Vittoria Benzine travels to Curaçao for the second edition of uncommissioned, Novo Collective’s experimental public art programme.
If you’re feeling cynical about art, maybe you aren’t looking closely enough. Six new works just cropped up throughout the Caribbean island of Curaçao, for those with eyes to see – courtesy of Novo Collective, one of contemporary art’s scrappiest, most ambitious new endeavours. A swirl of stones, for instance, springs from the rocky shores of Playa Zakitó. Surf laps at the base of the sculpture, which shifts with every step past it. There’s no wall text, no plaque attributing this creation to noted local artist Giovanni Abath, who made it for the second edition of uncommissioned, Novo’s experimental public art programme. It almost looks like nature made it.
Chuman Zhang and Jerry Guo founded Novo Collective two years ago, after Zhang left her four-year stint as artist liaison for Perrotin Los Angeles and Shanghai. As the couple daydreamed about their next move, they landed on a shared passion for art that transcends the traditional white cube.
Last year’s debut edition of uncommissioned recruited fifty acclaimed creatives, including Valencia-based street artist Escif and New York-based interdisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian to concoct public artworks in forty-two cities around the globe, pro bono. Kismet abounded, Zhang said. Some artists had been awaiting signs to bring their ideas into existence.
Guo, meanwhile, is a Burning Man camp organiser and a sailor known to dock in Curaçao. There, Novo Collective connected with Avantia Damberg, founder of public art foundation SKOR Kòrsou. After securing support from half a dozen Dutch and Caribbean cultural agencies, like The Mondriaan Fund, Novo invited artists for its first-ever focused edition of uncommissioned, wherein artwork and site ideas arose from seafaring research expeditions. Over the phone, ahead of my visit, Zhang said she and Guo had been pleasantly surprised at first to find that no one else was hosting sailing residencies. As uncommissioned began, they realised why: such endeavours are logistical nightmares. They’d already faced several emergencies – a car accident, a dog scratch, a Coast Guard rescue. “It’s been a real expedition,” Zhang said on our car ride from the airport.
Half of the eight artists in this edition of uncommissioned hailed from Curaçao. The rest embedded themselves within the rich art scene flourishing on this colourful island, where Royal Dutch Shell once set up the world’s largest oil refinery. Earlier in the summer, New York-based “speculative design” duo Pedro Oliveira and Xuedi Chen had crafted a plinth for activist Nash Caldera’s two-part performance during Uncommissioned’s opening reception. Before uncommissioned’s opening reception, Caldera stood atop it while donning cactus spikes, in direct dialogue with a sculpture immortalising political activistMoises Frumencio da Costa Gomez in the heart of Willemstad, itself a UNESCO Cultural Heritage Site. From there, Zhang and I followed Caldera to the remote Kueba di Indjan, where she resumed her perch, stoically marking the cave’s entrance.
Inside, past the five-million-year-old stalagmite and stalactites, hangs Luger’s installation, Land Song. Banana fibre ropes bask in sunlight streaming in through a crack, which suspend dozens of clay whistles created across three workshops Luger hosted in the span of a week (the first of which happened at Farm to Crafts, which fosters Curaçao’s self-sufficiency through creative industry). Luger’s wife and manager, artist Ginger Dunill, wove the ropes from material Farm to Crafts provided. At the reception, Luger’s older son staged a sound performance responding to both the space and a composition he made amidst the process.
At first, Luger’s family effort blends in with its enrapturing environs, intermingling amidst the luxurious vines, which nearly camouflage it. The artist left the whistles unfired, so rainfall can slowly return them to the earth, another way in which uncommissioned has embedded itself intimately with Curaçao. Indeed, most of the participants used local materials. Abath’s sculpture, titled saying everything without explaining anything… utilized stones sitting on the shores of Playa Zakitó, in the shadow of one of the 500 construction projects that cropped up on Curaçao over the past year alone. “When you pass by, it will transform,” Abath said of the work. “What you have to learn from this is that life will change.”
Twenty minutes away, sculptor Ailsa Anastatia has continued her exploration of humanity’s relationship with space by planting a new kind of garden titled terms and conditions, populated by hybrids blending cacti salvaged from said construction sites with clean metal prosthetics created in the artist’s studio. A tall, simple, metallic portal echoing their forms frames the blue bay beyond. “It’s not that I’m against construction, but I want it to be in coexistence with nature,” Anastatia told me. Her installation specifically avoided places where Banana di ref had carpeted the ground. In one spot or two, her cacti may actually take root. Colombian artist Carolina Aranibar Fernandez developed an assemblage that will be submerged, sustainably, at a later date.
The day after Uncommissioned’s reception, Guo and Zhang took Damberg, me, and the Luger clan on a three-hour sailing expedition to Klein Curaçao, during which I forewent Dramamine to determine once and for all whether I’m prone to sea sickness. Turns out, yes.
After nursing myself back to health with a dip in the perfect water, I accompanied Damberg to install her first-ever stained glass artwork, titled Through Colourful Shades: Inside Out, atop the tiny, uninhabited island’s lighthouse—debilitating fear of heights be damned. Quieted my stomach afresh as she hung out the open window, brandishing a drill. French electronic duo Paradis wafted from her phone speaker, complementing the warm, salty wind whipping off the sea, five stories below. I could hardly watch. Luckily, I didn’t have to. I knew Damberg had finished once sunlight cast the glass’s juicy hues on the wall before me. This piece is a counterpart to her second-ever stained glass work, The Land’s Hexagonised Treasures, nestled into the Kueba di Indjan like a secret loot. Both feature colourful hexagons.
Later that night, seated by our campfire near Klein Curaçao’s iconic shipwreck, Damberg recounted the origins of this geometric motif, which took root in 2013, shortly after she returned to Curaçao upon finishing her art degree in Amsterdam. In a dream, Damberg scoured the vast plot of grey, barren land that her mother had been given in exchange for her 27 years running a home for pregnant young women. There, Damberg turned up four giant hunks of diamond – one for each member of her family. The artist interpreted this vision as a lesson that “you have to discover real treasure later,” she said. “It doesn’t look immediately like you found something valuable.” Eventually, her sketches and collages of diamonds transformed into hexagons, nature’s most efficient shape for storing materials, maybe even memories. Yes, I will forever remember this trip not just for its beauty, but for its lessons. Real art is hard to come by. Like intimacy, it requires effort, discomfort, and bravery. A story without stakes stands to bore. uncommissioned offers another way.
