Baken Schiermonnikoog IV: Nos Pais by Gilleam Trapenberg
Galerie Ron Mandos is proud that Gilleam Trapenberg is one of the six artists participating in Hi-Lo’s Baken Schiermonnikoog. For an entire year, light projections will be displayed on the lighthouse Zuidertoren at sunset. A new light art piece every two months. The tower will once again become a beacon. In 2022, Jacco Olivier’s work Perpetuum was projected on the Zuidertoren. It was commissioned by Foundation Hi-Lo, which initiates large-scale projects around the Wadden Sea.
With Nos Pais (‘Our land’ in Papiamentu), photographer Gilleam Trapenberg opens a ‘portal’ on the Zuidertoren in the darkest time of the year, an opening through which you are transported from one island to another. You find yourself in a dreamy, jazzy day on Curaçao, where the sun is the beginning and ending of everything. It is Trapenberg’s declaration of love to his native land and an expression of deep longing. Schiermonnikoog in particular prompted him to start filming these images of homesickness. When he visited the Frisian island, for the first time in ten years in the Netherlands, he felt ‘home’ again. Trapenberg recognised the universal feeling that an island can evoke.
Credits Nos Pais
Concept, camera: Gilleam Trapenberg
Production: Artillerie
Edit: Emiel Nuninga
Post-Production: INK
Nos Pais | Gilleam Trapenberg
January 1 – February 28, 2023
Every evening during the nautical twilight
Zuidertoren, Torenstreek 22, Schiermonnikoog
Duration: 30.00 minutes
You can find all current start times via the button below.
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ABOUT Gilleam Trapenberg
Born in 1991 in Willemstad, Curaçao
Lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Born and raised in Curaçao, visual artist Gilleam Trapenberg (b. 1991) now lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Orbiting his homeland, his creative projects look closely at the fabric of Curaçao’s social landscape, probing at the island’s many paradoxes. He searches beneath the portrayals and tropes of Caribbean life that dominate (Western) media cycles, using the camera to create necessary counter-images.
Occasionally, though, Trapenberg is himself seduced by the allure of the exported picture- postcard; on European shores, nostalgia and longing take hold, perspectives drift, and memories of home are easily romanticised. For the artist, this experience of a perpetual limbo between two distinct places – connected by the fraught legacies of colonialism, enduring flows of goods and people, or even the mass tourism industry – is a growing focal point of his work.
A graduate of The Hague’s Royal Academy of Art, Trapenberg first moved to the Netherlands at 19 years old. In the years since, his works have been exhibited at institutions such as Foam Photography Museum and Stedelik Museum Amsterdam, whilst his first photobook – Big Papi – was published in 2017. He was the 2020 recipient of Foam’s Florentine Riem Vis grant and is one of five shortlisted artists for the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2023. The shortlisted works will soon be exhibited at London’s National Portrait Gallery.
