“Mi ben de bifo ben de, ben de!” (2024/2025, Maritiem Museum Rotterdam)
Installation View – ‘Mi ben de bifo ben de, ben de!’ – Maritiem Museum Rotterdam
‘Mi ben de bifo ben de, ben de!’ combines a sculpture with an audio experience to create a symbolic portal linking the present to the past and the future. The installation design – the sides of the gate – is inspired by Fort Elmina on the Ghanaian coast, the oldest European building in Sub-Saharan Africa. The Dutch, who captured the castle from the Portuguese in 1637, used the fort to imprison and ship enslaved Africans to plantations in South or North America.
The enslaved Africans were crammed into Elmina’s dark cellars to await their fate and were then forced through a narrow gateway with a metal door to board a slave ship. This ‘door of no return’ led to either a lifelong existence as a forced plantation laborer or death on board of a slave ship.
All the elements in the installation, like the pangi (loincloth) on the rooster weathervane, have a symbolic meaning in Afro-Surinamese Winti culture. The music includes Afro-Surinamese ancestor veneration songs and Curaçaoan Muzik di Zumbi. Both genres – rooted in the former Dutch colonial plantations of Suriname and Curaçao, and in Africa before the slave trade – are still played by descendants of the former enslaved. Also here in the Netherlands.