Emanuelson’s work grew out of the lived experiences and inherited realities of being born and raised in the Dutch Caribbean. When she speaks about “inherited realities,” she refers to the social and political systems that come from the colonial past legacies of slavery, migration, and the diverse communities that shape the islands today. These histories remain present in daily life, influencing how people live, speak, move, and remember.

She uses her own experiences, observations, and memories as a starting point. Early in her practice she turned to documentary film and personal archives because she wanted to see and share Caribbean stories from the inside, rather than through stereotypes or outsider perspectives. Over time, she expanded into installations, performances, and research-based projects to create more immersive and layered experiences.

Between 2010 and 2024, her work focused on themes central to life in the Caribbean: migration, tourism, climate change, belonging, and resistance. For her, these topics are deeply connected. They shape landscapes, families, choices, and identities. She is interested in how identities change over time, how cultural knowledge is passed down without being written, and how stories survive even when official histories overlook them.

Her works often bring together many voices, sounds, images, and fragments. They are messy, multilingual, rhythmic, and human reflecting the communities they come from. She sees each project as a meeting point between personal memory and collective experience. By combining image-making, research, and storytelling, she creates spaces where viewers can feel the layers of Caribbean life rather than receive a simplified version of it.

Across her films and installations, she questions narratives that have been repeated for too long narratives often created from outside the region. She aims to open space for different perspectives, allowing viewers to reconsider what they know and how history shapes us all. She does not seek one single truth, but a place where multiple truths can coexist.

With her solo exhibition “Between a Dance and Sitting in a Chair” and the works she created up to 2024, she closed an important chapter. Those years were about understanding, questioning, and naming what she was experiencing in both the Caribbean and the Netherlands. They formed the foundation for where she is heading next.

From 2025 onward, she continues to explore how identity, culture, and everyday practices shift in a global world. She relies on the openness and adaptability embedded in Caribbean ways of seeing and being to shape her evolving artistic practice and imagine what lies ahead. In her new body of work, she is expanding her installation, film, and photographic practice and beginning to experiment with textiles, drawing, theatrical dramaturgy, and visual ethnography. These mediums allow for tactility, gesture, and immediacy; they let her think through the body as much as through artistic research. Ethnography remains an important part of her process, grounded in careful observation and listening to the streets, to people’s lived experiences across different worlds, and to the subtle textures of place. Her aim is to share the richness and complexity of Caribbean life not as one fixed story, but as a constellation of many stories, always growing, shifting, and alive.

Working across film, photography, and installation, her practice draws on everyday objects, gestures, and traditions that form part of cultural heritage vernacular materials, rituals, domestic items, and fragments of the landscape. By placing these elements in new configurations, she encourages viewers to see them not only as familiar things, but as carriers of history, memory, and meaning. The familiarity of these materials becomes a bridge for viewers: it reflects daily life while creating space to reflect on identity, belonging, and the stories embedded within ordinary objects. Rather than illustrating narratives directly, she lets the materials themselves the object, the gesture, the trace activate memories, emotions, and new understandings.

Her installations often work like poetic groupings: simple forms that hold layered experiences of memory, migration, and place. Through this approach, she invites viewers to slow down, look closely, and connect with the deeper histories embedded in the everyday.