Suiker Droom [Sugar Dream]
2025 | 4K | 2-Channel | 16:9 | No Audio | 2 Hours per Screen
A Commissioned two-channel video installation for the Douane Laboratorium, Amsterdam. The lab was created in the late 19th century for the research, analysis and taxation of sugar: This project explores the complex and difficult history of that sugar and how the Douane Lab came to be.
Combining 3 hours of animation and tilt-shift videography: A tug boat dreams a dream so deep that it reaches through space and time, witnessing a collective memory of mis-adventure, exploration, exploitation, suikerriet [sugarcane] and suikerverdriet [sugar sorrow].
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Screen 1 shows the dream of the tug boat and access to a collective consciousness between the 17th to 20th century. This dream, animated as digital sugar granules, contains over 650 short animations made from archival drawings, images, and photographs with a run time of over 2 hours. It unfolds in four parts over hundreds of years.
First, the early sea voyages of the 16th and 17th centuries from The Netherlands to the tropics on either side of the globe; then to the creation of sugar plantations in Java, Suriname, and Brazil, where the VOC’s control, privatisation and slavery took hold from the 17th to 18th century; then the move into industrialisation between the 18th and 19th century, where mechanisation begins to replace labour, sail gives way to steam, and sugar production migrates back to the Netherlands;
and finally, the cargo’s arrival at the Douane Lab in the 19th to 20th century, where the original laboratory emerges from the archives and shows the modernisation of sugar analysis over time.
Screen 2 sees the world through the eyes of this 19th century tug boat being brought to life, The Netherlands is seen as modern, innovative and rich but rendered only in miniature models. The tug boat develops from a schematic, into a toy, then a model. As it grows, fragments of memory appear as granular animations. The more real the boat becomes real, the deeper it's dream of reality grows.
Direction, Editing, Animation-
christopher tym
Installed and documented at
Douane Laboratorium, Amsterdam
Thank you-
Margriet Kruyver
Martin Grootenboer
Mariken Overdijk
Rietwood Stichting
© christopher tym 2025
