Alleviative Objects: Intersectional Entanglement and Progressive Racism in Caribbean Art 9783839455920

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Glossary
Introduction
1 Sharing Silences: Inter-klas Dialogues in the Art Scene of Port-au-Prince
2 Conditional Hospitality: Atis Rezistans in European and U.S. American Art Institutions
3 Gestures of Generosity: Politics of Emotions at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince
4 Between Harmony and Anger: Exhibition Spaces by Eugène, Guyodo, Getho, and Papa Da
5 Disobedient Musealities: The Master’s Tools Revisited
Resume: Alleviative Objects, or Translating Black Suffering into White Pedagogy
Bibliography
List of Illustrations

Citation preview

David Frohnapfel Alleviative Objects

Postcolonial Studies  | Volume 43

David Frohnapfel studied art history, comparative literature, and religious studies at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich and at the Universidad de la Habana in Havana. He works on contemporary art and visual culture from the Caribbean region and defended his dissertation, Disobedient Musealities. Dialogue and Conflict in the Art Scene of Port-au-Prince, at Freie Universität Berlin in 2017. His research focuses on decolonial theory, critical race theory, critical whiteness studies, and affect theory. He also worked as curator of The 3rd Ghetto Biennale: Decentering the Market and Other Tales of Progress in Port-au-Prince together with Leah Gordon, André Eugène, and Jean Herald Celeur, and curated the exhibition NOCTAMBULES on Queer Visualities on the occasion of Le Forum Transculturel d'Art Contemporain.

David Frohnapfel

Alleviative Objects Intersectional Entanglement and Progressive Racism in Caribbean Art

Thesis: Disobedient Musealities. Dialogue and Conflict in the Art Scene of Portau-Prince, Fachbereich Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften, Freie Universität Berlin, Disputation July 3, 2017 Examiners: Prof. Dr. Tobias Wendl and Prof. Dr. Ingrid Kummels Acknowledgement: The dissertation was partly funded by the Elsa-Neumann scholarship of the state of Berlin

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http:// dnb.d-nb.de

© 2021 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Carina Frohnapfel Cover illustration: Assemblage The Shrine (1989) by Mario Benjamin with a carved, wooden head created by Jean Camille Nasson, photo taken by Fred Koenig in Port-au-Prince in 2012, © Fred Koenig and Mario Benjamin, Image edited for book cover by Anne Linke. Printed by Majuskel Medienproduktion GmbH, Wetzlar Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-5592-6 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-5592-0 https://doi.org/10.14361/9783839455920 Printed on permanent acid-free text paper.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements | 7 Glossary | 11 Introduction | 15 1

Sharing Silences: Inter-klas Dialogues in the Art Scene of Port-au-Prince | 57

1.1 Narrating Class Frictions | 59 1.2 Artistic Klas Isolation | 67 1.3 Institution Building: Barbara Prézeau Stephenson and La Fondation AfricAmericA | 75 1.4 Urban Sculptures as Unhappy Objects | 79 1.5 Rekiperasyon in Port-au-Prince | 89 1.6 The Room of Mario Benjamin | 97 2

Conditional Hospitality: Atis Rezistans in European and U.S. American Art Institutions | 107

2.1 The Vodou Art Network: Contemporary Haitian Art as Post-Apocalyptic Images | 117 2.2 Vodou as an ,Authenticating Mechanism | 123 2.3 Black Hyper-Masculinity | 131 2.4 Towards Situated Curations | 136 ,

3

Gestures of Generosity: Politics of Emotions at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince | 149

3.1 Fatigued by Sameness: the Ghetto Biennale as a Curated Social Situation | 159 3.2 Artistic Poverty Tourism | 165 3.3 Politics of Pity and the Spiral of Moral Accusations | 172 3.4 Performances of Affirmation | 178 3.5 Deskilling as a Response to Anti-Eurocentric Benevolence | 185 3.6 Community Antagonism | 195 4

Between Harmony and Anger: Exhibition Spaces by Eugène, Guyodo, Getho, and Papa Da | 205

4.1 André Eugène’s Musée d’Art: ‘Big Man-ism’ at Gran Ri | 210

4.2 Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo: Everybody likes a Good Outsider Story | 219 4.3 Royaume des Ordures Vivantes by Getho Jean Baptiste | 224 4.4 Musée des Esprits e d’Art by Alphonse Jean Jr. a.k.a. Papa Da | 238 5

5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4

Disobedient Musealities: The Master’s Tools Revisited | 249

GUYODO at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA | 259 Monstrous Orders and Ugly Feeling | 264 Reconfiguring Hierarchies through a Politics of Deviance | 267 Against Zonbi Curators: Museums as Spaces of Care | 275

Resume: Alleviative Objects, or Translating Black Suffering into White Pedagogy | 285 Bibliography | 291 List of Illustrations | 313

Acknowledgements

I have struggled—and on occasion stumbled—my way through life since I have decided to write a Ph.D. on intersectional conflicts and solidarities in the art world of Port-au-Prince. When you start writing a book, only a few people tell you about how hard it is really going to be, how heavily it can weight on your soul and influence your mental health, or about the financial and material difficulties you will encounter along the way. More so, if you are not coming from a family with money and you do not fully embody that (haunting and unsettling) heteropatriarchal norm. Many colleagues you encounter in the early stages of your career are the ones who have turned their books into academic success stories. Yet, many of us will not be able to follow in those footsteps and our conflicting relationships with academia will silently fade into the background of the conversation. I dedicate this book to all struggling young scholars I have met throughout the years, who have not finished their work because they had to encounter that academia and the art world are not evenhanded systems detached from a material reality or the bodies we inhabit. When I started researching for Alleviative Objects, I also did not expect that my inquiry of the unacknowledged racism of many leftist-leaning progressive art professionals (myself included) would come along with so much personal pushback, resentment, and white fragility. My affective performance of surprise here reveals of course my own white ontological denial of the racist world we live in and the complex investments that white progressives sustain with privilege and their sophisticated performances of innocence. Most of my work was only possible because of the kindness of ‘strangers’, who offered me their time and trust in many hours of inspiring conversations. Thus, I want to thank foremost the artists and activists working in the art world of Port-au-Prince who showed me so much hospitality and insight during thirteen months of research in Haiti. I regard it as an exceptional privilege to be able

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to partake as closely as I did in this world and I also want to dedicate my book to your activism and creativity. I want to thank in particular artists Getho Jean Baptiste, Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, Jean Herald Celeur, André Eugène, Joseph Marc Antoine a.k.a. Zaka, Racine Polycarpe, Evel Romain, Papa Da, Claudel Casseus, Romel Jean Pierre, Reginald Sénatus, Jean Claude Saintilus, Jerry Reginald Chery, Wesner Bazile, Katelyne Alexis, Paterick Elie a.k.a. Kombatan, Mabelle Williams, Steevens Simeon, Guerly Laurent, Pierre Adler, Jean Robert Palanquet, Ronaldo Duborgne, Londel Innocent, and all the other members of the community living in the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat who offered me conversations, encouragement, assistance, and disagreement. I also want to thank Barbara Prézeau Stephenson and Leah Gordon. Both kindly gave me the opportunity to collaborate on exhibition projects during Le Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain and Ghetto Biennale providing insight into what it means to curate art exhibitions in Haiti on a very practical level. These experiences of exhibition making, accompanied by hours of conversations, fundamentally influenced my scholarly work. Mario Benjamin also kindly helped me to gain wide access to very different interlocutors living in Haiti, and he took me around with his car every Sunday for lovely trips to see Port-auPrince from new perspectives. Thank you, my research would not have been possible without your knowledge, insight, and kindness. In terms of academic support, I am above all indebted to my supervisor Tobias Wendl who helped me to develop my project from the start, commented on my work, and offered me an enriching platform for dialogue with the weekly colloquium at Free University Berlin. My Ph.D. project was funded by the Elsa-Neumann-Stipendium of the state of Berlin and by a short-time fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Italy. I am indebted to Eva-Maria Troelenberg for a very inspiring time with her Max-Planck research group Objects in the Contact Zone that helped to kick-start my research. My beloved late grandmothers, Theresa Frohnapfel and Maria Rausch, my parents, Blandine Frohnapfel and Alfred Frohnapfel, and my sister, Carina Frohnapfel, also generously helped to finance my project in insecure times of need. I also want to thank all friends, colleagues, and acquaintances who offered crucial input, enriching conversations, emotional support, and responded to different versions of my chapters, papers, and articles in the last years, especially Anne Linke, Simone Stirner, Mathilda Legemah, Anna Messner, Monika Senz, Anandita Bajpai, Tessa Mars, Charlotte Hammond, Michael Gärtner, Tracian Meikle, Wendy Asquith, Josué Azor, Avinoam Shalem, Kerstin Schankweiler,

Acknowledgements | 9

Laura Heyman, Anaise Fabius, Ariel Fabius, Jean-Ulrick Désert, Reynald Lally, Huey Copeland, Alanna Lockward, Pascale Monnin, Giscard Bouchotte, Sebastian Frenzel, Jana Evans Braziel, Sharona Natan El-Saieh, Mano El-Saieh, Veerle Poupeye, Leon Wainwright and Elizabeth McAlister, as well as the members of the research network Inequality Tourism in the Americas. Thank you Alana Osbourne, Barbara Vodopivec, Sarah Becklage, Rivke Jaffe, and Eveline Dürr for your academic insight, emotional support, sharing of experiences, and many laughs after shared panels and workshops. Stefan, only your love, support, and academic engagement with my work made this book possible!

Glossary

atis kontanporen: contemporary artist Ayiti: Haiti betiz: obscenities, vulgarities bidonvil: informal neighborhood, slum blan: foreigner (white) bòkò: sorcerer bòs: boss boujwazi: bourgeoisie Bawon: deity ruling the cemetery Damballah: highest deity, primordial creator of life drapo vodou: vodou banner eskilti klasik: classical sculpture gede: group of spirits associated with death, life, healing, and sexuality gid: tourist guide Gran Ri: Creole term for the street Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines gwo nèg: ‘big man’ hounfour: religious house houngan: vodou priest kafou: crossroads rekiperasyon: recuperation art klas: class klas anba: lower class klas piwo a: higher class klas privilèjye: privileged class kliyan: client komedyen: comedian komisè: curator kouch sosyal: social strata

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kreyòl: Creole kwadèbouke (Croix-des-Bouquets): commune in the Ouest department of Haiti lwa: vodou deities malere: miserable Marchè En Fe: Iron Market masisi: derogative term for gay men mas pèp-la: common people mize (musée d’art): museum nèg: human peristil: religious dance space poto-mitan: ritual centerpost pov: poor travay: to work; also used to describe spiritual work vagabondaj: ‘vagabondage’, streetwalking Vodouisant: vodou practitioner wanga: magical work zonbi: a spirit or body of the dead captured to work for the capturer zozo: penis zwaso: bird

“Sometimes the repetition of good sentiment feels oppressive.” Sara Ahmed, On Being Included, 2012

Introduction

In 2013, I spent several days in London to visit an art exhibition at a gallery that presented artworks by the Haitian artist group Atis Rezistans alongside drapo vodou1 (vodou banners) and several photographs by British artist, filmmaker and curator Leah Gordon. The gallery, located in a historical 18th-century building, presented Haitian artists on three different floors. I wanted to find out how Haitian artists from lower socio-economic strata are showcased to buyers in commercial galleries. I therefore decided to tell the gallerist the made-up story that I work as an assistant for a Berlin-based art collector looking to expand his mainly Eurocentric collection with artworks from the Caribbean and Latin America. I introduced myself to the gallerist after I had spent some time in the gallery looking at the Haitian art assemblages staged dramatically against black painted walls. I asked the gallerist if she could help me to understand the Haitian artworks a little better. The gallerist started with some introductory words about the exhibition and artist collective Atis Rezistans. She explained to me the common 1

