research & publishing
hidden histories
Through a correspondence add in Jeune Afrique magazine, Ilse Cardoen connected with Elhadji Sall, and they started writing each other letters. In the summer of 1986 she visited Elhadji and his family in Quartier Kebe Der in Guediaway Dakar, Senegal.
Ilse and her son Kwabena asked me to create a book from her personal archive. Delighted to work with this beautiful archive, I chose to use the semi-analog Riso printing technique to recapture the vivid memories present in the photographs. We sadly found out that Elhadji Sall passed away in July 2022. This book is a tribute to him and everyone who gave Ilse Cardoen the ‘Teranga’ of Senegal.
LE SOLEIL 2023
Photo’s Ilse Cardoen
Art direction, Editing, Design and Riso printing
Mirelle van Tulder
A collaboration between
Kwabena Appiah-Nti & Mirelle van Tulder
Published by
Roots to Fruits
Print run
100
27 x 37 cm (48 pages)
Available at:
Foam Editions
Tenderbooks (sold out)
Ilse Cardoen
Werkplaats Typografie
AWARDS
- Best Dutch Book Design 2023.
- Zum Photo Book Festival 2023. Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo
Ilse and her son Kwabena asked me to create a book from her personal archive. Delighted to work with this beautiful archive, I chose to use the semi-analog Riso printing technique to recapture the vivid memories present in the photographs. We sadly found out that Elhadji Sall passed away in July 2022. This book is a tribute to him and everyone who gave Ilse Cardoen the ‘Teranga’ of Senegal.
LE SOLEIL 2023
Photo’s Ilse Cardoen
Art direction, Editing, Design and Riso printing
Mirelle van Tulder
A collaboration between
Kwabena Appiah-Nti & Mirelle van Tulder
Published by
Roots to Fruits
Print run
100
27 x 37 cm (48 pages)
Available at:
Foam Editions
Tenderbooks (sold out)
Ilse Cardoen
Werkplaats Typografie
AWARDS
- Best Dutch Book Design 2023.
- Zum Photo Book Festival 2023. Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo
Roots to Fruits is a magazine about music; its migration and origins, and its role against oppression. The first issue is dedicated to Highlife and its vital role in the struggle for independence and the creation of an African identity during the time of Kwame Nkrumah. It features an article by Dele Adeyemo, and a visual essay by Mirelle with images from the archive of the Wereldmuseum (NL) and the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT).
Dele Adeyemo’s ‘The Modernizing Beat’ rereads the production of space in a modernizing Ghana through highlife, taking the modernist New Town and Tema Harbour as a case study about how the emergence of the ‘worksong’ has governed urbanization in Ghana.
The beat of highlife’s precursor, the worksong, bound the community together in collective life that was attuned to the rhythm of the tides and cycles of the seasons; the evolution of the highlife sound can tell a story of the circulation of cultures, commodities, and political-economic structures condensed into the spatial forms of a modernizing Ghana.
Editing, Design and Riso printing
Mirelle van Tulder
Dele Adeyemo’s ‘The Modernizing Beat’ rereads the production of space in a modernizing Ghana through highlife, taking the modernist New Town and Tema Harbour as a case study about how the emergence of the ‘worksong’ has governed urbanization in Ghana.
The beat of highlife’s precursor, the worksong, bound the community together in collective life that was attuned to the rhythm of the tides and cycles of the seasons; the evolution of the highlife sound can tell a story of the circulation of cultures, commodities, and political-economic structures condensed into the spatial forms of a modernizing Ghana.
Editing, Design and Riso printing
Mirelle van Tulder
Nº2 Champeta, 2023
Launch: 22–24 September 2023, Miss Read Berlin,
Haus der Kulturen der Welt
Roots to Fruits Nº2 Champeta: A Colombian Caribbean Cultural Resistance
In Roots to Fruits Nº2 Champeta, Edna Martinez tells the story of Champeta, an Afro-Colombian music genre based on African rhythms, from which local producers create new sonic, visual and spatial practices, as both an outcome and facilitator of cultures of resistance.
