Sharelly Emanuelson materializes her observations and research  related to tradition, heritage, emotions, and practices within our everyday Caribbean lives. Through filmmaking, video, installations, photography, and mixed media she gets to new understandings and methods that create knowledge production through art.

Below a selection of her works

Capitalism and global politics are known factors that resulted in climate change significantly impacting all islands where environmental disasters are rapidly increasing. The work "Siudadanos," a 2-channel audiovisual installation, is characterized by a multimodal assemblage of Emanuelson's recordings where she lets us immerse in images of St. Maarten after Hurricane Gonzalo (2014). "Siudadanos" pours you with voices, sounds of wind & sea, miscellaneous ambient noise, singing birds, the barking of neighbourhood dogs, and different music genres. Emanuelson's first-hand interviews, sounds & video recordings offer an appreciation of life on St. Maarten and explore the various reasons for divergence, the residue of the colonial era, and the subsequent period of hyper-industrialization in the Caribbean. In recognizing the ever-changing plurality of the population of the islands, she shares contemplative thoughts of islanders on provoking ideas around national unity within a continuously changing and growing population on the Dutch side.

Siudadanos

During exhibition “Nexus”

MOCA, Taipei, 2023

For 2022, Emanuelson photographed the theme of Sustainability in the Netherlands and the six Dutch Caribbean islands: Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, St. Eustatius, and St. Maarten.

What does sustainability look like in the Netherlands and the six Dutch Caribbean islands? Sharelly Emanuelson explored the relationship between humans and their environment in light of climate change and the impact of everyday actions on it. Emanuelson grouped the photographs in the exhibition around various themes in which human activities are always central. The photographs show how people deal differently with water management, erosion, and waste disposal. These consequences are large or small, temporary or permanent.

“Tene”

During Document Nederland

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2023

En Mi País” is a video installation, Framed as 1 tour with many guides, a voice leads you on, instructing you to keep moving along this imaginary excursion. The characters pace up and down when giving their story, in which the rhetoric and repetitive speech pattern reminiscent of well-rehearsed tours mingled with personal anecdotes of locals to provide commentary on Aruba and on Main Street, which has gone through a rise and decline of prosperity in part as a result of tourism.

This installation plays with the idea that important events are discussed at the table. Because traditions such as eating together with the family at the table in Aruba are changing, I have worked with a projected ‘tour guide’, which through a voice-over reflects changing norms and values in the Caribbean, such as the presence of old and the rise of new capitalist infractures, cultural loss of memory and social problems such as such as addiction and violence. En Mi Pais invited viewers to reflect on questions such as What is the real value if the information and knowledge of what one’s country has to offer merely becomes a repeating dictation and not a self-awareness or understanding of context and cause and effect? Who is investigating, documenting, narrating and showing our multiple selves and social/human needs?

En Mi Pais

Stedelijk Schiedam, Rotterdam, 2020