Sequin-covered drapo vodou or vodou banners derives from the vodou religion. They serve in temples to elevate and ritually salute the lwa (spirits). Traditionally they are about 91.4 x 91.4 cm in size and their designs are based upon cosmograms called vèvè, which symbolize a particular lwa. Since the 1950s they also became commodities for tourists and galleries. Tina Girourard explains, “Creating a Vodou flag is a complex process not unlike making stained glass windows. In both cases, the master artist creates the design but relies on assistants to carry it out […] The assistant brings the work to life, with one hand above and one below the cloth, their dexterous fingers rhythmically sewing sequin by sequin, in a five-step process: needles guide the thread up through the cloth, through the sequin, through the glass bead which will hold it in place, then back down through the sequin to the cloth. A typical work requires from 18-20.000 sequins (usually 8 mm) to be sewn, a feat accomplished in about ten days.” (Girouard 1995: 357-358)

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narrative of the group: the artists are living in abject poverty in a slum in Haiti, recycle everyday detritus into art and are inspired by the vodou religion. Afterwards she brought me to the basement to show me some black and white portraits of Haitian men and women in costume at the carnival in Jacmel photographed by Leah Gordon. As the gallerist showed me the first photograph, she paused for a moment, smiled at me, and said: “You know, you and me we couldn’t travel to Haiti, we would get instantly killed over there. It is such a dangerous country for people like us.” Her comment took me by surprise and I was thrown off by the disconnection of her excited, smiling face and the image rushing through my head of how we would both get shot or otherwise killed in the streets of Port-au-Prince. I asked the gallerist in return how the photographer of the images manages to survive, given that she is British and white2 like the both of us. The gallerist answered that Gordon had been traveling to Haiti for about twenty years and that her partner was Haitian and lived in one of the most dangerous and poor areas of Port-au-Prince. Her experience and relationship secured her travels and she was able to bring us these wonderful photographs back from her journeys. Gordon’s photographs became part of a heroic travel narrative of a white, female photographer from Europe setting out to risk her own life by traveling into the ‘heart of darkness’ to bring us exotic knowledge from an inaccessible and dangerous culture. The 18th-century building, which houses the gallery felt suddenly very colonially charged. Gordon’s black and white photographs, which intend to tell us something about ‘subaltern’3 narratives of Haitian history

2

I do not use the terms ‘white’ and ‘Black’ as biological categories but as cultural, political, and anti-racist concepts. ‘Race’ as a biological category is a fiction but a fiction with severe—even life-threatening—consequences for racialized bodies. Cultural anthropologist Gloria Wekker, following Ruth Frankenberg, describes Whiteness as referring “to a set of locations that are historically, socially, politically, and culturally, produced, and, moreover are intrinsically linked to unfolding relations of domination. Naming ‘Whiteness’ displaces it from the unmarked, unnamed status that is itself an effect of its dominance.” (Wekker 2016: 24) Whiteness in this sense is a complex structure of privilege that provides certain bodies, which conform to a somatic norm, better access to resources, capital, and opportunities. Nirmal Puwar describes that as soon as people do not conform to a white somatic norm they are quickly read as space invaders who do not belong (Puwar 2004: 8). I will come back to the discourses on race in more detail throughout the book.

3

The term ‘subaltern’ goes back to the work of Antonio Gramsci and relates closely to his concept of hegemony (Gramsci 2014: 52-55). Celia M. Britton explains: “Gramsci established the concept of hegemony – the claim that the ideology of the dominant

Introduction | 17

through costume and masquerading traditions, became deflated and filled with something else: racism and the criminalization of an entire nation. I also realized why I was suddenly standing in the basement of the gallery: the gallerist tried to shift my attention away from the current art exhibition about Haitian art on the main floor and to the standard programming of gallery artists by showing me some of the stored artworks. My sneaky collector-assistant-alter ego backfired, as the gallerist saw me as a potential client. The artworks by Atis Rezistans and the vodou flags are supposedly not in the same price range compared to the standard programming presented in the gallery, and she started to show me her more ‘Western’ range of products. I reminded her that I was here for Caribbean artists, and as I left the gallery I kept wondering: what is the function of Atis Rezistans and their artworks in European art institutions? What are the affective politics shaping the bizarre disconnect between a pleased smiling white face in regard to the content of a conversation about violence and poverty in the ‘Global South’?

class in any society becomes the dominant ideology of the whole society; that is, those who do not belong to the class whose interests it serves will nevertheless subscribe to it. This kind of ideological ‘capture’ of a society accompanies political power and economic dominance, but Gramsci makes a basic distinction between power based on domination and power based on hegemony. Thus, it is important to note that hegemony is an ideological or, in the poststructuralist framework, discursive reality and that it is not correlated with any one particular class. The subaltern, for Gramsci, is the nonhegemonic subject, excluded from the dominant ideology’s representation of the society and its history […]” (Britton 1999: 53). The term gained larger currency through the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group around Ranajit Guha and especially Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s famous article Can the Subaltern Speak? (Spivak 1994). John Beverley and Ileana Rodríguez founded in 1992 a ‘Latin American’ version of the Subaltern Studies Group to continue the legacy of politically committed scholarship. Rodrìguez describes: “The Latin American Subaltern Studies Group saw subaltern studies as what Spivak calls ‘a strategy for our time’, with two essential postulates. One was to continue placing our faith in the projects of the poor. The other was to find ways of producing scholarship to demonstrate that in the failure to recognize the poor as active social, political, and heuristic agents reside the limits and thresholds of our present hermeneutical and political condition. Like the South Asian Collective, we were also dissatisfied with the realisation that the poor had not been recorded in a history of their own, but rather had been subsumed in a narrative which was not exactly their own.” (Rodríguez 2001: 3)

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Fig. 1: Entrance to Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere

Situations like this one have become common since I started working on contemporary art from Haiti and its classed, racialized, and gendered entanglements. Speaking about Haiti as a white, European scholar often seems to follow two similar paths. The first one can be illustrated and summed up by the following congratulatory responses: “Wow, you really lived in a country like Haiti for over a year?”, “I think it is wonderful that you work about art produced by the urban poor!” White scholars, artists, and curators can acquire a huge amount of symbolic capital by the mere decision to travel to Haiti and to work about marginalized Black communities living in poverty. Some white scholars and curators are actively encouraging these heroic narratives. Curator Donald Cosentino, for example, describes his ‘expeditions’ into the tourist market Marché En Fe (Iron Market) in Haiti with the following narrative: “To find [the artists] Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise, you must elbow and shove your way into the Iron Market. These artists keep their shop deep inside this century-old marketplace, an infernal warren of stalls and ateliers covered by a wrought iron shed all tarted up with faux minarets and turrets, like a Disney version of Arabian Nights. Similarities with Fantasia end there however, since this castle of Haitian commerce is located in the mud, filth and choking exhaust of downtown Port-au-Prince, a ramshackle city once de-

Introduction | 19

scribed by a disgruntled visitor as the ‘Paris of the gutter’. Depending on your sensitivity to heat, light, touch, noise and smell – on whether these sensations, pushed to an extreme, excite or frighten you – a descent into the Iron Market is a trip to heaven or to hell.” (Cosentino 1998: 7)

The description of the journey to heaven or hell transforms Cosentino into a Greek mythological hero like Orpheus and illustrates the affective dimension of adventurous excitement visiting curators experience in a ‘subaltern’ milieu in Haiti. The search for new artistic talents at the Marché En Fe becomes a heroic narrative of discovery for those curators brave enough to enter the hellish “Paris of the gutter” and to bring new ‘subaltern’ artistic talents to light. But this coin also has a flipside. Haiti, constantly produced as an exceptionally poor, victimized, failed state, can also quickly spark moral suspicion directed towards scholars, artists and curators working about Haitian art, which is indeed produced by one of the most vulnerable Black communities. This moral suspicion leads to a second path represented by the following responses: “Don’t you think it is very selfish of you to use the life stories of people living in misery for your own academic career?”, “Should a white, privileged scholar really work about Haiti?”, “What about the hierarchy between you and your informants?, “Isn’t your research about class and the urban poor too primitivist for the field of contemporary art in 2016?”, “Have you even bothered to learn Kreyòl?”.

DEHUMANIZATION THROUGH DEGRADATION AND IDEALIZATION Haiti is an idea, an idea that triggers strong emotional responses: hostility, fear, pity, guilt, anger, lust, fascination, excitement, and heroism. As one of the revolutionary islands of the Caribbean region, the idea of Haiti resembles either a decolonial Mecca of Black resistance, the ultimate embodiment of ‘Third World’ victimhood, or a magical island of nostalgic, exotic, and spiritual Otherness. João Feres Jr., following Reinhart Koselleck, has classified three asymmetrical counter-concepts or semantic oppositions that dominant groups use to produce a shared identity by delineating another group outside the naming group’s characteristics. These three semantic oppositions are: (1) culturally asymmetric oppositions, (2) temporally asymmetric oppositions, and (3) racially asymmetric oppositions (Feres 2009: 186). Haiti as an asymmetrical counter-concept is commonly described in everyday conversations as exceptionally ‘more’: more impoverished, more magical, more authentic, more artistic, more sexual, more African, more religious, more resilient, more decolonial, more superstitious, more crea-

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tive, more passionate, more grotesque, more dangerous, more backward, more rebellious, more victimized. Some of these labels are grounded in racist thought but others are empowering counter-concepts against degrading, racist ideas. It is important to keep in mind that processes of dehumanization are not only achieved through degradation; they can also thrive on idealization. Colin Dayan adroitly describes the process through which Haiti has been fixed in a status of being perceived as a metaphor (Dayan 2010). Haiti is commonly understood as “grotesquely unique” (Dayan 2010) and as an exceptional case of either ‘Black victimhood’ or ‘Black decolonial resistance’. Haiti as a metaphor oscillates between two different but intimately related poles: (1) degradation and (2) idealization. Both of these perspectives have in common that Haiti functions as a metaphor through a process of sublimation. Dayan explains further: “We must remember that both processes, whether idealization or degradation, displace the human element. We face a process of sublimation, up or down. Amid evocations of a desperate people and festering landscape, the media and the ‘humanitarian’ community continue to ignore the history and culture of Haiti.” (2010) Metaphors are by definition not the things they represent. Hence, Dayan goes on to ask: if we understand Haiti to be a metaphor, then what is Haiti a metaphor for? She locates the answer to her question in ‘our’ selfhood: “Our selfhood is reflected, as in a distorting mirror, in our notions of Haiti. The metaphor exists, as the long, sorry story of its genesis and historical development demonstrates, to serve a purpose. And that purpose is connected with, and deeply rooted in, our notions of self and identity—which means also our notions of the other. Blackness, black freedom, black political independence, black cultural expression and specificity—all of these are fundamental notions, and all are represented—not metaphorically, but really—in Haiti. Yet fear, contempt, and hostility to this blackness all come to expression in the way we formulate our metaphors. If Haiti stands as a metaphor for misery, for helplessness, then outsiders can assume that such a nation needs the United States to save it. Though the particulars of history prove otherwise, the capacious and constantly shifting uses of metaphor bring us to that critical point where compassion becomes pity: taking care of people who cannot take care of themselves. What remains certain here is that narratives of protection are conducted by the free in the name of the bound, or to put it another way, definitions are in the hands of the definers.” (2016)

Nadège T. Clitantre, following Jean Michael Dash, argues that Haiti as a metaphorical representation risks to be transformed into a disappearing island, an island that disappears entirely under complex symbols (Clitantre 2011: 146). She argues that in media representations of post-earthquake Haiti the paradigm of

Introduction | 21

Haitian Exceptionalism4 has centrally re-emerged. She states further that we have to theorize structures of Haitian Exceptionalism closely in order to be able to make differentiations between negative sides of exceptionalism, which are grounded in racist thought and cause Haiti to disappear further, and a positive side of exceptionalism as a counter-discourse which centers Haiti in global history and promotes Caribbean, African diasporic, and global affiliations (Clitantre 2011: 147). One of the central buzzwords Clitantre recognizes in this new positive language around Haitian Exceptionalism is resilience, which in fact accepts Haiti’s unique history of Black revolution but dangerously fixes Haitians at the same time as an exceptionally poor nation with the extraordinary ability to withstand situations of suffering and marginality: “But this positive language of Haitian exceptionalism, which recognizes Haiti’s history of resistance, has been co-opt by the media in problematic ways. Resilience is the postearthquake (re)production of Haiti by the media that makes Haiti legible to the world and fixes Haiti in the discourse of global poverty. We now talk of resilience of Haitians living in exceptional circumstances, so much so that they can live in a state of degradation for some time, and are able to do so because of a never ending history of struggle and resistance that now gets foregrounded to recognize their exceptional ability to suffer.” (2011: 152)

We will see in the main case study of my research that the members and dropouts of the Haitian artist group Atis Rezistans, a.k.a. the artists of Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Eta, often play directly into the hands of this discourse of resilience. They are commonly understood as “[m]orphing societal dregs into expressions of joy and beauty” (Grimes 2008). They are poor and marginalized but resiliently resist their marginal position in society by transforming the detritus of the “world’s failing economies into distinctly urban apocalyptic images”

4

Clitantre explains further that the term Haitian Exceptionalism goes back to MichelRolph Trouillot’s (2015) book The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the Word. Trouillot describes that in the nineteenth century an exceptionalist paradigm was developed to be able to speak about Haiti, which overemphasized Haiti’s singularity to make Haiti recognizable after Haiti’s revolutionary history had been silenced as an “unthinkable non-event” (Trouillot 2015: 70). Trouillot argues that the emphasis on Haiti’s singularity is a methodological and political move to counter the former negation of Haiti through a positive recognition of Haitian identity, history, and culture and that Haitian Studies today have to move beyond the fiction of this Haitian Exceptionalism.

