Sonje means remember

I made a quick trip to Port-au-Prince last week to catch the opening of Daniel Morel's show of the photographs he took on the day of the earthquake, five years ago on January 12, 2010. It was an entirely unique event in my experience of the Haitian art world. He displayed the photographs in the Grand Rue inner-city neighborhood where he took them, so that the primary audience for the show was the same people who appear in the images. The are the subjects, or the friends and neighbors of those seen running, panicked, through the streets, in the pictures. Furthermore his assistants and docents are all drawn from the community, making it entirely a neighborhood affair. It was extremely moving, and I remarked at the time that I have never seen visitors to any Chelsea gallery stare with such intensity at the images on the wall.

I hope to post an interview with Daniel Morel about the show soon. At the moment I have a piece about it running on the BBC's "From Our Own Correspondent." You can listen to it online here, or catch on the BBC World Service wherever and whenever they run the program.

Daniel, in front of his exhibition.

ps: Anyone still having trouble with the link, as pointed out by phuzz in the comments, can cut / paste this: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04ykk4w

Ghetto Biennale the Third! Calling all artists...

As if I needed any more indications of the lightning passage of time, my dear friend Leah Gordon wrote recently to remind me that the THIRD ghetto biennale is imminent. For those of you have been living in a hole in the ground for the last four years, the ghetto biennale of Port au Prince, Haiti is an art extravaganza that now rivals Venice's in terms of prestige, aura and above all, ambiance. It is held on the campus of the sculptors of the Grand Rue, about whom I have written extensively. Here, in late November, going into December, successful artist applicants from around the globe will gather to make art amidst the ruins of what, pre-Earthquake, was an impoverished but bustling business district at the heart of teeming Port au Prince. Think of it, as Leah once put it, as an artist's residency in a shantytown. All work is produced, completed and shared on-site.

Screening a completed film project at the 2011 Ghetto biennale.
Photos: courtesy Leah Gordon

The deadline for proposals is June 23rd at midnight. I'm not sure if that is Port au Prince or Greenwich Mean Time. I urge you to apply yourself. For more information visit ghettobiennale.com.

The Grand Rue after the earthquake

Georgia Popplewell visits the Grand Rue, so recently the site of the Ghetto Biennale.

Tragedy in the Grand Rue

It seems almost impossible to contemplate that only two months ago I was in Haiti to write about the Ghetto Biennale, an international art event whose very existence I interpreted as representing a moment of comparative optimism for the country. My various blog postings on that brilliant spectacle, with links to some of the media outlets I covered the story for, are HERE.

The Grand Rue was exactly the kind of neighborhood worst hit by Haiti's ongoing series of earthquakes, a place dense with shoddy cinderblock construction, wholly ignorant of building codes. Building after building sprouted ersatz bits and extensions, tacked on into a dense cement patchwork, to house expanding families and country people driven to the city by the neo-liberal plan's near-total undermining of the agricultural sector. It was a claustrophic experience to walk this warren of nerve-wracking construction even without the most distant thought of hurricane or earthquake in one's mind.

BEFORE photo: Chantal Regnault

Is it good news, or bad news, that "only" one of the four Grand Rue artists was killed last week? Louco, whose portrait is just visible atop the right-hand column of this inviting entryway to the Ghetto Biennale, perished. May he rest in peace.

AFTER photo: Leah Gordon

The Ghetto Biennale online

Now online is PRI's Christmas day edition of "The World," which included my report on the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti.

If you are visiting from "The World" and want more, scroll down a couple of posts for additional images and commentary from Port-au-Prince's Grand Rue. I'll happily address any questions left in the comments.

The Ghetto Biennale on PRI's "The World"

I'm assured that tomorrow, on Christmas day, my report on Port-au-Prince's recent Ghetto Biennale will air on PRI's The World. If in the United States check your local NPR affiliate station for showtimes HERE. For all you international listeners, the story will post to the PRI website on Monday, the 28th. I'll put a link up then.

