Surinam Bittersweet

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When I woke up in downtown Paramaribo in August 2011, I had the feeling of being in a movie filmed a long time ago. All the buildings were made of wood, following typical Dutch colonial architecture. The first conversations I heard were in Dutch and Sranan Tongo. It was hard to believe I was still in South America.

 

But what struck me most was not the city — it was what lay along the rivers.

 

Sailing for hours along the Suriname and Commewijne rivers, I began to encounter the ruins of what had once been one of the most powerful sugar industries in the Americas. The factories of Marienburg and Aurora — built with the labor of enslaved Africans, and later with indentured workers brought from British India and Java — had been abandoned since the industry's collapse in the 1980s. The machinery had been stripped and sold for scrap. The jungle had moved back in. What remained were the structures themselves: vast iron and brick skeletons half-swallowed by tropical vegetation, corroded by decades of heat and humidity.

 

Standing inside them, I found myself transported. I could feel the past speaking through the ruins — imagining the enslaved workers laboring in the jungle heat, the scale of the human suffering that had built these structures and been consumed by them. How can a ruin be so alive? How can it speak so powerfully of human beings and their capacity for cruelty?

 

I photographed the factories at night — exposures of up to thirty minutes, alone with lanterns, among bats and darkness. But Surinam Bittersweet is not a project about absence. Children play in the abandoned factory at Marienburg. Night watchmen live inside the corroded structures with their families, their domestic life unfolding among collapsed machinery and jungle-covered walls. Fishermen work the canals near Paramaribo. People inhabit what history left behind — not haunted by the past, but living alongside it, in a landscape that has never fully let it go.

 

It was the first time in my work that the structures themselves carry as much weight as the people. The ruin is not a backdrop — it is a presence. A testimony. The history of colonialism, slavery and migration that built Suriname is not in a museum. It is in the walls, still standing, still collapsing, in the middle of the jungle.

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— Alejandro.

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Technical Sheet 

 

Year: 2011  ·  Suriname and the Netherlands

Commission: Noorderlicht, Groningen, curated by Wim Melis

Long exposures up to 30 minutes  ·  Lanterns and available light

Two series: Surinam Bittersweet (Suriname)  ·  Sugar Heritage (Netherlands)

Six photographers: Alejandro Chaskielberg, James Whitlow Delano, Ed Kashi, Francesco Zizola, Carl De Keyzer, Tomasz Tomaszewski.

 

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Selected Exhibitions

 

2012  ·  Noorderlicht Photofestival, Groningen, Netherlands — curated by Wim Melis

2012  ·  Langgeng Art Foundation, Yogyakarta, Indonesia

2012  ·  Tembe Art Studio, Paramaribo, Suriname

2012  ·  WZM-Platforma Brasil Holanda, São Paulo, Brazil

2012  ·  Ruangrupa / Galeri Seni Kunstkring, Jakarta, Indonesia

2012  ·  Pingyao International Photography Festival, China

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Book

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The Sweet and Sour Story of Sugar, Noorderlicht, 2012.