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(Gordon 2012: 24) for art exhibitions and coffee tables. Artist Eric Grimes highlights the aspect of impressive resilience in Atis Rezistans’ artworks in his review of the exhibition Vodou Riche: Contemporary Haitian Art (2007) at Columbia college’s Glass Curtain Gallery: “The tale of contemporary Haitian art speaks to humanity’s innate drive to self-expression and how this passion has never been constrained by something as comparatively trivial as poverty. Vodou Riche was a superb exploration of a wealth of art coming from an extremely poor nation. [...] The style in this exhibition that most literally converts social poverty into visual wealth comes from a group known as ‘the sculptures of Grand Rue’.” (2008)

The members of Atis Rezistans also commonly narrate the name of their group through this discourse of resilience. Artist Getho Jean Baptiste explained to me in an interview: “As far as I remember, [Jean Herald] Celeur came up with the name of our group. Celeur did an art piece. A man with two hands out of iron. He wanted to articulate that if Haitian people would not have iron hands, they would not have enough resistance and would die. We will die if we do not have iron hands. Because Haitians, although we are hungry, we always have the strength to keep on working. Well, we resist against this oppressive system. [...] You have to eat. You have to drink. You have to pay your rent. If you have children, they have to go to school. You have to resist against that. For me this is our form of everyday resistance.” (Getho 2014)

Following Clitantre, however, I argue that the members of Atis Rezistans risk becoming disappearing artists in this discourse, artists disappearing under complex symbols produced through prejudicial anticipations of a “racialized common sense” (Wekker 2016: 19). We will see in my study that the members of Atis Rezistans often do not represent themselves as individual artistic producers and that they are seen as a prolonged process of Haiti’s metaphorical status. They oscillate in this trajectory between the following three correlated readings: (1) resilient decolonial revolutionaries, (2) victims of an aggressive neo-liberal world order, and (3) an exotic and socio-economic Other. Atis Rezistans, as victims of the global aggressive capitalist world order need to be saved, as ‘subaltern’ resistant fighters they need to be celebrated, and as the exotic, socioeconomic Other they need to be carefully policed against the constant threat of ‘Western’ or ‘bourgeois’ assimilation so as to remain ‘authentically’ other. But how do these artists from lower socio-economic strata see and narrate their own

Introduction | 23

position in the globalized artistic milieu? This book is fundamentally structured around these oral histories. I understand my conversations and interviews with the members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans as an autoethnographic forum. I return theories written about the artists and their artworks back to them to listen to their responses and opinions (cf. Bratt 1991).5

FIELD OF RESEARCH AND METHODOLOGY I understand my research as a contribution to ongoing discussions about the provincialization and decolonialization of dominant ‘Euro-U.S. American’ epistemic regimes and the decentering of artistic and curatorial practices in an increasingly globalized art world (for the concept of provincialization, see Chakrabarty 2000). How and where is knowledge produced and which social actors are capable to participate actively in the production of that knowledge? The theme of my analysis is the transnational contemporary art milieu of Port-au-Prince. My main foci are the members and dropouts of the Haitian artist group Atis Rezistans, who opened their studios and yards as autonomous musée d’art (art museums) in a bidonvil (informal neighborhood) between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat in Port-au-Prince, and the network of supporters this group has established since the early 2000s in Haiti and abroad. As far as social profiles of the main group are concerned, the group is almost exclusively male, its members’ ages range from early twenties to late fifties and most of them grew up in the Gran Ri neighborhood in downtown Port-au-Prince. Their network of supporters consists of artists, curators, collectors, tourists, expats, locals, boutique owners, cultural anthropologists, art historians, and journalists from very different backgrounds and nationalities. I follow the travelling artworks by Atis Rezistans over the globe from Haiti to the wider Caribbean region, to Europe, and the United States and analyze the hierarchical relationships these objects and their artists encounter on these transnational journeys. Every new location comes along with a different set of ideologies and agendas. Curator Tumelo Mosaka argues that “[t]he artwork is a mobile entity; it moves physically between places, and temporally through history. Its

5

Mary Louise Pratt defines autoethnography as “a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them. Thus if ethnographic texts are those in which European metropolitan subjects represents to themselves their others (usually their conquered others), autoethnographic texts are representations that the so-defined others constructs in response to or in dialogue with those texts” (1991: 34).

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meaning changes depending on its social context, location, and audience. As such, the works do not present a singular coherent identity but rather exist in manifold realities distributed through diverse spaces.” (Mosaka 2007: 19) Instead of concentrating on the analyzes of exhibitions of art objects presented in art museums, Kunsthallen, and galleries, I will shift the focus of my research away from this art historical, discursive analysis of curatorial selections and object iconographies to the wider social fabric of hierarchical relationships in which these objects are embedded. In my reading, the artworks are not without social context and are part of social infrastructures of power. The main theme of my book revolves around the artistic and socio-political means by which artists, curators, and scholars transform, contest, reestablish, and challenge the boundaries of interracial and inter-klas dialogues in globally entangled art milieus. How does a hierarchical social fabric resonate in art exhibitions, object iconographies, and curatorial selections? Art historian Partha Mitter (2008) pointed out that, from a Kantian a priori view of aesthetic, the concept ‘art’ is often regarded as neutral and disinterested, which systematically ignores the implications of race, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Exactly these implications are crucial for my research. I follow Ella Shohat’s and Robert Stam’s argument that “[a] full understanding of media representation [and the art world is one of those systems of representation] requires a comprehensive analysis of the institutions that generate and distribute massmediated texts as well as of the audience that receives them. Whose stories are told? By whom? [...] Who controls production, distribution, [and] exhibition?” (Stam Shohat 1994: 183) Cultural anthropologist Gloria Wekker (2016) describes in her book White Innocence that interracial encounters often functions within a racialized common sense that was established in four hundred years of imperial rule and still plays a vital, but unacknowledged part in meaning making processes in the Netherlands today. Wekker, following Edward Said, explains this racialized common sense as a cultural archive which is centrally located in our minds, feelings, and institutionalized realities: “The cultural archive is located in many things, in the way we think, do things, and look at the world, in what we find (sexually) attractive, in how our affective and rational economies are organized and intertwined. Most important, it is between our ears and in our hearts and souls. The question is prompted by a conception of an archive as a set of documents or the institution in which those documents are housed. My use of the term refers to neither of those two meanings, but to ‘a repository of memory’ (Stoler 2009, 49), in the heads and hearts of people in the metropole, but its content is also silently cemented in

Introduction | 25

policies, in organizational rule, in popular and sexual cultures, and in commonsense everyday knowledge, and all of this is based on four hundred years of imperial rule.” (Wekker 2016: 19)

Following Wekker, I argue in my book that the scholarly, curatorial, and personal engagement with a group of Black Haitian artists from weak socio-economic strata closely relates to this racialized common sense. The cultural archive produces a cultural repertoire that we constantly access unconsciously and consciously in exchanges and dialogues with racialized minorities. I examine how this cultural archive also influences the academic questions we preferably choose to discuss when it comes to Black artists from lower socio-economic strata. Haitian art in this trajectory relates often to a racialized idea produced through that cultural archive. I combine Wekker’s approach with feminist philosopher Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice to analyze hierarchical social interactions. Fricker (2007) analyzes how minority testimonies are often dismissed through practices of epistemic marginalization. She reads epistemology in combination with ethics and argues that epistemic marginalization occurs when the prejudice of a hearer causes a person to be “wronged specifically in her capacity as a knower” (Fricker 2007: 20). If a speaker is not fulfilling a particular preconceived prejudicial idea in a hearer, this situation will quickly produce epistemic dysfunctions which lead either to credibility excess or credibility deficit: “The idea that (what I am calling) testimonial injustice constitutes an ethical wrong that can be non-trivial, indeed profoundly damaging, and even systematically connected with other forms of injustice in society, is not much appreciated. If it were, perhaps we would be more ready to voice our resentments and argue them through to some sort of rectification; and perhaps a social shift would occur towards developing a better vocabulary and forum for airing and responding to such complains. Perhaps too we would be more ready and able to change our patterns of credibility judgment so as to become less likely to inflict testimonial injustice on others.” (Fricker 2007: 40)

The main thesis of my dissertation is that access to white art systems is more easily granted to Black artists from lower socio-economic strata when they do not disrupt the racialized common sense through epistemic dysfunctions vis-àvis their network of ‘Western’ curators and scholars and follow instead the route predetermined for the common reception of their artworks. To disrupt the preconceived, prejudicial idea of what Haitian art is really all about can quickly produce credibility deficits and hence disappointment, which influences curatorial selection processes, artistic collaborations, and social relationships. Epistem-

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ic marginalization influences not only curatorial selections but also scholarly selection: not every Haitian is seen capable to become a legitimate interlocutor and representative of the Haitian art world. Some Haitian artists and curators and their artistic and/or curatorial practices seem more credible than others. Thus, a central question for my research is how this “deep structure of inequality in thought and affect based on race” (Wekker 2016: 2) unfolds in inter-class and inter-racial relationships and epistemic regimes within the artistic, globalized milieu today, which often presents itself as generous and inclusive of racialized minorities—even though statistical investigations beg to differ (cf. Mellon Foundation 2015). Walter Mignolo (2011), following Anibal Quijano’s concept of coloniality, argues (in line with Wekker) that the ‘West’ from about 1500 to the current stage of globalization has built a universal frame of racialized, gendered, and classed knowledge that subalternizes other forms of knowledges. Within a genealogy of Afro-Caribbean thinkers, Mignolo proposes the necessity to develop decolonial mechanisms to disengage and delink from this process of epistemic marginalization by turning former objects of study into subjects: “Decolonial thinking and options (i.e. thinking decolonially) are nothing more than a relentless analytic effort to understand, in order to overcome, the logic of coloniality underneath the rhetoric of modernity […]” (2011: 10). He argues further that “[d]isengaging or delinking doesn’t mean that it is possible to ‘get out’ of modern epistemology […] as one walks out of the summer resort and goes home, just like that. Delinking means not to operate under the same assumptions even while acknowledging that modern categories of thought are dominant, if not hegemonic, and in many, if not in all of us. […] Delinking […] means to think from the silences and absences produced by imperial modern epistemology and epistemic practices.” (ibid.: 205-206)

Decolonial options are achieved, according to Mignolo, through epistemic disobedience, which is a transdisciplinary method that betrays ‘epistemically correct’ reasoning and interpretation: “A decolonial platform is trans-disciplinary and originated at the moment that standard conceptions and practices of knowledge (e.g. all disciplinary formations) have been both ‘advancing’ modernity and ‘contributing’ to coloniality of knowledge and of being.” (ibid.: 189) Thus methodologically, I use a queer scavenger methodology proposed by Jack Halberstam (1998), which strategically resists disciplinary coherence: “A queer methodology, in a way, is a scavenger methodology that uses different methods to collect and produce information on subjects who have been deliberately or accidentally

Introduction | 27

excluded from traditional studies of human behavior. The queer methodology attempts to combine methods that are often cast as being at odds with each other, and it refuses the academic compulsion toward disciplinary coherence.” (ibid.: 13)