 

In the meanwhile, they've already posted a Flickr set of my photographs from the trip, along with the almost oppressive suggestion that you visit this very same blog to "see more about the Biennale." Why oppressive? In addition to working on the piece for The World, I spent much of the last ten days writing stories about the event for the Suddeutsche Zeitung, the Times of London, the Miami Herald and the BBC's From our own Correspondent. Keeping all of these stories fresh and different has been enough of a challenge without more blogging on top of it.

Nonetheless, for those of you visiting from The World's link, antarcticiana refuses to disappoint, so here are a few more images from my recent trip to Haiti, where I was hanging out on the Grand Rue with a group of sculptors who make amazing vodou-assemblage art out of the discarded refuse of western civilization.

A detail from an André Eugene sculpture of a "Gede," installed right on the curb of the Grand Rue, along the Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The entire figure is about seven feet tall, with a ribcage welded together out of rebar. As I understand it, Gedes are a tribe of spirits representing the ancestors. One of the foremost among them is Bawon Samedi, literally "Baron Saturday," who is feted at the beginning of November with a vodou ceremony clearly correspondent with the Christian All Saints Day. I've blogged about the annual Gede festivity at Tap-Tap in Miami, before. The Gedes manifest a beguiling combination of sexuality and death, which Eugene explained to me in terms of a yin-yang duality he says permeates vodou. The Baron's voracious sexual appetite, he said, represents life, through procreation; but wherever life is present, so too is its opposite, death. The head of this sculpture is an actual human skull. Eugene says these occasionally wash out of the cemetery up the hill, appearing in the streets during violent storms, but they are so prevalent in the work of the Grand Rue artists that something more than hurricanes must be at work. I suspect locals now collect them and pass them along for a finder's fee.

 

A "Tap-tap," or public bus, sporting a mural of "Sweet Mickey," a popular konpa band based out of Petionville, the rich suburb in the hills above Port-au-Prince. Konpa (compas) is the dominant dance music of Haiti, a slow lilting groove something like a francophone version of salsa, danced "kole-kole," meaning "stuck together." Religious imagery is at least as popular a motif as pop-culture, with a special fondness for the "Jesus is my shepherd" theme as in this image on the back of the Tap-tap, below.

 

 

As part of a film crew I once made the long and kidney-churning drive to Canje, in Haiti's remote Central Plateau, to interview Paul Farmer, secular saint and subject of the Tracy Kidder biography Mountains Beyond Mountains. Farmer explained Haiti as "9,000,000 Africans kidnapped and dumped in the middle of the Caribbean with no way to get home." In the traditions of vodou and even in iconography such as that on this Tap-tap, which reads simply "Black Africa," that heritage is still very much alive, evident and celebrated. A visitor arriving to Haiti after being blindfolded and put on a plane could easily imagine that they had been transported to Senegal or Côte D'Ivoire, rather than to one of the Antilles.

 

But the old connections of the colonial Caribbean are equally strong. One evening, hearing a brass band playing, I wandered out of the gates of the famous and fabulous Oloffsson Hotel, which fifty years ago served as the setting for Graham Greene's The Comedians. I followed the sound to an outdoor basketball court down the road, where these musicians were practicing for carnival. The ensemble included only drums, an array of horns, and voices. Robert Peterson, the sound artist mentioned in the radio piece I did for PRI's "The World," joined me. Originally from Louisiana, he was bowled over by the similarity between this Haitian carnival music and the brass bands of New Orleans. Before the Haitian revolution and the Louisiana purchase, Port-au-Prince and New Orleans were of course sister cities in the French colonial enterprise.

On another occasion, sitting on the veranda, we heard more passing musicians. After just the very first few notes, Robert blurted out "that's funeral music." He told me that before coming to the Ghetto Biennale the farthest he had been from home was a trip to the Canadian side of the Niagara falls, but he took to Haiti immediately, wandering about with his digital recorder in a kind of exploratory ecstasy.

In the age of jet-travel and US hegemony the old trade routes that linked the great ports of the Caribbean basin have faded in our collective memory. Uncovering evidence of them is always exciting.

