Monikondee

CULTURAL INTANGIBLE HERITAGE AWARD 2025

A boatman delivers cargo to remote Indigenous and Maroon communities along the river bordering Suriname and French Guiana. His winding journey offers an inside look into the complex challenge of maintaining local customs in the face of rampant gold mining, multinational corporations, and a changing climate.

After their sumptuous Episode of the Sea (2012) shot on land and at sea with fishermen from the town of Urk in the Netherlands, the pair of Dutch artists, Lonnie Van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan, began working with Surinamese theatre director Tolin Alexander. Together, they started making participatory films working closely with the Surinamese peoples who descend from Maroon communities. Following Stones Have Laws (2018), Monikondee (for “money country”) is set along the Maroni River, on the frontier between former Dutch Guiana and present-day French Guiana. It documents the economic and cultural relations between the indigenous and Maroon communities – or Fiiman (for “free man”) as the protagonist, a boatman who sails up and down the river to deliver his cargo of petrol to remote villages and gold-diggers, immediately corrects. The story follows the vagaries of the boatman’s trips, the damage to his slender, 18-metre-long craft, the passage through the rapids made more difficult by the weight of his dangerously balanced cargo. Here, each plays their own part and tells stories of origins, travels, extractivism and the colonial plundering prolonged by economic enslavement to the goldmining that is destroying their river.  Each stop-off is an opportunity for other voices to speak up, in fable or song, following an ancient narrative technique known as Mato, but also to multiply and join forces in order to gain ownership and jurisdiction of conflicts needed to effectively fight for territorial and environmental rights. 

Antoine Thirion