Kitty Zijlmans, Art’s agency on contemporary Curaçao: Tirzo Martha’s “Blijf maar plakken” and the Instituto Buena Bista  This presentation will give an example of how a contemporary artwork – or rather art practice – can help to forge a sustainable community in the Caribbean ‘bottom up’, with an outreach to its diaspora. The work in question is Curaçaon artist, Tirzo Martha’s art project “Blijf maar plakken” (translated literally as “just keep adding on”, but with a further connotation which will be clarified). Except for this project’s complicity with Curaçao’s social complexity and politics, it stretches out beyond being an art practice into becoming a social intervention. The art project is also framed by the Instituto Buena Bista (IBB), founded in 2006 at the initiative of artists David Bade and Tirzo Martha, in close association with the art historian Nancy Hoffmann. The IBB can briefly be described as a combination of an institute for the pre-academic training of talented Curaçao youngsters aged between 14 and 24, as well as a laboratory for contemporary art, complete with an artist-in-residence post. A former colony of the Netherlands, in 2010 Curaçao became an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands and its citizens have Dutch nationality. The IBB strives to enrol talented young Curacao youngsters in Dutch art schools or art academies which would allow them to develop their recently discovered talent further. In the periphery of the ‘big’ art world, the IBB is a powerhouse in its own right, embedded in the local, regional and the international art world. The art project “Blijf maar plakken” connects local culture and local habits with the larger frame of social groups, hierarchies, institutions and power relations on Curaçao on the one hand, and the Netherlands, its colonial past and postcolonial presence, on the other. IBB is stimulated by the urgency to create a specific cultural ecology in the mutual interaction between groups of people, their culture and environment. This concerns the immediate environment just as much as the processes of globalisation in which we all now participate, and art is its agent. Some images, sounds or other media used in the following presentation are subject to copyright restrictions that prevent them being shown. In order to provide a complete record of the conference, these items have been blurred or silenced. Should we obtain permission to use these images, sounds and other media in the future the films will be updated.