Academic research from a vantage point of marginalized, formerly colonized, and indigenous communities enjoins a strong awareness of the tainted colonial legacy of our own academic project as well as the hierarchical social interactions in which one is persistently embedded as a white scholar, like myself, when working about Haiti. The production of knowledge can be an aggressive endeavor which relocates white scholars in positions of being naming and discursive authorities. I experienced in Haiti that my own white body can be read as offensive and threatening despite any supposedly ‘good intentions’ of my research project. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) describes something similar in her study Decolonizing Methodologies: “From the vantage point of the colonized […] the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism. The word itself, ‘research’, is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. […] It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our ‘faculties’ by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are. […] It appalls us that the West can desire, extract and claim ownership of our ways of knowing, our imagery, the things we create and produce, and then simultaneously reject the people who created and developed those ideas and seek to deny them further opportunities to be creators of their own culture and own nations.” (ibid.: 1)

In order to analyze the unacknowledged cultural archive at a discursive, emotional, and structural level, I combine in my analysis discourse and narrative analysis, Decolonial and Post-Colonial Theory, Critical Race Theory, Critical Whiteness Studies, and Intersectionality. I interpret art objects, curatorial descriptions in exhibition catalogues, and academic writings and combine this analysis with ethnographic and sociological literature on poverty tourism and volunteer tourism in the ‘Global South’. I also base my research on participatory observation in Port-au-Prince where I stayed for thirteen months to communicate, interact, and work together with many different actors of the artistic field. During thirteen months of fieldwork in Haiti between 2011 and 2015, I conducted informal conversations and structured and semi-structured interviews with a

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diverse array of actors within the cross-cultural artistic field of Port-au-Prince. Such an approach is necessary to grasp the sociological preconditions of how artists from different sections of Haitian society interact with each other and with a wider contemporary artistic milieu. Haitian student Herold Leon helped me to translate my structured interviews with the members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans from Kreyòl to English. We will see in the course of this book that the livelihood of the Gran Ri artists depends on the relationships they establish with a network of visiting foreigners. Thus, I decided to be careful in citing critical opinions by the artists, which I encountered in conversations and interviews. Especially in chapter three, several voices of artists are cited anonymously in order to protect them from a potential backlash from their support network. Most of these critical opinions are also shared by a large number of artists, which is why I did not name the individual artists who articulated these opinions. I also worked as assistant curator at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in 2011 and cocurator at the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013 in order to understand the politics of this art event from within. My own white body and experiences in the field are centrally part of the data I analyze. Working as a white, male, queer scholar and curator in Haiti produces its own set of hierarchical interactions rooted in white privilege. White, heteronormative, cis-gendered, and able-bodied identities are commonly produced as unmarked, universal, and invisible because the rest of the world is constantly racialized, culturalized, and framed as a specific particularity aside from universal grand narratives. Sara Ahmed calls this process “hardenings of histories into barriers in the present” (2017: 136) and describes how those barriers are hegemonic in their invisible claim for a universal truth. But those hardenings of history accommodate only a particular group of people and their specific needs. For those accommodated, those barriers are often invisible. Scholars like Gloria Wekker (2016), Ruth Frankenberg (1993), Grada Kilomba (2017), Peggy Piesche (2017), Richard Dyer (2017), among others, have shown in their writings how naming Whiteness displaces it from the unmarked status that is itself an effect of its dominance: “the production of whiteness works precisely by assigning race to other” (Ahmed 2004). Race is a fictional construct that does not exist. But racism has real-life consequences and severe effects. However, conversations about the effects of Whiteness—critical intentions notwithstanding—risk forcing attention back to white perspectives in a self-centered manner just in moments when different voices should be heard. Hence, Ahmed (2004) provides a skeptical reading of critical whiteness studies as an anti-racist practice in her article Declarations of Whiteness. She argues that articulations of antiracist Whiteness often stay in a performative sphere and are not doing the antiracist work they claim to do.

Introduction | 29

“I will suggest that declaring whiteness, or even ‘admitting’ to one’s own racism, when the declaration is assumed to be ‘evidence’ of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what it says. In other words, putting whiteness into speech, as an object to be spoken about, however critically, is not an anti-racist action, and nor does it necessarily commit a state, institution or person to a form of action that we could describe as anti-racist. To put this more strongly, I will show how declaring one’s whiteness, even as part of a project of social critique, can reproduce white privilege in ways that are ‘unforeseen’.” (ibid.)

Ahmed furthermore describes the importance of a ‘double turn’ in critical debates about white privilege in progressive milieus: “[T]o turn [critically] towards whiteness is to turn towards and away from those bodies who have been afforded agency and mobility by such privilege. In other words, the task for white subjects would be to stay implicated in what they critique, but in turning towards their role and responsibility in these histories of racism, as histories of this present, to turn away from themselves, and towards others.” (ibid., emphasis added)

The chapters of my book navigate Ahmed’s double turn by repeatedly turning self-critically towards Whiteness, while also turning away from it and towards Haitian artists and curators and their important contributions for the decentralization of contemporary art. We will see in the course of this book how racial bias is largely unconscious and conversations about race seem to conflict with a white progressive self-image of being benign, good, and innocent (Wekker 2016). This self-image hinders the recognition and accountability of Whiteness as a “terrorizing imposition” (hooks 1997: 165-179). Many anti-racist scholars and activists have taught us: it is not a question of if we are racially biased but how white supremacy as a structure shapes our perception about the past, about the present, and the institutional reality we have inherited to keep Whiteness as a structure of discursive and material power in place. I often use myself as a placeholder in this book in order to debate how a societal structure of oppression and inequality becomes embodied in our behaviors, our emotions, and also expresses itself in everyday interactions between individuals. Saidiya Hartman (2020) warns us that the interpersonal can deflect from larger societal structures of oppression if we lose sight of the intimate structural relation racism maintains with class oppression. She writes: “The possessive investment in whiteness can’t be rectified by learning ‘how to be more antiracist.’ It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism.” (ibid.) Taking Hartman’s and Ahmed’s warnings into account, I still con-

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sider critical whiteness a productive tool to unmask the often unacknowledged epistemological dimension of Whiteness in academia and how a racialized common sense continues to shape knowledge productions. Following feminist scholar Donna Haraway (1988), I describe the knowledge I produce in this book as a situated form that rejects a fictionally disembodied universal frame of objectivity without a clear location. I will come back to hierarchical dispositions of knowledge productions in different moments throughout the book. By combining in my methodology discursive analysis with participatory observation, I also seek to describe hierarchical interactions between actors of different socio-economic strata, nationalities, and races, which often camouflage unequal hierarchies through a heroic, celebratory rhetoric of successful inter-class relationships. How do these hierarchical inter-klas interactions and the racialized common sense influence the final curatorial object selections we encounter in art museums, curatorial descriptions, and scholarly writings? The social network I inquiry ranges from (1) postcolonial art professionals who try to find mechanisms to de-exoticize redundant and stereotypical expectations for contemporary Caribbean art, (2) foreign curators and artists who are fascinated by exactly these expectations of cultural and socio-economic alterity, (3) Haitian visitors at the Gran Ri neighborhood who are also attracted by aspects of socio-economic and cultural difference, (4) casual tourists from abroad who are looking for a possibility to engage with an ‘authentic’ slum neighborhood in the ‘Global South’, (5) gallerists and collectors who capitalize on the categories ‘outsider art’, ‘vodou art’ and ‘contemporary art’, (6) NGO workers who intend to help the urban poor, (7) local owners of artisanal boutiques for artistic souvenirs, (8) politically motivated visiting artists who are searching for participants in socially-engaged art projects to produce communal inter-klas spaces, and (9) art sociologists and cultural anthropologists who analyze exactly this complex network of social relationships. To navigate a career as an artist in this social network of diverse and often conflicting interests requires flexible artistic identities. Most of the members of Atis Rezistans developed multiple discourses alongside curatorial and market-driven demands and are able to adjust simultaneously to very different interest groups for their artworks. To access the cultural archive located in our minds and feelings, a central focus of my research lies on Affect Studies, particularly the work by queerfeminist scholar Sara Ahmed. I also follow Jennifer C. Nash, who argues that one of the most crucial insights of Affect Studies has been its “invitation to consider how structures of domination feel, and to suggest that simply naming those structures fails to do justice to how they move against (and inside of) our bodies” (2019: 30). In this book, I am interested in the ways that “global politics and his-

Introduction | 31

tory manifest themselves at the level of lived affective experiences” (Cvetkovich 2007: 461). I structured the book ‘atmospherically,’ according to the following six sentiments produced through inter-klas and inter-racial relationships between Haitian artists and their network of supporters: (1) disappointment, (2) expectations of gratefulness, (3) heroism, (4) optimism, (5) anger, and (6) sympathy. Academia is a restricted social environment where white, able-bodied, male, and cis-gendered bodies take up more space and receive more recognition than others. I therefore decided on a citation policy for my academic work. I predominantly work with BIPoC scholars for the theoretical backdrop of my research in order to inscribe my work into an intersectional path of knowledge production. Ahmed explains the necessity for a better awareness of how citations can screen out certain bodies in academic spaces: “[C]itational structures can form what we call disciplines. I was once asked to contribute to a sociology course, for example, and found that all the core readings were by male writers. I pointed this out and the course convener implied that ‘that’ was simply a reflection of the history of the discipline. Well: this is a very selective history! The reproduction of a discipline can be the reproduction of these techniques of selection, ways of making certain bodies and thematics core to the discipline, and others not even part. […] I also stated that this citational structure is ‘most or usual citational practice.’ And I think within feminist and gender studies, the problem does not disappear. Even when feminists cite each other, there is still a tendency to frame our own work in relation to a male intellectual tradition.”6

CONTEMPORARY CARIBBEAN ART Curatorial interest in the artworks of Atis Rezistans started in the early 2000s. This interest relates to wider discursive formations gaining shape in the globalized artistic milieu since the 1990s, which Paul O’Neill has described as a shift from “post-modern pluralism” to “curatorial post-coloniality” (O’Neill 2012: 59). Cuban curator Gerardo Mosquera articulates the new mission statement for the artistic field since the 1990s as follows:

6

While Ahmed (2013) is mainly concerned with the discursive formations of ‘race’ and ‘gender’, I am also conentrating on how we can insert ‘class’ into this academic debate. Sara M. Mitchell, Samantha Lange and Holly Brus (2013) similarly show that men are more likely to cite other men in their academic work and that even female scholars are more likely to cite men. Although my topic is not explicitly a feminist one, I think that it is still important to clearly state that my work is embedded in feminist concerns and theory and heavily informed by a Black, feminist, intellectual path.

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“The history of art has, to a large extent, been a Eurocentric story. It is a construction ‘made in the West’ that excluded, diminishes, decontextualizes and banishes to bantustans a good part of the aesthetic-symbolic production of the world. It is becoming increasingly urgent [...] to deconstruct it in search of more decentralized, integrative, contextualized and multidisciplinary discourses, based on dialogue, hybridization and transformation, open to an intercultural understanding of the functions, meanings and aesthetic of that production and its processes.” (Mosquera 1995: 121)

These processes of including Latin American artists are not without their newly produced hierarchies. Arlene Dávila (2008) argues that survey exhibitions showing Latin American art in the United States function through an established hierarchy for Latin American countries: while countries like Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina are positioned on top and are most frequently presented in survey shows, countries of the Caribbean region are often at the bottom of this representational hierarchy. According to Dávila, this hierarchy reveals a racist underpinning of survey shows, which use the notion ‘artistic quality’ to camouflage their Eurocentric, racist bias for Latin American art: “These countries were said to have greater and longer art traditions, or to have been historically more ‘open to international art movements’, or simply to have ‘better artists.’ Marta Traba (1994), for instance, makes a distinction between ‘open-door’ and ‘closed-door’ countries. She attributes the supposedly greater artistic development of artists from Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina to the fact that those countries have received more European immigrants and thus have more contact with European art trends than the Central American and Caribbean countries. […] The racist underpinnings of these hierarchies of Latin American countries are quite apparent. What is baffling is that they continue to be veiled by notions of artistic ‘quality’.” (Dávila 2008: 127)

Artist and curator Nii Ahene’La Mettle-Nunoo argues in the exhibition catalogue to the exhibition Karibische Kunst Heute at the Documenta Halle in Kassel that “Caribbean art of the present-day, with exception of Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Haiti, did not develop far enough that it could find international recognition on a wide basis.” (1994: 114)7 He asks subsequently if the “[static style of Caribbean art] is possibly a side product that comes along with life on an

7

My translation from the German original: “Die karibische Kunst der heutigen Zeit, mit Ausnahme der von Puerto Rico, der Dominikanischen Republik und Haiti, hat sich nicht so weit entwickelt, daß sie auf breiter Basis international anerkannt werden könnte.”

