With SAIL2025, the national route of Art Project Armazoen came to a close. We have now reached the final preparations to begin the international route. Our very first destination will be Angola.
For the international route, the original plan was for our own sea container, which had completed the national tour, to also make the entire international route. By container ship, our container would travel the whole route: the Netherlands > Angola > Curaçao (this part of the route referring to the original triangular voyage of the very first slave voyage of Hof van Zeeland) > Suriname > the US.
Unfortunately, due to a lack of sufficient logistical and financial resources, combined with the deteriorating and therefore uncertain political situations in a number of countries, we had to conclude that connecting all the locations in this way, as a 'symbolic' remembrance of our shared history of slavery, was no longer feasible.
I therefore decided to create an alternative art object for the international route, one that could take over the sea container's international journey itself, so that we would still have a (literally) tangible object summarising the symbolic connection between the descendants of this shared history at every location Art Project Armazoen visits.
After working out a number of other ideas, I arrived at the final design: an alternative design of the Dutch flag, inspired by an original VOC flag I saw hanging in Texel, at the location of the contextual programming, when Art Project Armazoen was presented there:
With this new work, I offer, from my own perspective, what I feel is a more complete representation and meaning of the way the Dutch flag was used by the various maritime trading companies during the era of the slave trade. Alongside the MCC monogram, this flag also carries various data and cargo figures from the voyage of the slave ship Hof van Zeeland, such as the percentages of enslaved men, women and children on board, the duration of the middle passage, loading and unloading locations, mortality rates of the human merchandise, the number of crew members, and more.
This one flag will travel to every location on the international route, collecting the names of the various descendants of our shared history as these names are written onto it.
Before departing for the very first international location, Angola, my mother — a direct descendant (her biological grandfather was 17 when slavery was abolished by the Netherlands, her biological grandmother was 3 years old) — was the first to write her name on the flag.
When the flag returns to the Netherlands after completing the entire international route, we (descendants and staff of Art Project Armazoen) will add our names to it, after which the flag, mounted on a flagpole, will be added to the sea container of Art Project Armazoen.