Atlantic Transformerz: Faidherbe

About the Photographer

Landvreugd, Charl

Surinamer-Dutch, b. 1971

Suriname-born and Dutch-raised, Charl Landvreugd’s Atlantic Transformerz project explores the diversity of Blackness. Landvreugd considers the plurality of black color and experience--specifically that of the African diaspora--celebrated and culturally represented differently in different regions, yet understood to be the same. He visualizes the different models of the African diaspora by situating his project on the four continents around the Atlantic Ocean where the slave trade took place: New York, USA, Moengo, Suriname, Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Dakar, Senegal, the location of Landvreugd’s last part of the project, Atlantic Transformerz: Faidherbe. Standing above the city of Dakar, on the top of the Hotel Faidherbe, named after the French general and colonial governor of Senegal, the subject, wearing the mask of the science-fiction hero, Optimus Prime, finds himself in his past, present, and future. Landvreugd studied African Diaspora Aesthetics in Continental Europe at Goldsmiths College in London and later as a Fulbright Fellow at Columbia University in New York City.