How to See the Spots of Der Leopard by Quinsy Gario

In the seventeenth century Duke Jacob Kettler of the Duchy of Courland, a Polish-Lithuanian vasal state in an area that is today western Latvia, commissioned several ships to participate in the violent European project of colonial expansion and resource extraction. 
In 1645, one of those ships, De Hoop (The Hope) was spotted off the French coast of Saint Martin/Sint Maarten, which was then a joint Dutch–French colony. The ship had been built in Zaandam, a Dutch city, and sailed under Dutch command from Amsterdam to the Grain Coast (present-day Liberia) for grain, then to the Caribbean for timber, and then back to Europe. 
In 1653, the ship Der Leopard (The Leopard), also under Dutch command, sailed from Amsterdam to Guinea, where abducted and chained Africans were forced onto it. It then sailed to Martinique, where our ancestors were sold and enslaved to work sugar plantations established on the French colony by Dutch people, who had previously been expelled from Brazil by the Portuguese. 
From 1654–1659, the Duchy of Courland had a colony on the island of Tobago, currently part of Trinidad and Tobago, after it had been a Dutch, French, and British colony. Duke Jacob Kettler had heard of the island in the Dutch city of Middelburg, where he was told about the difficulty in colonizing the island for the Dutch Republic. 
In 2013, a statue was erected for Duke Jacob Kettler in Kuldiga, Latvia. During his reign, Kuldiga was the seat of his power and was called Goldingen, “the Golden City” in Baltic German, which was the ethnicity and language of the ruling class.
In 2020, Quinsy and Jörgen Gario, who are from Sint Maarten, a former Dutch colony that in 2010 became a country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, were invited to perform in Kuldiga. 

Words and sounds by Jörgen Gario, words and scenography by Quinsy Gario, camera by Adele Bea Cipste, Inga Lāce, and Māra Žeikare, edit by Quinsy Gario, production by Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Ieva Astahovska, Margaret Tali, Jörgen Gario, and Quinsy Gario, supported by The Mondrian Fund, with special thanks to Ilya Lensky, Jews in Latvia Museum; Māra Zālīte, Pētera Putniņa kokļu darbnīca. For all who were taken and all of us who survive. 

Quinsy Gario is a visual and performance artist from the Caribbean islands that have Dutch colonization in common.