will look for their own answers, and that the exhibition will create awareness of cultural identity issues.

But perhaps the ‘Art of Survival’ is the answer to its own question; perhaps the key to survival for little-known cultures is the recognition, understanding and appreciation of their identities in the wider world, in the melting pot of our increasingly inter-connected Global Village.

And the Tropenmuseum’s exhibition will surely be an important step in appreciating our Maroon neighbours.

Anna Ritchie

‘Art of Survival’ will be on display from 6 November 2009 to 9 May 2010, at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. A richly illustrated book (only available in Dutch) edited by Alex van Stipriaan and Thomas Polimé has been published in conjunction with the exhibition; Maroons and experts on Maroon culture discuss their views on some of the exhibition themes, alongside photographs from the Tropics Institution image archive, the museum collection and by contemporary Maroon photographers.

Maroon art on display at the Tropenmuseum

Tropenmuseum
Linnaeusstraat 2
Amsterdam
+31 (0)20 568 8200
www.tropenmuseum.nl

Open daily from 10.00 to 17.00.
Open till 15.00 on 5, 24 and 31 December.
Closed on 1 January, 30 April, 5 May and 25 December.

(Left) 'Tembe anga tja ede I': three dimensional painting by Marcel Pinas, 2008.

 



1 reaction to this article

Ann Brown posted: 2009-11-28 18:32:32

There is still a very active settlement of Maroons in Jamaica that live autonomously from the government. They hold their own elections to appoint their leaders as well govern and police themselves.

The Maroons have been an integral part of Jamaica's history with one of the National Heroes being Nanny of the Maroons.

Anyone looking for an authenic and well-perserved piece of history into the way of life of these people can also research the Accompong Maroons.

http://www.jamaicans.com/info/jahistory/maroons.shtml

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1 reaction to this article

Ann Brown posted: 2009-11-28 18:32:32

There is still a very active settlement of Maroons in Jamaica that live autonomously from the government. They hold their own elections to appoint their leaders as well govern and police themselves.

The Maroons have been an integral part of Jamaica's history with one of the National Heroes being Nanny of the Maroons.

Anyone looking for an authenic and well-perserved piece of history into the way of life of these people can also research the Accompong Maroons.

http://www.jamaicans.com/info/jahistory/maroons.shtml

Add a comment
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