Tilting Axis Collections & Commissioning Fellow, 2019, Scotland
It is a great honor to receive the Tilting Axis Collections and Commissioning Fellowship 2019, Scotland. I am more than thankful and look forward with great delight to participating in a cross-cultural discourse stemming from the creative ecology of the Caribbean. More so, I look forward to meeting you all! During this fellowship I promise to do my best to absorb everything there is to learn from this experience as well as to contribute to the intelligent imagination that I believe cultivates our realities. To be terse: I am so excited! Let’s do this!
Lisandro Suriel is a Photographer and Artistic researcher born and raised in Saint Martin. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and received his Master’s of Art by research in Arts and Culture: Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. As part of his Master’s thesis he analyzed early twentieth century illustrations of West-Indian mythology in relation to cultural aphasia. This research forms the foundation of his on-going artistic research project Ghost Island in which he visually deconstructs the New World-imagination of the African Diaspora. Lisandro Suriel proposes that the imaginative lens is arguably the best with which to view how folkloric figures act as an agent in history and animate cultural memory. Lisandro Suriel seeks to employ the Caribbean’s own unwritten vestiges of ancestral memory and colonialism imbedded in landscape, architecture, and people to generate imaginative linkages to a political past and social identity.