Suriname — the land that carries stories

Suriname — the land that carries stories is a digital exhibition in Dutch. It starts with the oldest traces of habitation on the Sipaliwini savanna and ends with the 2025 elections and land rights in 2026. The river is the motif: on the opening picture, an aerial photo of the Suriname River at Atjoni, the country's rivers slowly draw themselves across the photo.

The route has eight chapters, each with its own form. A monumental photo for the time before the colonial maps. An eighteenth-century plantation map you can zoom into, asking who is not on it. Source fragments on slavery, resistance and abolition: a planters' letter from 1842 asking for compensation, and Anton de Kom on the 21 cannon shots of 1 July 1863. A diptych of Hindostani and Javanese migration with a table of all migration flows. A picture essay around the photographs of Augusta Curiel. The year 1975 in large type, with those for and against. For the December murders, the fifteen names, and three columns that separate what is established, what a court ruled and what is an interpretation. The last chapter has figures with a reference date and threads back into the rest of the route.

The timeline holds 84 events with theme filters, a shareable link per event and a plain text list. The present-day map is drawn from Natural Earth and OpenStreetMap, with 14 places and a historical map from 1737 as a separate layer. Under 'What an object keeps' are six real objects from public collections, such as a letter of manumission from 1849 and a bill of three hundred guilders paid to a slave owner in 1863. Each object also says what we do not know.

All 43 pictures come from Wikimedia Commons and collections such as the Rijksmuseum, the Nationaal Archief, KITLV and the Wereldmuseum. The licence was checked per file: public domain, CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA. Every colonial picture says who made it and for whom. There are 111 sources, searchable in the colophon, with a list of what could not be verified. The typefaces are Newsreader, Atkinson Hyperlegible Next and IBM Plex Mono, all under the Open Font License. Motion and text size can be set, the content works without JavaScript and the page prints. Built with Vite, without a framework, with Claude Code as programming assistant. Unit tests check that every claim has a source and every picture a permitted licence; end-to-end tests walk through the exhibition in Chromium, Firefox, WebKit and on a phone, under this site's security policy.