Introduction | 33

island, that is exposed to the outside world only in limited ways.” (ibid.: 116)8 Through the trope of the island, Mettle-Nunoo evokes here a very problematic, colonial conception of the Caribbean region as a place of isolation, frozen in time. The Caribbean region, however, is not an island but an archipelago. In his study The Repeating Island, Cuban Novelist Antonio Benítez-Rojo (1996) resists seeing the Caribbean as an isolated entity and describes it instead as an interconnected, rhizomatic island bridge, as a meta-archipelago, without boundaries or center: “This is again because the Caribbean is not a common archipelago, but a meta-archipelago […], and as a meta-archipelago is has the virtue of having neither a boundary nor a center. […] If someone needed a visual explanation, a graphic pictures of what the Caribbean is, I would refer him to the spiral chaos of the Milky Way, the unpredictable flux of transformative plasma that spins calmly in our globe’s firmament, that sketches in an ‘other’ shape that keeps changing, with some objects born to light while others disappear into the womb of darkness; change, transit, return, fluxes of sidereal matter.” (ibid.: 4)

Martinican writer Edouard Glissant (1989) developed in the 1960s his literary and political concept of Antillanité (Caribbeanness), which also describes the Caribbean experience by accentuating a shared rhizomatic experience of multiple relationships. Antillanité intended to disassociate the regional identity from Négritude’s search for universal African, pre-colonial cultural roots: “Die Antillanité markiert einen epistemologischen Bruch mit der Négritude, denn sie bemüht sich nicht mehr um territoriale Wurzeln, und wenn schon Wurzeln, dann Luftwurzeln bzw. ‚Flugwurzeln’ oder submarine Wurzeln, dich sich in einem offenen, ephemeren Raum bewegen. [...] Glissants Ansatz der Antillanité [...] stellt der Cesaire’schen Exteriorität eine Interiorisierung der antillanischen Realität gegenüber, welche sich in einem amalgamen, synkretistischen Kultur zeigt. [...] Denn weder die Assimilation (an die Kultur der Kolonisierer) noch der Rückzug zur afrikanischen Ausgangskultur sind realisierbar. [...] Ziel der Antillanité ist es, die unterschiedlichen Geschichten der Antillen in einen Zusammenhang zu bringen, den karibischen Kontext als Zentrum zu setzen und eine über die frankophonen Antillen hinausgehende karibische Föderation, also einen unabhängigen politischen Raum zu gründen, der sich an der konkreten insulären Realität orientieren und aus der euro-amerikanischen Abhängigkeit hinausführen soll.” (Ueckmann 2014: 116117)

8

My translation from the German original: “Ist dies möglicherweise ein Nebenprodukt des Lebens auf einer Insel, die nur begrenzt der Außenwelt ausgesetzt ist?”

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Michelle Stephenson follows Glissant’s and Benìtez-Rojo’s approaches and develops an archipelagic, maritime approach for Caribbean studies, which understands the Caribbean Sea as a connector of different territories rather than a ‘sea water curtain’ or isolator: “A more maritime approach to Caribbean studies focuses in a more material way on the geoform of the island itself, on the fact that what distinguishes islands is that they are surrounded by water. For some this signifies the island’s solitariness and singularity. What the sea also signifies, however, is the island’s inescapable, littoral connectivity to everywhere else and, certainly, to other islands. […] This approach would begin from and stay with the geography of the isles, the relationships between lands and sea, even as it notes the influences of that geography on those aspects – peoples, cultures, ideas – of the Caribbean that have traveled to far-flung, diasporic, metropolitan, and continental spaces. […] It is the archipelago, as opposed to the island, that offers a vision of bridged spaces rather than closed territorial boundaries. […] Caribbean insularity emerges not as parochial, fixed, and self-enclosed but rather as a crucial component of a terraqueous planet whose land- and water-spaces are connected by a fundamentally archipelagic logic. The island becomes a rim opening the sea, in a rhythm and tension between movement and settlement, plantation colony and ship, island and mainland, land and water.” (Stephenson 2013: 11-12)

Against this background, curator Tumelo Mosaka explains that the title for his exhibition Infinite Island (2007) at the Brooklyn Museum in New York “was invoked to suggest a Caribbean space defined by its possibilities rather than its boundaries” (2007: 19). To increase pan-Caribbean links between different artists and institutions in the archipelagic region, rejecting artistic isolation and perceptions of ‘insular backwardness’ is a central, frequently-debated endeavor for many contemporary art platforms located in the Caribbean: from several biennales taking place in the region, like the first Havana biennales in the 1980s and the 1st Biennale Internationale d'Art Contemporain in Martinique in 2012, to the academic journal Small Axe, Holly Bynoe’s ARC magazine launched in 2013, to Barbara Prézeau Stephenson’s Le Forum Transcultural d’Art Contemporain taking place in Port-au-Prince since 2001 and several other residency programs by artist-run initiatives like Fresh Milk in Barbados, Alice Yard in Trinidad, or Ateliers ’89 in Aruba and, in a diasporic sense, also Alanna Lockward’s performance art festival Be.Bop: Black Europe Body Politics in Berlin.9 The problematic im-

9

These pan-Caribbean, artistic networks often seem to group themselves along traditional linguistic lines of Spanish-speaking, French-speaking, English-speaking, and

Introduction | 35

age of islands as ‘isolated places frozen in time’ shapes the larger perception of Caribbean artists as equally isolated, anachronistic, and behind the times. Art historian Leon Wainwright (2011) argues in his study Timed Out: Art and the Transnational Caribbean that the aspect of time is crucial for understanding why art history has failed to consider the Caribbean as a theme of scholarly interest: “With historicism comes the accusation of anachronism that has been an impediment to many Caribbean artists’ efforts to claim their place as artists. They have been forced to negotiate the view that their art was ‘behind the times’, the challenge of being regarded as somehow lagging behind the newest developments in the art of their day. Indeed, anachronism became the defining qualification most attached to artists of the Caribbean and its diaspora in Britain by art critics and art historians during the post-war period. [...] But no matter how deeply artists of the Caribbean and its diaspora would infiltrate those spaces, it was the politics of time that provided the myth of them as outsiders and mere mimics of European art, only ever in a process of ‘catching up’ with a heritage that was not theirs.” (2011: 4-5)

Since the 1990s, several survey exhibitions on contemporary Caribbean art in Europe and the United States have been eager to correct this imbalance by showing that Caribbean islands have indeed vibrant, contemporary artistic scenes and

Dutch-speaking islands in the region. Art professionals working in Haiti complained to me on several occasions that they often feel unnoticed by wider pan-Caribbean processes of network building, especially when it comes to English-speaking art networks. Many pan-Caribbean art infrastructures are also shaped by funding opportunities and access to resources which are particularly scarce in Haiti. Museums in the United States and Europe often offer possibilities for pan-Caribbean exchanges in survey shows about contemporary Caribbean art. Huge and expensive survey shows like the ones in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art institutions unfortunately cannot be made possible within many museums in the Caribbean (biennales are the exception). Some islands which are oversea departments also have easier access to European resources than other independent island nations. I think it is necessary for art historians to deconstruct rhetorical claims to pan-Caribbeanness and to review which artists are capable to participate in these intra-regional dialogues and who is left out from the process of pan-Caribbean network building. In brief, who are the gatekeepers of these panCaribbean contemporary art networks within the region and can we find in these networks a similar regional hierarchy like the one described by Arelene Dávila for the wider Latin American context?

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complex art histories.10 Nancy Hoffman’s survey exhibition Who More Sci Fi Than Us? (2012) at Kunsthal KAdE in Amersfoort is maybe the most literal response to the process of exclusion of Caribbean artists through temporal asymmetric oppositions.11 The title implies that it is not enough to be contemporary; Caribbean artists have to become futuristic in order to escape their former temporal asymmetrical marginalization. Most of these contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions correspond to a postcolonial critique of the 1990s, which does not follow the postmodern pluralism for art proposed by former exhibitions like Hubert Martin’s Les Magiciens de la Terre or Robert Farris Thompson’s Face of the Gods in the late 1980s and early 1990s.12 Les Magiciens de la Terre was strongly critiqued by postcolonial art

10 Here is a selection of the most important survey shows of Caribbean art in Europe and the United States since the 1990s: Karibische Kunst Heute (1994) documenta Halle Kassel, Caribbean Vision (1996) Miami Centre of Fine Arts in Florida, Caribe: Exclusión, Fragmentación y Paraíso (1998) Casa de América in Madrid, Island Nations (2005) RISD Museum of Art in Providence, Infinite Island. Contemporary Caribbean Art (2007) Brooklyn Museum of Modern Art in New York, Kréyol Factory (2009) Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris, Rockstone & Bootheel: Contemporary West Indian Art (2009) Real Art Ways in Hartford, Wrestling with the Image. Caribbean Interventions (2011) Art Museum of the Americas in Washington, Who More Sci Fi Than Us (2012) Kunsthal KadE in Amersfort, Caribbean: Crossroads of the Worlds (2012) El Museo del Barrio/Studio Museum Harlem/ Queens Museum of Art in New York, among others. 11 Nancy Hoffmann describes her title in the exhibition catalogue thus: “How could I capture the common denominator in a title without using the heavily burdened word ‘Caribbean’? I remember, it was at Kingston Airport where I bought my first copy of The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by the Dominican writer and Pulitzer Prize winner Junot Diaz. I devoured it on the airplane. On page 22, in a note, explaining why Oscar Wao had such a fascination of the science fiction genre, he stated exactly what I had always felt: ‘It might have been a consequence of being Antillean (who more sci-fi than us?).’ I couldn’t have said it any better.” (2012: 11) 12 Art historian Krista Thompson (2011) also describes how the Caribbean and the African diaspora has become a ‘master symbol’ representing post-colonial condition in general terms in the 1980s and 1990s for people, objects, cultures, and temporalities mixed or/and in motion: “There is not space here to examine what is lost and gained when the diasporic experience, often so informed by social marginalization, becomes a central paradigm that the broader society claims. Such pronouncements of and celebrations of syncretism, it is crucial to note, often continue to be enmeshed in specific

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professionals as a “mistaken division between central and peripheral modernities—the latter perceived as something exotic, archaic, or antimodern” (O’Neill 2012: 59). Or, in Rasheed Araaen’s words: “The important point is that other cultures have already aspired to modernity, and as a result have produced modern works of art.” (1989: 11) O’Neill describes this development as a shift from postmodern pluralism to postcoloniality by juxtaposing two paradigmatic exhibition modalities developed by the two curators Jean Martin Hubert and Okwui Enwezor respectively: “In distinguishing the curatorial approach of ‘Les Magiciens de la Terre’ from later exhibitions, it is important to consider representations of ‘otherness’. The former applied the rhetoric of postmodernist ‘pluralism’ of the time, while the later approaches of Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Catherine David, Charles Esche, Okwui Enwezor, Ivo Mesquita, and Gilane Tawadros could be defined as postcolonial. […] For Foster, pluralism was a sham, inasmuch as it posited a celebration of difference within popular, consumer culture, while allowing increased networks, spaces, and objects for capitalization and cultural consumption. Foster was arguing against the idea that postmodernism was simply productive, against its celebration as a breakdown of distinction between high and low cultures. On the one hand, the curatorial gesture could be seen as opening up a radical prospect, through an acknowledgment of the lack of visibility of otherness; on the other hand, it could be seen as ultimately reifying certain power relations, by failing to articulate a political context that would make more meaningful the various forms of otherness alluded to within the exhibition.” (O’Neill 2012: 57)

