Quincy Gario

The research that Quincy Gario will conduct as part of the Fellowship programme will look at footage that his uncle shot of the first Caribbean Carnival in the Netherlands in 1983 in Utrecht. The video is fascinating and critically engages with its moment in time. During the research fellowship he will engage, through the production of new work, with the materiality of the city of Utrecht in the 1980’s as presented through this Super 8 footage and juxtapose that with the artistic material produced in the city during the signing of the Peace of Utrecht.

Quinsy Gario is a performance poet and visual artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. His work centers on decolonial remembering and unsettling institutional and interpersonal normalizations of colonial practices. Gario’s most well-known work, Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012), sought to denormalize the racist Dutch figure and practice of Zwarte Piet (Black Pete). His current practice attempts to delink from gendered and Westernized artistic genealogies by working together with his family and friends. He has an academic background from Utrecht University in media studies, gender studies and postcolonial studies and is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research program of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague.