Stones Have Laws
'Stones Have Laws' presents the colonial history that the Netherlands and Suriname share, from the perspective of the Maroons. They are descendants of Africans who were shipped across the Atlantic to work on the plantations but managed to free themselves. Building on their ancestral knowledge and what the indigenous people taught them, they established new communities in the rainforest and formed alliances with the rivers, the stones, the animals and the forest.
The hybrid documentary film project by Dutch artists Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan and the Surinamese theatre maker and poet Tolin Alexander bridges filmmaking, poetry and theatre. The Maroons demonstrate rituals to get in touch with their ancestors and local forest spirits and express how their ties to their ancestral grounds land have become endangered as industries devastate the region through deforestation and mining.
In the exhibition, the chapter ‘The Flood’ is shown, with materials that shed light on the cooperation with the Maroon community, the experimental process of collective scripting, and the reception of the film in the Surinamese interior.
