“My greatest inspirations are the stories of ghosts, mysteries of nature told by the members of my community as well as experiences of magic. This is the foundation of everything I do in my artistic career and the driving force behind my search for Black identity beyond the scope of coloniality we have been taught to confine ourselves to.”
Lisandro Suriel is a photographer born and raised in the Caribbean, in Saint Martin. He also specialized in directing and producing visual concepts for film and photographic production. He currently lives in Rotterdam. He earned his Bachelor's degree in Photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and received his Master's degree in Artistic Research at the University of Amsterdam.
Lisandro Suriel's work has been published worldwide and featured in numerous exhibitions, most recently at Photo Basel and the 6th edition of Photo Vogue Festival Reframing history in Milan where he was the recipient of the Photo Vogue / Studio RM Prize. In 2021, he was selected by FOAM magazine's Talent issue as one of 20 outstanding photographers and featured his artwork Black Magic in a digital exhibition. In 2022, Foreign Agent prensented the Jumbee Sea, Lisandro Suriel's first solo exhibition at the gallery.
Through his work, he seeks to disengage the Black narratives from a one-dimensional colonial history, solely based on exploitation and slavery. According to him, an essential part of his history and identity is found in immateriality which he calls the Black Imagination. Therefore, Suriel explores oral traditional stories and the Black subconscious as a means of reconfiguring collective memory and reclaiming history.