Some time ago, i went to Paramaribo and this city left a very strong impression on me : an impression of softness, history, dream, and slowness.
I had the feeling that several words had settled onto the facades, the wooden houses and the atmosphere of the city center. Paramaribo, is a former Dutch colonial city whose historic center preserves architecture from the 16th to the 18th century. It reminded me at once of certain Caribbean architectures, but also of South American ones.
At one point, I stopped in front of a house at sunset. There was a small waterway beside it, palm tress, and a very soft luminous light, almost like being drawn back into a inhabited past. I saw Barbados, Guadeloupe and even Haïti.
The porches and balconies made me think the kinds of houses one sees in films set in the Carolinas or Virginia, and even New Orleans where I never been. The mix of people, the diversity also remininded me London. Of course, all of this belongs to my own perception of the town, shaped by the way i moved through, by what i was looking for there and by the inner state i was in.
Someone could ask : why find beauty in colonial architecture, shaped by slavery, domination and their afterlives? What i perceive is not admiration for the colonial or slave-holding administration. I feel something else through these walls : a historical density, presences, something subtle and powerful.
As if several threads of memory were crossing one another and drawing an invisible map between different Caribbean and Atlantic spaces. Spaces that are at once painful and luminous, and that continue to live within us, returning us to pasts, presents and resonances.
This is what moves me so deeply : this sense of a place that is inhabited, alive and charged. That is also what i love in architecture and in objets.
blakekathryn
jacobvanloon
theartofmadeline
kianamaiart