And he goes on to explain that for Enwezor, on the other hand, “[…] postcolonialism is not a discourse of distinction between elsewhere and here, but an entirely new way of reading the global entanglement as being postcolonial in its very nature – it is a starting point rather than an end point from which to consider our current global condition. Thus, the ‘postcolonial’ constellation’ is seen as a vast range of artistic practices that expand the definition of what constitutes contemporary culture. For Enwezor, the main point of historical intersection within this array of practices is their alignment in opposition to the ‘hegemonic imperatives of imperial discourse’.” (ibid.: 59)

national, social, and racialized debates about difference. Some parties in hailing creolization and cultural blending may in fact be hostile to the idea of African diasporic cultures.” (ibid.: 20)

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When it comes to Haiti, Gerald Alexis described in the mid-1990s that the foreign art market still tended to perpetuate the old idea that Haiti was the only country in the world whose artistic output is represented by works of ‘naïve painters’13 without any academic training (Alexis 1995: 62). Alexis attributes this to the fact that in contrast to Cuba, for example, where the international art scene was inaugurated by a group of academically trained ‘avant-garde’ artists, in Haiti this happened with the presentation of so-called ‘primitive’ painters. Critics and collectors have celebrated these painters for their ‘authenticity’ and ‘pre-modern primitivism close to nature’ while modernist Haitian artists have been criticized as ‘derivative’ for their lack of distinctiveness from supposedly European art traditions (Alexis 1995: 62). Artists from the ‘naïve’ painting tradition have been presented hyper-visibly in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ museums since the 1950s while modernist Haitian artists, like abstract painter Lucien Price, for example, have been considered derivative of a ‘Euro-U.S. American’ tradition; their art was understood as a rejection of their Haitian culture and identity (Alexis 2012: 120). Art historian Veerle Poupeye describes similar tendencies for the wider Caribbean context: “Caribbean art has developed in a polemical context and debate about its ‘Caribbeaness’ has played an integral part. It is a common notion, for instance, that authenticity in Caribbean art is measured by its independence from the Western artistic canons. This perspective has been a factor in the international success of ‘primitive’ Caribbean art and has raised questions about cultural and even racial stereotyping. Caribbean intellectuals have also questioned the metropolitan Western influences in modern Caribbean art which many see as a product of cultural imperialism.” (Poupeye 1998: 10)

13 I use the term ‘Naïve Art’ or ‘naïve painting tradition’ only with inverted commas to distance myself from the problematic connotations that come along with the name of this Haitian art genre. I understand the term ‘naïve’ in a similar historical trajectory like the term primitive art. Haitian painters have been marked through this term as archaic, pre-modern, intuitive, primitive, or more authentic in order to produce the progressiveness of ‘Western’ modern art traditions. Shelly Errington (1998) describes in her study The Death Of Authentic Primitive Art the historical process of how ‘Primitive Art’ from 1935 till 1985 was institutionalized as opposed to or as a starting point for European modernity: “Like the history of art history itself, the discourse of ‘authenticity’ and ‘the primitive’ were made possible by the metanarrative of progress. The idea of progress, in turn, rests on the notion of linear time, which took its modern form during the course of the 19th century.” (ibid.: 5)

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This dominant excitement for artists from lower socio-economic strata from the Caribbean region who proved, through their artistic practices, to be particularly ‘non-Western’ and thus ‘more authentic’ lasted till the 1990s in the ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art world. Jean Hubert Martin’s Le Magicians de la Terre exhibition is a good example of how the Caribbean region is presented solely by works of vodou-inspired feroniers (iron sculptors) from the Kwadebouke (Croix-desBouquets) artist community in Haiti in the context of contemporary art (besides Cuban artist and palero José Bedia, whose conceptual, academically-trained art practice is rooted in the Afro-Caribbean spirituality of Palo Monte Mayombe, see Bettelheim 2001: 44). I had many conversations with expats in Haiti, who still enthusiastically celebrate Haiti’s current art scene for being simply less ‘Westernized’, ‘modern’, and ‘much more authentically African’ than many other ‘Europeanized’ and thus supposedly ‘spoilt’ artists from the Caribbean region, who are described as rejecting their cultural heritage and Blackness. It is of no particular concern for this continuing search for Haitian ‘authenticity’ that the ‘naïve’ painting tradition emerged in fact as an inter-klas and transnational exchange with a network of U.S. American supporters like DeWitt Peters in a time when tourism increased on the island (Richman 2008: 211). Art historian Carlo A. Célius (2016) argues more precisely that the primitivist paradigm for Haitian art originated as an ontological judgement by the Cuban art critic José Gómez Sicre in 1945. He associated a painting by artist Philomé Obin with a previously labelled artistic style as naïve and non-modern and created the naïve art-modern art dichotomy: “The works were labelled naïve art, a genre that had already been established by the primitivist current in its later nineteenth-century European avant-garde formulation. It is in fact through the modernist invention of primitive alterity that naïve art emerges and that we are better able to understand the naïve art-modern art dichotomy. Defined as the art of the ‘Other’ by the so-called modern art that invented it, naïve art was necessarily excluded from modernity. Thus it is the discursive self-definition of the modern as such that excludes an otherness (‘othernesses’) that is also created and is constitutive of it. In this respect, naïve art participates in modernist movements.” (Célius 2016: 124-125)

Therefore, it is important to ask if the interest in Haitian art today is still influenced by the racist and simplifying paradigm described by Ella Shohat and Robert Stam: “If you are too unlike us, you are inferior; if you are too like us, you are no longer a ‘real’ black or Indian or Asian. Racism thus juggles two complementary procedures: the denial of difference and the denial of sameness.” (Stam and Shohat 1994: 24)

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DE-EXOTICIZING PARADIGMS When I asked curator, artists, and art historian Barbara Prézeau Stephenson if she considered herself to be a Caribbean artist, she rejected this label and responded with exasperation: “No, David, I’m not waking up every morning thinking about a coconut tree.” Bahamian, London-based artist Blue Curry responded in an interview to the question if he feels burdened by his decision to use an aesthetic vocabulary associated with the Caribbean region in his art with the following answer: “I hate being saddled with all of the superficial associations of the tourist destination just because the Caribbean can’t be understood in terms of critical thinking or contemporary art. I can’t tell you how many conversations I thought I was having about work which have ended as nothing more than fond recollections of sipping piña coladas while watching the sunset on a beach. Further, when you can be identified closely with a place on the periphery of the bigger art world, you’re considered an ‘international artist’, a pejorative term which is a ghetto to be avoided. If it’s not all of that to contend with, then there will be someone haranguing you about colonialism or the Diaspora and expecting that you take a position, because that is still the tired theory which is pulled out of the bag to interpret art production in the region. Identity politics are of no interest to me, and I don’t have to answer to them. I’m a visual artist born in the Caribbean who works with the image of that place, but I don’t claim to be making work representative of it, nor would I want it to be the main thing to define my practice.” (Curry, quoted in Archer 2016)

Most contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions follow a similar de-exoticizing paradigm and deconstruct prejudicial images of the Caribbean region produced through tropicalizing tourist gazes and racism.14 Curator Tatiana Flores argues that Caribbean artists are “particularly sensitive to stereotypes, and much of their work calls attention to images as illusory and insufficient” (2011: 19). Artist and

14 Art historian Krista Thompson describes in her study An Eye for the Tropics the term tropicalization or tropicality as “the complex visual systems through which the islands were imaged for tourist consumption and the social and political implications of the representations on actual physical space on the islands and their inhabitants. More specifically, tropicalization delineates how certain ideals and expectations of the tropics informed the creation of place-images in some Anglophone Caribbean islands. It characterizes how, despite the geological diversity within ‘the tropics’ and even in a single Caribbean island, a very particular concept of what a tropical Caribbean island should look like developed in the visual economies of tourism.” (2006: 5)

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curator Christopher Cozier explains that the artworks selected for his survey exhibition Wrestling with the Image “are often in contest with a much longer history of distorted representations that continue to be internally and externally manufactured” (2011: 7). He goes on to explain, “In a place like the Caribbean, we cannot take the agency of portraiture for granted, in the aftermath of a much longer history of topographical and anthropological representations. The subject position—the role of the subject—within the frame or field of pictorial representation is highly contested. Standard regional historical narratives of the Caribbean recount or register developmental shifts from persons being privately owned property— indentured workers and colonial subjects—to being citizens—of a republic, for example. But in the pictorial domain, we are still anthropological, cultural, national, ethnic or electoral commodities and signifiers. We remain labeled but nameless images. The moment of encounter and of exchange
is what is at stake. The question is whether the purpose for taking the image shifts to real portraiture and not simply image-capture, in the worst sense of the term, leaving us as subjected signs of ourselves, in a kind of cultural doppelgängering that disturbingly reminds us of our traditional role within a visual territory not exclusively of our own making, or coyly performed.” (ibid.: 9-10)

Rejecting or reclaiming contested, prejudicial images of the Caribbean region is a central curatorial framework to present contemporary Caribbean artists in survey shows. Marta Fernandez Campa describes how Wrestling with the Image “often reveals an aesthetics that […] always strategically resists categorizations and cultural reductionism. As viewers, our ability to interpret or ‘read’ artwork is constantly being challenged, that is, we are challenged to (re)consider our own perceptions, mostly although not exclusively, in regard to the Caribbean and its imagery.” (2012: 2) And Jerry Philogene highlights positively in her review of the same exhibition that “[…] brightly coloured flora and fauna, ganja-smoking Rasta men, picturesque market women, or affected vaudou imagery” (2011) were entirely absent. Many Caribbean art exhibitions also seem to counter the former desire for a Caribbean alterity with their choices of media: video art, installation art, photography, and especially conceptual art have become the dominant language of most of these exhibitions in order to reject distorted ideas of Caribbean backwardness. Many of these contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions seem to follow Terry Smith’s definition for contemporary art: “Contemporary Art is the institutionalized network through which the art of today presents itself to itself and to its interested audiences all over the word […]. Contemporary Art practice is saturated with deep, detailed—but not always (or even often) systematic— knowledge of art history.” (Smith 2009: 109)

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Director of the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Amanda Coulson, describes the general misconceptions people associate with art from the Caribbean with the following, telling juxtaposition: “How can there be critical thinking? Conceptual art? Isn’t it all ‘tourist’ or ‘native/naïve’ art? This rather condescending assumption is, however, something we are largely responsible for perpetuating ourselves due to what is close to idolatry of our massive tourism industry, which leads to our own self-stereotyping. Generally, the images that the Bahamas—and much of the Caribbean region—tends to transmit to the world confirms this. Maurizio Cattelan’s Caribbean Biennale, which offered ‘ten chosen artists a one-week vacation on the enchanting island of St. Kitts, with no art and no work to do’ really didn’t help much and was, for a person of Caribbean descent, pretty offensive, because where else in the world do you, as a rule, sit around all day under a palm tree getting drunk and being nonproductive, right? […] Again, I underscore that we ourselves are complicit in perpetuating this image, so I don’t blame the non-‘Belongers.’ One curator, walking out of Tavares Strachan’s Bahamian Pavilion in Venice last year said to me, very innocently, ‘Wow, that was surprising. It was so conceptual…’ and I just had to reply, ‘Yes, it really is surprising that we actually have concepts down there, isn’t it?’.” (Coulson in Blatt 2014)

The genre conceptual art becomes a means to counter prejudicial depictions of the Caribbean region and also a means to prove the ability to ‘think critically’. But is critical thinking and ‘naïve art’, ‘native art,’ or ‘tourist art’ really such a clear contradiction? Does Coulson’s argument need this delineation from ‘popular’ art traditions from the Caribbean region, which are mostly produced by artists from lower socio-economic strata who cannot afford academic training in art? Conceptual art is also not entirely innocent and detached from market demands: How does the interest and promotion of conceptual art relate, for example, to a particular class position and the global art market’s interest in conceptual art as one of its central commodities? We will see in the following chapters that the members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans emerged out of such a Caribbean tourist tradition and nonetheless developed a strong socio-critical approach for their artistic practices—precisely because they received opportunities to do so. These artists constantly navigate and try to escape narrow social, material, and intellectual confinements that occur when their artworks are merely perceived as craft and/or as ethnographic artifact.

