Performance poet and artist from Curaçao and St. Maarten. His artistic work centers on decolonial remembering and instituting otherwise. He is currently pursuing a PhD at the VU Amsterdam on ethnographic collections and contemporary art engagements as part of the Pressing Matters research project. Gario did his undergraduate studies in theater, film and television studies and completed minors in gender studies and postcolonial studies at the Utrecht University and he is a graduate of the Master Artistic Research of the Royal Academy of Art The Hague. He is a 2017 Humanity in Action Detroit Fellow, 2017/2018 BAK Fellow, 2019/2020 APASS alumnus and a 2020/2021 Sandberg Institute Critical Studies Fellow. He is a member of the collective Family Connection, established in 2005 by his mother Glenda Martinus and her sister. With the collective Gario has researched and presented work on resistance, recovery and refusal as practiced through history by the racially oppressed on the Caribbean islands that have continued Dutch colonization in common. Previous presentations of the collective centered on fugitivity through various means. Gario’s most well-known work is Zwarte Piet Is Racisme (2011–2012) which ushered in a second Dutch anti-racism wave. Gario received among others the Royal Academy Master Thesis Prize 2017, the Black Excellence Award 2016, the Amsterdam Fringe Festival Silver Award 2015, The Kerwin Award 2014 and the Hollandse Nieuwe Theatermakers Prize 2011. His work has been shown in among other places Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), MACBA (Barcelona), Latvian National Museum of Art (Riga), Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), MHKA (Antwerp), TENT (Rotterdam) and Göteborgs Konsthall (Gothenburg).