 

Much as this looks like another assemblage by the sculptors of the Grand Rue, this is a ritual space, the vodou equivalent of a shrine or altar, outside in the yard at the home of the local vodou priest. There are likely cauldrons, repositories of spirits called by the priest to do "work" on behalf of practitioners, buried in the ground beneath this installation. In Cuba I saw bundles almost identical to this thread-wrapped ball, in similar environments. The bundle most probably contains symbolic objects collected together by the client at the behest of the spirit, speaking through the priest. If the client wishes to ensure the faithfulness of his lover, for instance, the bundle might contain a lock of her hair, a photograph, or a stolen swatch of fabric from her clothing. The Hollywood stereotype of the "voodoo doll" probably originates from a mis-characterization of this sort of symbolic substitution of part for whole.

 

All kinds of cast-off material are incorporated into the work being made on the Grand Rue. These stick figures, with heads taken from the discarded dolls of North America, are wound around and around and around with lengths of cassette tape, mummified in music.

 

Another Grand Rue creation, a sort of Haitian Carmen Miranda, with a headdress made from 7up, Guiness and Prestige Beer bottle caps.

Times of London

Knick-nack shelf of postmodern gargoyles on the Grand Rue, Port au Prince

My first story on the Ghetto Biennale ran in the Times of London over the weekend in the Saturday Review section. To date no trace of it online, as far as I can google. If you are in the UK, save me a copy.

Grotesquerie of Gargantuan Gargoyles, Part One

The cacophony of Port au Prince begins with the very first steps out of the airport terminal and the onslaught of freelance porters and taximen. Among the touts and eager family members waiting to greet a long-absent diasporan I spotted in the crowd my name, scrawled in black magic marker on a sheet of notebook paper. Minutes later I was in an Isuzu Trooper in the safe hands of Faubert, a driver for the Oloffson Hotel, sent to pick me up and drive me to Jacmel to teach sound at the Sine Lekol Jakmel.

The airport is on the wrong side of the capital for access to Haiti's south and west, and driving to Jacmel requires traversing a throbbing cross-section of Port au Prince quartiers. I immediately asked Faubert to make a stop at the very heart of the maelstrom, at 622 Boulevard Jean Jacques Dessalines, the city's main drag. Even on a Sunday afternoon the boulevard was a logjam of mobylettes weaving through the steaming refuse, and honking, blockaded tap-taps, the lurid, muralled minibuses that serve as public transportation. Diesel fumes and the sizzle of arc-welders and hot dust assaulted the nostrils. This is the auto-repair district, where dozens of unlicensed mechanics ply their trade on the sidewalks, banging and hammering and welding, pulling engine blocks and repairing oil pans and beating out panels and adjusting mufflers right on the sidewalk, as pedestrians struggle to walk by.




It is one of the most chaotic corners of a very chaotic city. There, waiting for me, was Andre Eugene Jean Robert, a leader and founder of the sculptors of la Grand Rue, a group of trash-collecting anarchist artists who have turned a vacant lot here into a kind of Vodouist Watts Tower. A twenty-foot figure of rusted, welded iron, part abandoned bedspring, part truck chassis, sprouting an immense vibrating phallus made from a a length of log fixed into the coil of a big rig's shock absorber, presides over the entrance.

Eugene, standing by the right leg of the Grand Rue watchman, included to show scale

Sproing! Eugene demonstrates the action of the, uh, lower portion of a gigantic torso

The doctor is in! Schedule your next checkup now. Appointments still available for November 1st

Behind are countless sculptures jammed together on this wasted plot of land, so densely packed together that it is impossible to tell where one figure ends and another one begins. The ensemble is a sort of metallic stew incorporating the refuse of modern society, Vodou spirits personified as grinning demons, djab, and hobgoblins, like incarnations of Maurice Sendak's Wild Things made from bent, tangled and mangled bits of metal, lumps of melted plastic and the rest of the bottom of the world's garbage barrel, stuff from the dregs of humanity's trash, which even here finds no other use. Shattered grates from cheap, expired Chinese electric fans, hubcaps, abandoned dolls and clothing, and even human skulls that wash out of the ground of the nearby central cemetery, all find their way into this army of demented creatures, metaphors for a world gone mad.

Bizango, if you don't know.

I only had fifteen minutes to spend with Eugene on the way into Haiti, as we were rushing to reach Jacmel before nightfall, but I promised to stop back for a closer look on my way out....