Halfbloed/To the finder the spoils
2024- on-going
’Halfbloed’ is a personal journey through the rich history, traditions and stories that shape my bi-cultural/racial background. Using a personal archive, the historical treasures of Curaçao and the entrepreneurial stories of my Dutch ancestors. The images create a dreamlike world where the boundaries between past and present, reality and imagination are fading. The images interweave the diversity of my cultural experiences and show how they can exist in with each other. Through visual narratives and compositions, the gaps between cultures become clear and occasionally bridged. In this project I am attempting to visualize a world that I have some kind of para social relationship with, each image revealing a piece of the past while offering a window to a future in which past and present merge.
An almost surreal atmosphere is created in which the past and the present become one, There are places and people I think I know but don't really know, or places that seem familiar to me but I've never been to.
Halfbloed Book
In this segment of the ongoing project, I explore the boundaries of ownership, identity, and memory. My practice is rooted in a bicultural background, where my mother’s world, descended from a family involved in the Dutch tobacco trade, intersects with that of my father, from Curaçao with ancestral ties to West Africa. By repositioning artefacts drawn from lived reality within the present, a dialogue emerges between past and now. It is a journey through personal and collective histories, where archives, family narratives, and imagination flow into one another. The title To the Finder the Spoils balances between justification and critique, inviting reflection on what is found, lost, claimed, and passed on.
