De Plantage van onze voorouders

150 years after the ‘ending’ of slavery, Manoushka Zeegelaar Breeveld and Malou Gorter take on the roles of Maartje Duin, Peggy Bouva and their relatives, in order to get a grip on the shared colonial history and everything that has resulted from it.

Their meeting is the start of a quest in which they mirror, confront and question each other. Together they go back to a shared past, to the Tout Lui Faut plantation in Suriname, the place that connects their ancestors. It is becoming increasingly clear how the historical inequality between women continues to affect the present. The actresses Manoushka and Malou interpret all of the characters and perspectives, but in the end they relate to themselves and speak out to each other, personally. The spectator gets confronted with a crystal clear fact: that colonial history still has his marks in today’s society in multiple ways. 

For this project, I designed the costumes for the actresses (Manoushka Zeegelaar Breeveld & Malou Gorter) and the musicians (Shauntell Baumgard & Yariv Vroom). 

Since the actresses are working and struggling towards answers on multiple questions they have, I designed colorful working suits for them. While the musicians played more of the ancestral spirits (winti) as though they were almost mythical creatures. Therefore these costumes are more sculptural.
For Shauntell I created a top with folded fabric, details which are seen in the traditional Surinam Marron costumes. The transparant layered pantalon has a print I created based on the “keti koti”, which means literally “broken chains”. This refers to the chains of the enslaved African people in Surinam. 

photography: Bart Grietens