The Picó Sound System of the Colombian Caribbean cities of Cartagena, Barranquilla and Santa Marta have created parties for people of their working-class neighborhoods, in particular for the Afro-Colombian diaspora. The issue explores the musical migration from Africa to Colombia; how it made the Afro-Colombian’s diaspora aware of its origins and colonial past; and how champeta has resisted marginalisation and continuous to break with hegemonic powers.
We’re thrilled to be able to share an essay by Edna Martinez in this issue. Edna is an artist, DJ, and Curator of Music and Sonic Practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin.
Editors
Daniel Senior Durán & Mirelle van Tulder
Design and Riso printing
Mirelle van Tulder
In Roots to Fruits Nº2 Champeta, Edna Martinez tells the story of Champeta, an Afro-Colombian music genre based on African rhythms, from which local producers create new sonic, visual and spatial practices, as both an outcome and facilitator of cultures of resistance.
The Picó Sound System of the Colombian Caribbean cities of Cartagena, Barranquilla and Santa Marta have created parties for people of their working-class neighborhoods, in particular for the Afro-Colombian diaspora. The issue explores the musical migration from Africa to Colombia; how it made the Afro-Colombian’s diaspora aware of its origins and colonial past; and how champeta has resisted marginalisation and continuous to break with hegemonic powers.
We’re thrilled to be able to share an essay by Edna Martinez in this issue. Edna is an artist, DJ, and Curator of Music and Sonic Practices at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin.
Editors
Daniel Senior Durán & Mirelle van Tulder
Design and Riso printing
Mirelle van Tulder
20 Riso prints 42 x 59,4 cm (2013-2023)
When the library of the KIT (Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam closed in 2013, I was able to collect many catalogs and magazines that were about to be thrown away. I assembled a small library of my own that became source material for my work. In one of the magazines I found a poem titled “Being Part European,” written in 1974, by the Fijian poet Sam Simpson.
I immediately felt a strong connection to the poem, and could relate it to my own feelings of displacement and senses of belongings; an artist whose life started in Fiji, but born in Aotearoa (1988), to a Brazilian mother and a Dutch father, growing up in a privileged Northern European context; The Netherlands.
The magazines and catalogs I collected from the KIT became part over my ever-growing ‘ethnographic’ collection, of publications of private collections and institutional catalogs. Part of this ‘European upbringing’ (learning no ancestral knowledge whatsoever), resulted in the collecting of images that were constructed with an ethnographic-colonial European gaze that were used as a tool to advertise and categorize objects and people; a need to feed the European world’s cabinet of curiosities about distant and ‘primitive’ cultures. Catalogs were the only access I had to the ancestors.
In the compositions of Being Part European, I've replaced the categorizing captions of photos and objects with sentences from the poem. By giving a voice to the objects and people depicted in the photographs, I question the traditional use of captions. What stories do these objects whisper to each other, across the gutters of the compositions and through the walls of the shelves?
The compositions of photographs shot in their original contexts, to objects removed from their original location, floating in a vacuum of geometric levels of gray walls, emphasize the classification of "ethnographic”, previously imposed by the white man, rendering them inferior. The equalizing quality of the Riso prints reinforces the feeling that these images all seem the same, resulting in the loss of each of the images its value and identity. The displacement of the object thus becomes a way to talk about the displacement of the self.
Featured in Foam Magazine #62: M/OTHERLANDS, September 2022.
Riso prints are available at:
Foam Editions
Poetic Intervention, Foam Amsterdam 2023
Thursday 20 April 18:00
With an introduction by Wonu Veys, Curator Oceania at the Wereldmuseum (NL).