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Fig.2: Assemblage Anbrase (Embrace) by Getho J. Baptiste

Inscribing oneself into Caribbean aesthetic traditions is still a possibility as long as artworks are enwrapped in an academically-trained practice and critical discourse. Artworks by Ebony Patterson, Hew Locke, Maksaens Denis, Leasho Johnson, or Minia Biabiany illustrate how an ‘aesthetics of Caribbeanness’ within the field of contemporary Caribbean art can be produced by referencing aesthetic traditions from groups of lower socio-economic strata. Patterson’s work, for example, explores masculinity in Jamaican dancehall culture and is influenced by Haitian sequin art traditions like drapo vodou (vodou flags). Tatiana Flores comments: “For too long, the region has been subjected to stereotype, but it is encouraging that artists nevertheless choose to engage local subject matter— broadly understood—instead of retreating into a hermeticist visual language that would have them deny their surroundings and background altogether.” (Flores 2011: 25) These examples show that the de-exoticizing paradigm for contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions seems to have come with a catch for artists from lower socio-economic strata, who lose the status of being subjects of their own artistic practices as they become instead objects for Caribbean artists to investigate, appropriate, and be inspired by. ‘Subaltern’ Caribbean art traditions are often present in contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions only as a reference which is being appropriated by academically trained artists or as a written reference in exhibition catalogues. Therefore, the question arises if art scholars should start to discuss things like ‘inter-class cultural appropriation’ more critically by drawing on methodologies sensitive to intersectionality and an awareness of how class

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inequalities continue to shape globalized art worlds. Are large-scale vodou flags created by Haitian artist Myrlande Constant, for example, less relevant to contemporary art than Patterson’s socio-critical works?15 I spoke about the lack of ‘subaltern’ positions in contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions since the late 1990s in an E-Mail interview with artist Charles Campbell. He explained: “You won’t find a lot of Jamaica’s poor seeking recognition from the art world. Like everywhere else in the world the contemporary art world in the Caribbean is populated by educated, middle class people. – I’m not saying this isn’t a problem, I’m saying that it isn’t a distinctly Caribbean one. With a large proportion of poor it is of course more obvious in the Caribbean. There are all sorts of problems about who is and who isn’t represented in the art world in Jamaica, but the idea that a more authentic art would come from the poor and uneducated is fraught with difficulty. Is that how we define ourselves or are defined by others?”

Bringing up the question about the inclusion of artworks by artists from lower socio-economic strata quickly raises fears of a former search for ‘authentic Caribbeanness’. But can we take for granted that Caribbean artists from lower socioeconomic strata really do not seek recognition (as well as symbolic and economic capital) from the art world, or are they simply not asked if they would like to have a seat at the same table? Writer and art critic Annie Paul points towards ‘subaltern’ visual art traditions in her article in the catalogue of the exhibition Infinite Island:

15 I juxtapose Myrlande Constant so directly with Ebony Patterson not only because of aesthetic similarities in their artistic practices but also because both collaborated with each other at the 1st Ghetto Biennale in 2009 in Port-au-Prince. Patterson is very aware of the power imbalance in her art and her work can also be understood as a mechanism to draw attention to works by drapo vodou makers as a process of valorization. But the authorship for her project remains in her hands. Myron M. Beasley, cocurator of the 1st Ghetto Biennale, describes the project as follows: “Through a narrow hallway, the bedroom of a home became an installation by Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson. Known for juxtapositions which cast known Jamaican drug kings in female drag, she worked with two Haitian flag makers, Myrlande Constant and Roudy Azor, to produce five large sequined flags. While each was dedicated to a feminine spirit with the Vodou tradition, the icon was in fact depicted as a Haitian man. Altars at the base of each emblem presented offerings of food and artifacts associated with these spiritual beings.” (Beasley 2012: 69)

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“The Caribbean is striking in having produced subalterns, or members of the underclass, with distinctive and powerful voices of their own, whether expressed in painting and religion as in Haiti or music and dance as in Jamaica. Caribbean visual art cannot model itself on narrow modernist concepts and tropes without risking extinction. […] Visual art has much to learn from this vibrant region where sound sculpts new, unimagined communities from people once treated as property.” (Paul 2007: 32)

Yet none of those artistic voices made it into the final object selection for display. What happened, after all, to Jamaica’s Intuitive Artists who were so heavily promoted and canonized by David Boxer and the National Gallery of Jamaica in 1980s (Poupeye 2007)? Or the quieter, barely researched Jamaican quilt and patchwork tradition produced by female family members?16 Is every discussion about art forms from lower socio-economic strata instantly destined to return to a ‘primitivist’ search for authenticity produced by a white (and ethnographic) gaze? Artist Mario Benjamin (2014) recounted to me that he had tried to pitch to curator Tumelo Mosaka the idea to include artworks by the members of Atis Rezistans in the Infinite Island exhibition. According to Benjamin, Mosaka decided against the presentation of these particular art objects because he considered the recuperation of detritus into art and vodou imagery simply ‘too cliché’ and ‘too exoticizing’. The long-lasting exclusion of Caribbean artists in the ‘Western’ art canon through temporal, asymmetrical counter-concepts and the simultaneous representational power bestowed upon the Haitian ‘naïve’ tradition in the ‘West-

16 Curator and former director of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Veerle Poupeye, describes her interest in Jamaican patchwork tradition as follows: “In November 2015, I conducted an interview with Jacqueline Bishop, coming out of our conversations about the ‘Explorations IV: Seven Women Artists’ exhibition at the National Gallery. That exhibition, among other things, asked why there is so little consideration, in the (art-)historical and material record, for the material creative production of Jamaican women, other than what has been consecrated as ‘fine art.’ And what has been so consecrated is constrained by narrow definitions of art and, closely related to that, a myopic, class-based view of who is an ‘artist.’ This somehow seems to affect women’s creative production more than men’s — almost all the artists who have been recognized as ‘Intuitives’ are men, for instance, in part because they more typically work in media that can be recuperated as ‘fine art’ such as ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture.’ Another reason is that women’s social roles have traditionally been defined differently across the class spectrum, with little space or recognition given to creative expressions of lower class women.” (Poupeye 2016a)

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ern’ imagination as more ‘authentic’ makes it understandably difficult today to include artists from lower socio-economic strata in contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions without falling back into the reductionist trap of postmodern pluralism. Wendy Asquith (2013-2014: 6), following Kobena Mercer, speaks of a hyper-visibility of Haitian popular artists in ‘Western’ art museums, but this hypervisibility did not lead to an open integration into global art historical narratives. Instead, it marked these artists discursively through temporal asymmetrical oppositions as ‘primitive’, ‘naïve’, or simply ‘unchanging’ and thus placed them chronologically before the meta-narrative of progressive ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art history. Caribbean artists from all layers of society have suffered from this predicament and have had to prove again and again that they are legitimate global players in the artistic field by claiming their contemporaneity and their capacity to think critically. The redundant exhibition modus of geographically defined survey shows for contemporary Caribbean art in ‘Western’ art museums is a constant reminder of this persisting problem of recognition outside a Caribbean “ethnic slot” (Puwar 2004: 70). We will see in chapter two that processes of inclusion, which often function within a logic of “conditional hospitality” (Ahmed 2012: 43), maintain the form of exclusion by articulating who is considered to be guest and who is host of these survey exhibitions. But instead of following Laymert Garcia dos Santos’ suggestion that “contemporary art needs to recognize the intrinsic value of indigenous, ethnic art, not as a treasure of universal culture, nor as a legacy from bygone time, but as art that is also contemporary” (2009: 164), many curators for contemporary Caribbean art ignore Caribbean voices from lower socioeconomic strata altogether. They do not want to risk sparking persisting resentments against a white gaze that is so intimately attached to the former historical presentation of these ‘subaltern’ art forms. A central task for my dissertation is to pursue the question if there is indeed a possibility to exhibit ‘subaltern’ artistic voices from the Caribbean region without falling back into primitivist and racist imaginaries that merely confirm existing prejudice. I will describe in chapter three that the short timeframe for the presentation of postcolonial, academically trained artists from the Caribbean region in contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions in Europe and the United States through deexoticizing paradigms has already produced a critical counter-response, which crystallizes in the emergence of the socially-engaged art festival called Ghetto Biennale. This art festival takes place within an informal neighborhood in Portau-Prince in collaboration with the members of Atis Rezistans. I analyze in this book if this counter-response to contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions is a nostalgic return to postmodern pluralism as formulated in Jean Hubert Martin’s ex-

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hibition Magiciens de la Terre or, conversely, if it opens up new fruitful conversations alongside the intersectional vectors of race and class? Kim Dovey and Ross King argue that “[p]art of the potency of the image of the slum is that of a dystopic counter-image that cuts through the dream of modernity” (2012: 287). Similarly, it seems that the artworks by the members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans and the Ghetto Biennale function as a constant reminder in contemporary art institutions that global injustice and structural violence prevail. Curatorial debates around Atis Rezistans seem to ask insistently: what about the urban poor when it comes to the field of contemporary Caribbean art? Former terms like ‘authentic’, ‘pre-modern’, ‘primitive’ or ‘intuitive’ are replaced in written curatorial descriptions of the Ghetto Biennale by the politically charged Marxist term class and evoke new politics of deviance (Cathy J. Cohen 2004) in the field of contemporary art. The situation in Port-au-Prince shows a contemporary art world that enthusiastically promotes many artists from lower socio-economic strata seeking direct recognition from the globalized art world and claiming their contemporaneity. Institutions like La Fondation AfricAmericA, the Ghetto Biennale, and a network of commercial galleries specialized in the ‘naïve painting’ tradition promote a variety of artists from different sections of Haitian society.

ART AS A POLITICS OF DEVIANCE? Political scientist Cathy J. Cohen (2004) argues in her article Deviance as Resistance that scholarship about the politics of African Americans need to overcome a bias towards a politics that is not traditionally organized, declared, and respectable. Instead, she argues for a politics of deviance, which analyzes the agency and actions of those deemed ‘deviant’, those “under surveillance, those being policed, those engaged in disrespectable behavior. Missing from this understanding of Black politics is what Robin Kelley calls ‘a politics from below’” (ibid.: 32). “Scholars, especially those interested in the evolving nature of Black politics, must take seriously the possibility that in the space created by deviant discourses and practice, especially in Black communities, a new radical politics of deviance could emerge. It might take the shape of a radical politics of the personal, embedded in more recognized Black counter publics, where the most marginal individuals in Black communities, with an eye on the state and other regulatory systems, act with the limited agency available to them to secure small levels of autonomy in their lives. […] It just might be that after devoting so much of our energy to the unfulfilled promise of access through respectability, a politics of deviance, with a focus on the transformative potential found in deviant practice, might

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be a more viable strategy for radically improving the lives and possibilities of those most vulnerable in Black communities.” (ibid.: 30)

Cohen calls for a new generation of scholars who concentrate on those marginal voices from Black communities, which many would prefer to see silenced and made invisible: “[o]nly by listening to their voices, trying to understand their motivations, and accurately centering their stories with all of its complexities in our work can we begin to understand and map the connection between deviant practice, defiant behavior, and political resistance” (2004: 33). Cohen’s argument also parallels Saidiya Hartman’s (2020) concept of waywardness as way to rethink what constitutes a radical Black tradition: What is considered a legitimate political action, what is considered respectable behavior, what exceeds the boundaries of normativity, and what fell from history because such behavior refuses to follow a politics of respectability and is deemed deviant? With the term waywardness, Hartman asks us to give more credit to those lived lives of everyday refusal as an “utopian longing and [a] promise of a future world” (ibid.: xv). Critical conversations about how politics of respectability have confined Black thought open up wider intersectional spaces for new solidarity. Both Hartman’s waywardness and Cohen’s politics of deviance help us to unfold those “silences within silences” (Trouillot 2015: 58) which were created by ignoring intra-group differences and peer-to-peer misunderstandings and violence within minority knowledge projects. Can we use Cohen’s and Hartman’s concepts in the context of a scholarship on art without reproducing longstanding racist fascinations about Afro-Caribbean art and culture? What would be at stake if we were indeed to include more artists who are “excluded from the middle-class march toward respectability” (Cohen 2004: 42) and actively refuse to be perceived as ‘respectable’? The consequences and stakes are a lot higher for Afro-Caribbean artists who constantly have to navigate their dehumanization, anti-black sentiments, and social structures of racist oppression than they are for a white, male scholar like myself asking these questions from a position of privilege. We will see in Alleviative Objects that academically trained artists and curators from Haiti are constantly brought into a position where they have to counter a credibility deficit and prove the legitimacy of their presence in ‘Western’ art institutions. Annie Paul (2003) has coined the term alter native to describe a double illegitimacy many contemporary Caribbean artists have to face in global, local, and glocal arenas. “The alter natives are the illegitimate children of the nation who by virtue of differing race, class, gender, or sexual variables find themselves on the wrong side of nation stories

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in opposition to the majority groups that assert ownership of the national or Caribbean space. Alter natives are a kind of internal refugee and suffer a double illegitimacy when they go abroad because their artistic practice is seen as elevated above or irrelevant to the realities of third-world countries by metropolitan critics. What, conceptual art in the periphery? Perish the thought. […] The alter natives are natives without narratives, or perhaps those with unpopular narratives. Often their talent is recognized abroad before it is accepted at home.” (ibid.)

