superhero

Flying through The Netherlands on a daily basis. Wendeline Flores (1989) doesn't limit herself to the Tropenmuseum, but she works for 4 museums. She visits one of the 4 or sometimes even two in a day. This includes the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Africa museum in Berg en Dal, the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden and she also works together with the World Museum in Rotterdam.

She knows what she wants. When Wendeline was an intern at the Tropenmuseum during her Bachelor of History at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, she already knew she wanted to work there. Good things take time, they say. But her dream came true. Currently, she is the curator in Caribbean Region and Colonial History of the National Museum of World Cultures.

In fact, if you spend time with this cheerful woman during working hours, you will find out her job exists out of a lot of different tasks. For example researching, looking at objects, writing texts and collaborating on exhibitions with artists, which she talks about with a lot of passion.

The most valuable things in her work are the research and the challenge of transferring to a large public. She is mostly specialized in long-distance nationalism in journals by Antillean and Surinamese student migrants in the Netherlands (1950-1975). Next to that, the present of the slavery past, is an exhibition that she is passionate about.

Wendeline could be considered the core of the content in the museum exhibition. With her knowledge about Colonial History, you feel the message and information of an artwork have more to say to the public. She is always in exchange with the artist. The works presented in the museum are a combination of the content she brings and a translation of an artists, which creates magical and inspirational content.
It is important to her that she has different interfaces with people, and they teach her all kinds of things. ‘’You learn every day’’, she says, which could be considered her motto while working.

She always looks at the context of the art critically and tries to represent all communities and aspects of the subject. Words that typically fit in those situations are: ‘’Well this community thinks like that or history shows that actually…”. She is the one that will always start the difficult conversation. And that it is difficult, is because it is worth having.
She comes across pure and honest in all her words and has only the best intentions. She describes the development of the museums and exhibitions herself like: “In fact, you also have to become aware that you are doing certain things. The museum also comes from afar and actually develops further and further every day.”

Listening to her, talking so conscious about the past and so hopeful for the future, makes her a person to be really inspired from. An activist, a historian, an educator. She is someone special, who adds a lot to the knowledge and art in this country. She fights every day to make the world and society we live in a little bit a better place, flying between different museums of the Netherlands every day, just like a superhero.