Buses in Paramaribo are privately operated, mostly by Hindustani owners. The buses are small, but still pack around 30 people. They are extensively decorated, mostly with movie heroes, crazy lettering, beautiful women, pop stars, slogans, patterns. In terms of themes, Bollywood seems to dominate the landscape.

The 2009 / 2010 SPAN project organised activities to stimulate conversation about contemporary art and visual culture in Suriname, about art practice in a particular location at a particular time. This was developed through meetings, a book, an exhibition, and a blog.

This blog post reports about a meeting between contemporary artists, street sign painters who paint advertisements on walls and bus painters. It mentions that “bus painters concentrate on stars and heroes, emblems of beauty, to attract people.” In itself that seems not too have changed that much since then, but an apparent change is the absence of hand painted imagery on buses. Most, if not all decoration is done using digital images, photo’s, computer designed typography, printed on self adhesive supports which are applied to the vehicle.

Mister Radjen operates a bus between Knuffelsgracht / Heiligenweg and Kwatta. His car is titled ‘Kwatta Pasie‘. The word ‘pasie’ being a brilliant mongrel between ‘passie’ the Dutch word for ‘passion’ and ‘pasi’ the Sranan word for road, or passage. I haven’t asked if this is a deliberate word play.
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IKEA is a swedish furniture company.
IEKA is a shop voor building materials in Paramaribo.
Starbucks is an american coffee company.
St*rbucks is a shop for windows, doors and lighting in Paramaribo.
HEMA is a dutch grocery store.
HEMA is a surinamese chinese restaurant in Paramaribo.

I am in Paramaribo to look at how different languages are used. I am particularly interested in the relation between Dutch, being the national language, and Sranan which is the language most people speak. The goal is to look at comparative cases that will help to develop new methodologies for working in between language groups in Brussels, as in for example the previous language projects Parlez-vous Saint-Gillois? and De Schaarbeekse taal. As part of my five week stay, I roam the city to note and photograph language in public space. How is language choice, variation and diversity at play in official announcements, in commercial and individual notes, in how people speak to each other?

The Algemeen Bureau voor de Statistiek, or ABS (General Office for Statistics) has its headquarters on the Klipstenenstraat 5 in Paramaribo. A window display visualises the workflow logics of the ABS, see the image above.
In the middle we find the logo of the ABS surrounded by the national colours of Suriname. In the left green column we have the ‘data providers’ (government, enterprises and households). The ABS inquires (enquete), their ‘responses’ are outputted to the square Suriname.
The fallen ‘distribution’ arrow, was presumably meant to indicate that information is distributed to the parties mentioned in the right hand green column, the ‘data users’ (students, government, unions, enterprises, individuals, organisations) Their wishes are uttered to the Suriname square, critique is funneled back to ABS, which completes the circle.
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