Shurendi Statie

"As a creator and educator with Caribbean roots, I experience how my culture, my perspective and my story remain invisible within the Dutch art world.

Growing up in the Caribbean means living in an environment where different faces, languages and rhythms coexist as a matter of course. That plurality forms the foundation of my practice. After moving to Europe, that sense of belonging gave way to a feeling of uprootedness and the constant negotiation of identity. My research grows out of this tension: how art can make space for complexity and for identities that refuse to be reduced to a single narrative.

Édouard Glissant’s ‘Poetics of Relation’ offers me a language through which I need not translate or soften my multiplicity, but can approach it as a source of imagination and strength. Materiality and colour play an important role in this; they function as carriers of memory, energy and resistance.

'Un ñapa di mi kultura' is an installation that functions as a cultural heirloom. The title, in Papiamento, cannot be fully translated. Drawing on Glissant’s idea of opacity, the title embraces the right not to be fully translatable. The language itself thus becomes part of the work. The work is an attempt to preserve something of the Caribbean sensibility, history and way of life and to pass it on to future generations, and to anyone who identifies with a multiple identity.

My practice aims to create encounters: places where difference need not be explained, but acknowledged. Where identity is allowed to remain in flux and art becomes a field of relationships."

Contact:
hello.endi@hotmail.com