Dreaming Above the Atlantic

52 portraits of 52 people from Suriname and Curaçao living in Amsterdam.

Dreaming Above the Atlantic is a photographic portrait and interview project bringing together 52 people from Curaçao and Suriname living in Amsterdam. Developed through 52 encounters over the course of a year, the project considers migration, cultural memory and belonging through the experiences of Caribbean people making lives in the Netherlands.

Thierry moved from Curaçao to the Netherlands at the age of fourteen. Over time, migration produced an increasing distance from the people, language and cultural references through which he had understood home. The project began years later with an unexpected encounter in an Amsterdam restaurant. A stranger reminded Thierry of his mother; the recognition prompted a request to make his portrait, followed by a conversation that opened onto questions of family, displacement and cultural memory.

That encounter became the beginning of a wider photographic inquiry.

Through portraiture and conversation, Thierry began meeting people from Curaçao and Suriname across different generations, professions and cultural backgrounds. Their experiences complicated any singular understanding of Caribbean identity or migration. Conversations moved between home and departure, ambition and displacement, cultural inheritance and the different ways people negotiate belonging between the Caribbean and the Netherlands.

Each portrait was accompanied by an interview and published over the course of a year. Image and conversation therefore developed together: the photograph offered one form of encounter, while language created another space through which participants could articulate experiences that a portrait alone could not contain.

The project also marked an early inquiry into the relationship between photography and self-understanding within Thierry’s practice. What began as an attempt to reconnect with a cultural history from which he had become distanced gradually became a way of questioning how identity is formed through encounters with others. The people photographed were not simply illustrations of a shared Caribbean identity; their differences revealed the limits of treating diaspora as a singular experience.

Seen from the perspective of Thierry’s later work, Dreaming Above the Atlantic introduces questions that continue throughout his practice: how migration alters relationships to home; how portraiture can create encounters between individual and collective memory; and how photographs and spoken accounts can exist alongside one another without either becoming a complete account of a person.

The Atlantic within the project is therefore both geographical and relational: the distance between places, generations and memories, but also the space across which connections continue to be made.