The ocean has long been humanity's grandest narrative, an ancient conduit for life and a vital force connecting our collective ancestry. My project, "Across The Sea," stems from an eco-imaginary perspective, weaving historiography with ancestral wisdom from across the Atlantic world. I seek to convey the forces of nature to weave stories together that transcend space and time, stories that resonate with people separated by vast distances yet intimately linked.
"Across The Water" positions the natural world at the center of historiographical discourse, bestowing upon it a democratic quality that transcends the human-centric view of telling history. By narrating through the lens of nature—a universal constant—histories gain a supernal dimension where the ocean emerges not merely as a body of water but as the vessel and being of our collective memory.
Emerging from the Caribbean—a nexus of Atlantic World histories—the ocean has always been at the core of human development, whether in pre-colonial societies or in the post-colonial epoch. Our interactions with and interpretations of natural forces illuminate the cultural imprints and primordial ties that bind us to a shared web of influences; a tree of life.
"Across The Water," is a collection of images and a video, that present how the forces of nature are regarded and can be a bridge across seemingly disparate worlds. This body of work, purports to navigate both the mythological and the real, showcasing entities birthed by the ocean and those carried upon its waves, thus cementing the ocean's role in cultural syncretism and collective memory.
Lisandro Suriel biography
Lisandro Suriel is a photographer of magic realism and artistic researcher from Soualiga, an island in the Caribbean known today as Saint Martin. Suriel 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 Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam. His artistic research practice employs Black imagination in order to generate linkages to a forgotten past and decolonial identity. Suriel's work is founded on his insular background in Saint Martin, and connotes the Caribbean condition of complex overlapping histories. He 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. Consequently, he seeks to employ unwritten vestiges of an intelligent imagination imbedded in landscape, architecture, and people to generate imaginative linkages to a past and identity beyond coloniality.
Lisandro Suriel 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 Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam.