Portrait of a Black Artist-Activist: Dutch-Carribean Sculptor Nelson Carrilho
What is the purpose of an artist? To Dutch-Caribbean sculptor Nelson Carrilho, a great artist is nothing short of a spiritual leader who can use the healing power of art to bring divided communities together. Atelier Carrilho — nestled between the canals of Amsterdam — has an open-door policy. As long as the door is open, anyone can freely enter the artist’s studio for a tour. Carrilho’s studio and sculptures alike are open invitations to hear the stories of the artist’s personal life and experiences. They are also stories of black history and colonial legacies, but not of the shame or guilt about past atrocities. Instead, they are stories meant to inspire and give solace to anyone who wishes to engage in conversations. They are stories meant to forge community bonds between people rather than stay dormant within gallery walls. These are stories meant to be touched and heard by everyone.
Carrilho’s Dutch-Carribbean identity was shaped by forced cultural assimilation in his native Curaçao, a small Caribbean island colonised by Dutch settlers in the 17th Century. Although ties between Curaçao and the Netherlands remained close after territorial autonomy was granted in 1942, the effects of colonisation had a long lasting impact on the island residents — one of which being languages. Papiamento, the native language of most Curaçaon, was not permitted to be spoken at schools. Being deprived of a linguistic connection to his African heritage, Carrilho adopted art as his language instead. The artist grew up singing and dancing to traditional African music that creates an emotional connection with nature and a sense of freedom. This later became the source for Carrilho’s language as a sculptor. His art-making process embodies the emotional and spiritual energy felt through African dance and music with emphasis on gaps and contradictions of the body. The language of singing and dancing translates into the forms and aesthetics in Carrilho’s sculptures: rhythms are embedded in dynamism of the figures and gaps are expressed through rough textures of the bronze. These expressions seek to reveal a certain universality in human experiences: an emphasis on our collective yearning for emotional and spiritual connections.
Perhaps that is why the motif of “Mother Nature” became so crucial in Carillho’s oeuvre. The artist’s break-through work is the public monument “Mama Baranka (1984)”, which in Papiamento means “Mother Rock”. It was originally commissioned by the city of Amsterdam to commemorate the death of 15-year-old Kerwin Duinmeijer in a racial hate crime in 1983. Despite the municipality’s request for a portrait of Kerwin Duinmeijer, Carrilho insisted on creating the figure of a mother instead. His intuition told him that the best way to commemorate the past was to erect a timeless symbol that aspires to a better future in its place. As an Antillean cultural icon, “Mother Rock” symbolises black female power as she carries all human wisdom and strength inside her womb. Now standing her ground in a central park in Amsterdam, “Mama Baranka’’ also came to be a symbol for social justice and liberation rather than victimhood as she carries through the hopes of those without a voice. In 2020, “Mama Baranka” was the center of a community project in Amsterdam called “Earth(ing)”, where people gathered around the statue to perform various rituals that activated its power and connection with the earth.
Much like bronze — a material that requires patience and perseverance — Carrilho has been on a slow-burning path to renown since completing his academic art training in Utrecht in the 1980s. As the waves of the Black Lives Matter movement sent ripples across the cultural sector with museums jumping on the bandwagon to address post-colonialist issues, Carrilho was recently featured in a major exhibition surrounding the controversial Dutch Golden Carriage at the Amsterdam Museum. But despite his past training in academy art and the recent institutional attention, Carrilho has intentionally chosen to work outside the realms of art institutions in his decades-long path as a working sculptor. To Carrilho, art can only become the glue that binds communities together when it can be as close as possible to its viewer who can touch and feel a sculpture intimately. Since gallery spaces often demand physical distance rather than closeness, it’s much more likely to find Carrilho’s works in public parks and on the streets. Most recently, the artist is working with activist-curator Chiara Scolastica Mosciatti to install three public monuments in three Southern Italian villages, which are part of the large territory of the Metropolitan City of Reggio Calabria. The area is wild, often hostile and it touches both the ionian and the tyrrhenian sea. The installations of the statues are designed to interact with the sea, which is, for most of the migrants landing in Italy, a portion of their Odyssey. Therefore, the intervention on-going claims social inclusion issues in the region.
Carrilho and Mosciatti believe that interventions are needed the most in the villages — not big cities like Amserdam — as counter-intuitive as it might sound. Because it is in the villages where the lack of acknowledgement towards diversity and multiculturalism sometimes result in fatal tragedies. In 2018, Malian migrant and human rights activist Soumaila Sacko was brutally murdered in Calabria. His death provoked strong demands to address the increasing hostility and violence against refugees in Italy. Mosciatti and Carrilho partook in the global response of solidarity towards the event through an abstract portrait of Soumaila Sacko based on Carrilho’s earlier work “The Other Face”. In the curator’s own words, it depicts him “in the moment of overcoming several obstacles and unmasking contradictions”. The sculpture is meant to be installed this year in San Ferdinando, a Calabiran village at the Western coast.
Portrait of Soumaila Sacko in progress in Carrilho’s studio. Source: Nelson Carrilho
The monument for Soumaila Sacko in San Ferdinando is the second phase of the Calabria project. Last year in October 2020, Carrilho and Mosciatt installed “The Archer ‘’ in the village of Camini despite the various obstacles imposed by pandemic restrictions. The third public monument, a reworked version of Carrilho’s previous work “Carrier From Afar”, will hopefully be installed in Riace next year. The village of Riace was known for the uncovering of two ancient Roman bronze sculptures, which coincidentally mirror the double-figured sculpture by Carrilho. The curatorial idea was to mix various cultural symbols together to create new visual meanings, which might stand to inspire its onlookers. As the public monuments would share the open public spaces with their viewers, the hope is to strengthen the sense of belonging through visual and cultural symbols that can connect migrants to the local communities, and vice versa.
The Calabria project was initially self-funded by Carrilho and Mosciatti, who gifted “The Archer” to Camini using their own personal funds. By the relentless efforts of the artist and the curator, the project is growing into a multinational effort connecting the Netherlands with Italy through culture, as both countries have faced growing issues with racism and social exclusion. But the path to complete such a monumental task has been far from easy. In our conversation, Mosciatti describes the multi-factored challenges that had hindered the progress: bureaucratic processes, funding concerns, sexism, and now also the Coronavirus pandemic. But this is also the kind of work that is worth the most effort because it can make a much stronger and long-lasting impact for the local community, as opposed to big metropolitan cities that are almost over-saturated with monuments. That is why to Carrilho and Mosciatti the fight must continue and go on — more so within the coastal villages of Italy than in the galleries of Amsterdam.
Curious about the artist’s future projects? Stay in touch with Nelson Carrilho via the artist’s social media channel.