When the library of the KIT (Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam closed in 2013, I was able to collect many catalogs and magazines that were about to be thrown away. I assembled a small library of my own that became source material for my work. In one of the magazines I found a poem titled “Being Part European,” written in 1974, by the Fijian poet Sam Simpson.
I immediately felt a strong connection to the poem, and could relate it to my own feelings of displacement and senses of belongings; an artist whose life started in Fiji, but born in Aotearoa (1988), to a Brazilian mother and a Dutch father, growing up in a privileged Northern European context; The Netherlands.
The magazines and catalogs I collected from the KIT became part over my ever-growing ‘ethnographic’ collection, of publications of private collections and institutional catalogs. Part of this ‘European upbringing’ (learning no ancestral knowledge whatsoever), resulted in the collecting of images that were constructed with an ethnographic-colonial European gaze that were used as a tool to advertise and categorize objects and people; a need to feed the European world’s cabinet of curiosities about distant and ‘primitive’ cultures. Catalogs were the only access I had to the ancestors.
In the compositions of Being Part European, I've replaced the categorizing captions of photos and objects with sentences from the poem. By giving a voice to the objects and people depicted in the photographs, I question the traditional use of captions. What stories do these objects whisper to each other, across the gutters of the compositions and through the walls of the shelves?
The compositions of photographs shot in their original contexts, to objects removed from their original location, floating in a vacuum of geometric levels of gray walls, emphasize the classification of "ethnographic”, previously imposed by the white man, rendering them inferior. The equalizing quality of the Riso prints reinforces the feeling that these images all seem the same, resulting in the loss of each of the images its value and identity. The displacement of the object thus becomes a way to talk about the displacement of the self.
Featured in Foam Magazine #62: M/OTHERLANDS, September 2022.
Riso prints are available at:
Foam Editions
Poetic Intervention, Foam Amsterdam 2023
Thursday 20 April 18:00
With an introduction by Wonu Veys, Curator Oceania at the Wereldmuseum (NL).
A PLEA FOR THE RESTITUTION OF AN IRREPLACEABL CULTURAL HERITAGE TO THOSE WHO CREATED IT
An appeal by Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, former Director-General of UNESCO, 1978.
“The men and women of these countries have the right to recover these cultural assets which are part of their being.
They know, of course, that art is for the world and are aware of the fact that this art, which tells the story of their past and shows what they really are, does not speak to them alone. They are happy that men and women elsewhere can study and admire the work of their ancestors. They also realize that certain works of art have for too long played too intimate a part in the history of the country to which they were taken for the symbols linking them with that country to be denied, and for the roots they have put down to be severed.
These men and women who have been deprived of their cultural heritage therefore ask for the return of at least the art treasures which best represent their culture, which they feel are the most vital and whose absence causes them the greatest anguish.
The return of cultural assets to their countries of origin nevertheless continues to pose particular problems which cannot be solved simply by negociated agreements and spontaneous acts. It therefore seemed necessary to approach these problems for their own sake, examining both the principle underlying them and all their various aspects.”
Sold out
An appeal by Amadou-Mahtar M'Bow, former Director-General of UNESCO, 1978.
“The men and women of these countries have the right to recover these cultural assets which are part of their being.
They know, of course, that art is for the world and are aware of the fact that this art, which tells the story of their past and shows what they really are, does not speak to them alone. They are happy that men and women elsewhere can study and admire the work of their ancestors. They also realize that certain works of art have for too long played too intimate a part in the history of the country to which they were taken for the symbols linking them with that country to be denied, and for the roots they have put down to be severed.
These men and women who have been deprived of their cultural heritage therefore ask for the return of at least the art treasures which best represent their culture, which they feel are the most vital and whose absence causes them the greatest anguish.
The return of cultural assets to their countries of origin nevertheless continues to pose particular problems which cannot be solved simply by negociated agreements and spontaneous acts. It therefore seemed necessary to approach these problems for their own sake, examining both the principle underlying them and all their various aspects.”
Sold out