English: Text: Bida di hende ta manera piñata. Yen di sorpresa.
Translation: Life of people is like a piñata. Full of surprises.
Elis Juliana is Curaçao's most remarkable and best-known cultural expert. He has been collecting, documenting and presenting the culture of Curaçao in many different ways. In doing so, he was fully alive to his native language, rhythm, oral traditions. spirituality, the history and resistance of slavery, games, eroticism and dealing with death.
Juliana began as an artist and turned out to be a versatile artist, a poet, narrator, sculptor and writer. He soon started moving on the path of research into native culture. Juliana's great merit is that he has systematically documented our culture from the years before and during the modernization in the twentieth century. He was then joined by Father Paul Brenneker. They collected an irreplaceable wealth of information. It comprises not only an abundance of data from oral history, but also may objects, as a witness of the material cultural heritage.
In the course of years, Elis Juliana has received several prizes as a token of acknowledgement for his work. In 2013 Elis also received an honorary doctorate from the University.
Elis Juliana himself will be grateful to us, if we carry on his work and continue substantating the Curaçao identity.
(Text on a plaquette next to the portrait)