Workshop: Maroon Cosmopolitics through the works of prof. dr. Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha and filmmakers Alexander, van Brummelen, and de Haan.

This workshop is part of the Cosmologies workgroup (see: https://asca.uva.nl/programme/seminars/cosmologies/cosmologies.html). 

In this workshop, we will explore Maroon cosmopolitics through the work of Prof. Dr. Olivia Maria Gomes da Cunha in conjunction with the filmic works of filmmakers Tolin Alexander, Lonnie van Brummelen, and Siebren de Haan. 

The Maroon, as descendants from peoples forcibly brought from the African continent by Dutch, English, Spanish and Portuguese Atlantic slave traders to work in the plantation systems of the Americas, and who resisted the violence of slavery by rebelling and escaping, find themselves at the intersections of ancestral ways of living and modern, colonial impositions. In this workshop, we specifically focus on the “singularity of the settlements, the centrality of kinship in their social structure, the omnipresence of the ancestors, and the richness of Maroon cosmology, languages and arts,” but also on “the rapid transformations that were already changing their ways of life” (da Cunha 2018). In what ways has “the environmental damage caused in traditional Maroon territories by the effects of the Plantationocene and the material vestiges of colonial and racial violence left by capitalism” changed these ways of life, and what modes of resistance do they offer? (da Cunha, 2024)

From an anthropological point of view, Prof. Dr. da Cunha’s work explores and scrutinizes the limits of the discipline’s epistemological orientation. In the studies of Maroon populations settled in the forests and cities of Suriname and French Guiana, da Cunha’s work traces different ”relationships in which humans and more-than-humans interact in composing body and earth through refractive and diffractive effects,” which might be understood as resisting the modern, cosmopolitan outlook of the discipline as well as the many problems it propagates. The cosmopolitical question is how to understand Maroon cosmologies on their own terms.

From a filmic point of view, the work of Alexander, van Brummelen, and de Haan expresses the pluriversal existence of the Surinam Maroon populations, as well as the struggles with the modern cosmology’s imposition. After Stones Have Laws (2018), which takes us into the heart of Suriname's rain forest to show the life of a Maroon community, their most recent film Monikondee (2025), shows how economic interests have encroached upon these lands. Both films concern these ways of living and their cosmologies as much as it concerns the vital question of what it is to film these and how.

For the workshop, several readings are assigned as well as a viewing of Alexander, van Brummelen, and de Haan’s Stones Have Laws (2018). During the workshop, Prof. Dr. da Cunha will give a short talk on Maroon cosmopolitics and its concerns, after which we will have an open conversation with Prof. Dr. da Cunha and filmmakers Alexander, van Brummelen, and de Haan and all participants.

Readings:

Da Cunha, Olivia Maria Gomes, ed. “Introduction: Exploring Maroon Worlds on The Move.” In Maroon Cosmopolitics: Personhood, Creativity and Incorporation. Studies in Global Slavery, volume 6. Brill, 2019, pp. 1-32.

Da Cunha, Olívia Maria Gomes. “The Earth Is Sweet. On Cottica Ndyuka (De)Compositions.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 66, no. 2 (2024): 242–66.

Van Brummelen, Lonnie, and Siebren de Haan. “‘Something Is There’: Filmmaking in Multiple Realities.” World Records Journal 1 (2018). https://worldrecordsjournal.org/something-is-there-filmmaking-in-multiple-realities/.

Van Brummelen, Lonnie, Siebren de Haan, and Tolin Alexander. “Monikondee: Interview with Directors.” Interview by Jason Fox. 2025. https://vriza.org/en/monikondee-interview-with-directors/.

Students can get 1 ECTS for actively participating. For ECTS, students are required to do the readings, prepare questions for the workshop, and participate. 

To register, email: h.h.kuipers@uva.nl

After the workshop a screening of Monikondee will take place at filmtheater De Uitkijk at 21:00, with Q&A. Student participants can get a ticket for the screening.

Bios:

Olívia Maria Gomes da Cunha is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Museu Nacional, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Her research focuses the production of textual and visual artefacts, archives, and modernist ethnographies. She also has been carrying on research on the Cottica Ndyuka in Eastern Suriname. 

Lonnie van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan have worked together as an artist and filmmaker duo since 2002. Their films explore how political, economic, and technological forces shape the lived realities of local communities and the environments on which they depend. Moving between art, documentary, and collective research, their practice is grounded in collaboration and reciprocity.

Since 2014, they have created three participatory documentaries: Episode of the Sea (2014), with the fishing community of Urk; Stones Have Laws (2018), with Maroon communities along the Suriname River; and Monikondee (2025), with Maroon and Indigenous communities in the border region between Suriname and French Guiana. They co-directed the latter two films with Surinamese theatre maker Tolin Alexander.

Tolin Alexander is a writer, theatre maker, and performer of Maroon descent. His work focuses on intercultural and community-based theatre and is strongly influenced by Augusto Boal’s Forum Theatre. In addition to his collaborations on Stones Have Laws and Monikondee, he recently curated the exhibition The Surinamese Forest at the Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden.