Disco Diaspora ★ Sranan Rewind ♫

Sat 28.0221:30

Disco Diaspora ★ Sranan Rewind
28.02.2026 @ mezrab

Disco Diaspora is back on Saturday, February 28, at Mezrab, presenting Sranan Rewind.
Curated by 1.06 Music Library with additional selections by Jumanne (Pokoemonster), this
audiovisual dance party brings together music videos from the Surinamese and Surinamese
Dutch archive, tracing its evolution from the 1970s to today.

Get ready to dance the night away, celebrating the beats, the visuals, and the energy of
Surinamese culture, in a unique dance party you won’t forget.

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Surinamese Dutch people form one of largest migrant group and diaspora in the
Netherlands. Following Suriname’s independence from the Netherlands in 1975, a
significant wave of migration took place, bringing many Surinamese to the former colonial
metropole.

This migration carried with it a diverse, vibrant, and historically layered transatlantic music
culture that has since deeply influenced Dutch popular media and cultural imagination.
Growing up in the Netherlands, it is difficult not to be shaped by the rooted presence of
these musical traditions in popular media as well as through private and semi-public forms
of dissemination. From archival recordings emerging from the Bijlmer to mainstream
television and popular music platforms, the variety of Surinamese Dutch artists and
communities have played a crucial role in shaping the Dutch entertainment industry and its
soundscape.

Sranan Rewind pays tribute to this rich history and to what it reveals not only about the
Netherlands, but also about the relationship between the diaspora and the multi-ethnic
homeland. This program features music videos made in the Netherlands and in Suriname,
reflecting contributions from across Creole, Hindustani, Indigenous, Javanese, and Chinese
Surinamese communities.

By bringing together archival material that has often been disseminated across fragmented
platforms, it places emphasis on the cultural importance and relevance of the Surinamese-
Dutch archive for the Netherlands and beyond. It offers a different view of history, one that
is not marginal, but rooted in a collective present and in future sonic and decolonial
imaginaries.

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Disco Diaspora: Sranan Rewind is curated by 1.06 Music Library and Jumanne
(Pokoemonster) and serves as Other Futures Festival’s lead-up programming.

1.06 Music Library is an Amsterdam-based archive of curated vinyl and CDs, run by
Christiana Johnson and Leslie Roosblad. The library exists to stimulate, educate, and inspire
curious minds through music in all its forms, across genres, eras, and geographies, with
physical sound carriers as its foundation. Together, they also perform as DRKNGHTS,
bringing over 12+ years of experience to the dance floor, with sets played at De School
(Amsterdam), Perron (Rotterdam), and Macadam (Nantes).

Jumanne (Thomas Gesthuizen) is a DJ and music researcher with a background in African
Studies. He founded Africanhiphop.com in 1997, pioneering global exposure of urban
African music. Through radio shows on VPRO, FunX, Red Light Radio, and Echo Box, and his
Afro Cosmic Club mixes, he connects African and diasporic sounds from the 1980s and ‘90s.
He is also half of Pokoemonster, an archive of Surinamese and former Dutch Caribbean
music, and co-creator of the Suriname Disco Scant mixes.

Disco Diaspora is the lead-up programming of Other Futures Festival bringing a series of
cinematic, immersive parties that turn the dance floor into a playground of visual, sonic, and
archival exploration. Each iteration moves across geographies and eras to trace the
aesthetics of diasporic expression through music, image, and movement, with a focus on
music video clips. This concept was developed in 2018 by artistic director Katayoun Arian.