Work in progress. Sin Miedu is a young foundation: the brand, this site and the first workshop are being built right now. What you read here is true today and will grow.
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Pick up the pieces. Find the whole story.

Sin Miedu helps people with Dutch Caribbean roots uncover their family history and put it back together through storytelling, technology, workshops and personal leadership. Much of that history was never told. We help you find it, understand it, and make something new with it.

See the first workshop

Sin Miedu is a foundation with Caribbean roots, started by the studio Ngrane in Amsterdam. Our first programme starts in November 2026.

Collage of archive photographs, prints and paper scraps from the Dutch Caribbean: a mother holding her baby in 1969 at the centre, portraits of men and women from the 1860s to today, strikers with signs, salt workers, a fort tower, ships and harbour views, with labels reading 1 Juli 1863, Emancipatie, 30 mei 1969 and Kòrsou.

What we do. Four ways.

Many of us grew up with a history that was half told. Sin Miedu helps people from the Dutch Caribbean diaspora find the missing pieces, understand them, and make something new with them. We work with archives and new technology, with facilitators and coaches, and with each other.

A page from a nineteenth-century Curaçao birth register: ruled columns headed with date, name of the person reporting, date of birth and sex, filled in by hand in brown ink.

Educate

Open up the history of the six islands and their people (the documents, the languages, the names) so that it can be found and understood.

A woman in a green dress presents her family history to a group of adults; behind her a projected slide shows an old family photo next to a hand-drawn family tree, and a man in the audience raises his hand.

Empower

Healing, coaching and personal leadership, so that carrying a heavy history becomes a source of strength instead of silence.

Wireframe of the Roots Discovery research tool: a search bar above a family tree of seven cards across three generations, two of them dashed because they are only suggested, and a progress bar tracking how far back the research has reached towards 1863.

Innovate

Tools that make research and storytelling possible for everyone: AI-assisted archive search, image and film, a living digital archive.

Six people standing shoulder to shoulder in front of a screen at a Sin Miedu workshop evening in Amsterdam.

Connect

Bring people together across families, islands, generations and the ocean between the Caribbean and the Netherlands.

We live between

The islands are places where opposite things sit side by side and both are true. Our work does not choose one. It holds both.

Picking up the pieces

Our past is not one broken vase. It is many: Indigenous, African, Sephardic, European, Latin American. All of it fused into the people and the languages of the islands. Each of those vases was broken at some point, and the pieces were scattered across families, six islands and two continents.

Sin Miedu picks those pieces up and glues them back together. In the Japanese craft of kintsugi, a broken bowl is repaired with gold so that the cracks become the most beautiful part. That is how we look at our history: the fractures are not hidden. They show, and they are ours.

What comes out of the repair is not the old vase. It is something new, made of everything we were.

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One vase made of four different vessels: Indigenous Caribbean earthenware, dark West African pottery, Sephardic majolica with pomegranates and Dutch Delft blue, joined with visible gold seams.
Sin MieduPapiamentu · without fear

Sin means without. Miedu means fear. The name is Papiamentu, the language of Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao, spelled with a u the Curaçao way, and it is meant for all six islands.

The fear we mean is not a lack of courage. It is what a hard history leaves behind: not knowing what the records will say, not wanting to reopen what a grandmother closed, not feeling fully at home on either side of the ocean. Sin Miedu means we are allowed to look. Set that fear aside, gently, and what remains is the whole story, and the people who are ready to tell it.

Our logo is designed as a mosaic: one word made of many letterforms, glued together with visible seams.

Four members of a family sitting close together outdoors at dusk under a string of lights: an older woman in a patterned shawl, a man with his arm around her shoulders, a young woman with braids leaning against him holding a mug, and a teenage boy. The sky behind them runs from deep purple down to terracotta at the horizon.
One face split down the middle by a crack: on the left, an enslaved ancestor in an archival black-and-white photograph; on the right, a young Caribbean woman today, in colour.

Roots Voice Legacy. Our first workshop.

Our first programme: three workshops over three months for around twenty participants with Dutch Caribbean roots. Each person arrives with the names, photographs and stories their family has kept, and leaves with a personal artifact: a piece of their history made visible.

Day 1 · RootsFri 13 Nov09:30 – 17:00
Day 2 · VoiceFri 4 Dec10:00 – 17:00
Day 3 · LegacyFri 29 Jan10:00 – evening
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Who we are. An initiative of Ngrane.

Sin Miedu is an initiative of Ngrane, a design and technology studio in Amsterdam founded by Stephen Garcia and David van Delden, who was born and raised in Curaçao. Ngrane works on strategy, branding, digital products and film for clients in the Netherlands and the Caribbean.

Sin Miedu is where that work meets home. It is set up as an independent foundation with its own team: facilitators, coaches, designers and makers, most of them from the Dutch Caribbean diaspora.

ngrane.com

Collage of Ngrane at work: team portraits, a workshop with sticky notes, two people working together at a desk, a presentation, a map of the island, and products the studio made, including an audio tour app, an AI assistant, a web shop and dashboards, with labels reading Amsterdam and Kòrsou.