I also want to draw attention to the kind of emotional satisfaction that I have repeatedly encountered in conversations about my research with white colleagues and interlocutors, as soon as I brought up categories like ‘poverty’ and ‘vodou’ in the specific context of visual art coming from the Caribbean region. Atis Rezsitans as a prolonged version of Haiti’s metaphorical status confirm anticipations. The artists are living extremely vulnerable lives, but we will see that they are at the same time quite powerful on a representational level. Ironically, conversations about Atis Rezistans’ artworks seem to make many white people feel comfortable in their identities and privileges because they confirm prejudicial ideas about what defines Afro-Caribbean art and culture. How can we disrupt usages of Atis Rezistans for the production of white progressive identities? James Scott reminds us in his study Domination and the Arts of Resistance that “most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites” (1990: 136). Cultural anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister follows Scott in arguing: “Perhaps argument about whether traditional culture is conservative or progressive, characterized by resistance or accommodation, misses the point. The relevant question may be: How does popular culture help people survive?” (McAlister 2002: 162) In contrast to McAlister’s and Scott’s perspectives, the members of Atis Rezistans are directly produced and celebrated in curatorial descriptions as a ‘subaltern’ form of decolonial resistance ‘from below’. Following McAlister’s survivalist paradigm for popular Haitian art or, in Cohens words, the decision “to make the best out of very limited life options” (Cohen 2004: 40), I will discuss how the presentation of artists from lower socio-economic strata has to come along with an awareness of specific sets of problems. We will see in this book that the social inter-klas hierarchies, which artists and objects from ‘subaltern’ milieus encounter on their journeys to Europe and the United States, are not dismantled by good intentions alone, by a support network of white curators, or by generously showing artworks within institutionalized frameworks. I will retrace how many curators fail to reflect on their own hierarchical position of power in inter-

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klas interactions with members of Atis Rezistans, and how these hierarchies in turn influence artworks and object selections for exhibitions. Granting artists from ‘subaltern’ communities new visibility in art museums does not automatically diminish social hierarchies—let alone abolish them—and does not guarantee that those artists are by the same token freely and self-reflexively articulating critical agency through their artworks. With the concept of infrapolitics, Scott (1990: 183) describes disguised forms of unobtrusive resistance which emerge in social situations of severe hierarchical difference. Thus, a central question for my study will be to discuss how infrapolitics influence art productions as well as personal inter-klas relationships between artists, curators, and scholars. Cohen also points out that, “many of the acts labeled resistance by scholars of oppositional politics have not been attempts at resistance at all, but instead the struggle of those most marginal to maintain or regain some agency in their lives as they try to secure such human rewards as pleasure, fun, and autonomy. In no way is this statement meant to negate the political potential to be found in such behavior. It does underscore, however, my stance that the work marginal people pursue to find and protect some form of autonomy is not inherently politicized work and the steps leading from autonomy to resistance must be detailed and not assumed. We must begin to delineate the conditions under which transgressive behavior becomes transformative and deviant practice is transformed into politicized resistance.” (Cohen 2004: 38)

I will show that manipulating the desires and anticipations of this visiting group from abroad is a wayward infrapolitics, which can help Haitian artists to produce new inter-klas loyalties, better access to resources, and thus more autonomy in their lives. Artists who have to use art as a survival strategy will sometimes rely on seduction, trickery, and ‘auto-orientalist’ mechanisms to sell their artworks in hierarchical dialogues. Thus, these artists can become mirrors for a racialized common sense of white curators, artists, and tourists as well as their particular research or touristic agendas. Some of the artists I came to know in Haiti do not see their artistic practice as a process of direct political action or as a genuine artistic self-expression but as a quick mechanism to gain at least a little bit of money to eat something in the evening. However, I do not want to produce a generalizing account in this book: of course, not all artists from lower socio-economic strata are unwilling to deconstruct prejudicial images through their art. We will hear many different voices which actively, and often angrily, resist prejudice and challenge the racialized common sense brought into the Gran Ri neighborhood by their network of sup-

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porters. It is important to keep in mind that developing enough self-confidence in hierarchical inter-klas relationships to articulate critique against distorted images is a difficult task, especially if many of these images are not coming from clearly degrading but also from a rather romanticizing trajectory of metaphorical anticipations about Haiti. Is a taxing endeavor for the members of Atis Rezistans to acquire self-confidence in an intimidating structure of power (e.g. the global art world), which often excludes Haitian artists on the basis of skin color, gender, class position, and nationality or by marking them “temporal guest of someone else’s home” (Ahmed 2012: 43).17 Everyone who does not fit this particular somatic norm (white, male, straight, cis-gendered, able-bodied, middle or upperclass) is read as a space invader (Puwar 2004) and is policed for being legitimately present in these social and professional environments. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ontological complicity, Puwar explains how different actors can experience social spaces differently with regard to their social disposition and learned habitus. “We all participate in the games of our field. However, some people, due to their social trajectory—most especially their class background and scholastic training—are much more inclined to have a sense of the game, as well as the ability to play it. Their social trajectories have immersed them in a habitus that is ‘immediately adjusted to the immanent demands of the game’. As Bourdieu aptly puts it, ‘they merely need to be what they are in order to be what they have to be.’ […] There are also degrees to which there is ontological complicity. Class is a crucial differentiator, and so are ‘race’ and gender. Race, class and gender don’t simply interact with each other. They can cancel each other out, and, in fact, one can compensate for the others. For instance, women who enter predominantly male environments with an élite familial or scholastic background will be inclined to have a habitus that allows for a greater degree of ontological complicity than those who have not had the same social trajectory. […] Similarly, those racialized minorities who have had an élite background will have a habitus that is much more in keeping with the demands of the field than those who have not been immersed in this environment.” (ibid.: 126-127)

Puwar goes on to describe that ontological complicity often leads to ontological denial for people who are used to benefit from this particular structure of power: “Those […] whose habitus is immediately adjusted to the demands of the field, do not feel the weight of the water, and hence they do not see the tacit normativity of their own specific habitus, which is able to pass as neutral and universal.”

17 This phrase refers to Ahmed’s concept of conditional hospitality in social processes of inclusion, to which I return in more detail in chapter two.

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(ibid.: 131) Insecurities and the lack of self-esteem are intimately linked to these social preconditions and to the capacity to relate to the construction of the somatic norm of straight, cis-gendered, white, middle and upper-class maleness. How can you become successful in the artistic globalized milieu if you are not the somatic norm and lack access to capital? How is success in the globalized art world even defined by the members of Atis Rezistans? We will see in chapter two that a framework of being socio-economically and culturally other is probably the easiest possibility for members of Atis Rezistans to move into social ‘high art’ spaces without producing irritation and discomfort for others and themselves. Claiming to be only a temporal guest of someone else’s home, for example through strong emphases on cultural and socio-economic difference, produces conditions for temporal hospitality, but it also makes sure that the artists are perceived to be not at home. A colonial logic unfolds that recentralizes white authority and inscribes Black artists into a white pedagogy (Hartman 2020) in order to create new benign self-images. I will follow Campbell’s earlier remark as a central guideline for my analysis in the following chapters and ask repeatedly: Who is really capable to define whom, when it comes to the inclusion of artworks produced by the urban poor within hierarchical infrastructures of power in the artistic milieu? Who is speaking for whom, when it comes to inter-klas and inter-racial conversations in the artistic milieu? How do disguised infrapolitics and the racialized common sense influence the art practice of Atis Rezistans and the relationships with their support network, which often seems to be in ontological denial about their own persisting hierarchical position vis-à-vis members of Atis Rezistans? While societies often operate with processes of aggressive assimilation in their engagement with cultural difference, the art world in commodified societies developed in contrast a “disarmingly friendly tolerance” (Ngai 2005: 345) for cultural difference—a tolerance which Puwar has called “an almost benevolent imperialism” (2004: 70) and Olu Oguibe a “Western obsession with and insistence on difference” (2004: xiv-xv). Graham Huggan (2001) also describes in his study The Post-Colonial Exotic how marginality is constantly packaged and reified into easily consumable exoticisms and thereby deprived of any subversive content. “Exoticism effectively hides the power relations behind these labels, allowing the dominant culture to attribute value to the margins while continuing to define them in its own self privileging terms. What is more, the value it ascribes is predominantly aesthetic: marginality is deprived of its subversive implications by being rerouted into safe assertions of a fetishized cultural difference.” (ibid.: 24)

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Thus, drawing on cultural theorist Nelly Richards (1994: 263), I argue in the course of this book that it is not enough to occasionally present objects from marginalized communities in exhibition displays. Instead, it is necessary to go further and ask: To what degree has the heterologous recuperation of the marginal become anything more than a declarative gesture? In brief, a principle guideline for my research is to show that it is crucial for art museums and curators to start changing the “terms of conversation, not just the content” (Mignolo 2011: 225).

CHAPTER OUTLINE Chapter one retraces how discussions about social marginality and class oppression in the art world can become a mechanism to produce epistemic marginalization for Haitian curators, and thereby center and authenticate the work of white curators and scholars in the discourse about contemporary art from Haiti. Despite inter-klas collaborations and complex artistic exchanges, the relationship between Atis Rezistans and the established contemporary art network in Port-auPrince has been narrated by ‘Western’ curators, scholars, and artists in terms of friction, isolation, and rejection. I will show how mobile art actors produce narratives of klas friction, which claim that the local art scene in Port-au-Prince actively disapproves of Atis Rezistans, and thereby try to assume this supposedly lacking position of support. The artworks by the members of Atis Rezistans are often read as culturalized expressions of an ‘authentic’ marginalized, socioeconomic reality. To be able tell a more nuanced story of Atis Rezistans as being deeply entangled in the larger contemporary artistic milieu of Port-au-Prince, I draw attention to (1) curator, artist, and art historian Barbara Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work in the early 2000s, and (2) to the installation art by artist Mario Benjamin. We will see how Benjamin’s artistic practice became a crucial factor for the emergence of rekiperasyon (recuperation art) in Port-au-Prince and the art spaces of the members of Atis Rezistans. I will discuss in chapter two how Haitian artists from weak socio-economic strata are welcomed in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ institutions but mainly under selfserving interests. Sara Ahmed describes processes of inclusion of racialized bodies in white institutions as manifesting logic of conditional hospitality. In this logic, acts of inclusion maintain the form of exclusion. By combining Affect Theory with discourse analysis, I show how vodou is related to processes of inclusion through an inter-klas system of rewards, which relates to the racialized common sense and grants Haitian artists visibility. This sort of visibility, however, expresses the narrow confines of the ‘Western’ art system’s self-serving in-

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terests to claim a position of benevolent tolerance. I argue in this chapter that by renouncing vodou in their artistic and curatorial practices, Haitian artists and curators intend to regain their representational autonomy after vodou has been used to culturalize and reify their artworks within “ethnic slots” (Puwar 2007: 40) as something easily consumable and readable for ‘Western’ audiences. Vodou, as an artistic inspiration within the Gran Ri neighborhood, is a representational conflict. But it is never presented as such in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ exhibitions, which solely focus on allegedly ‘authentic’, culturally intelligible dimensions within the art practices of Atis Rezistans. Curators tend to obscure their own influence on the history of these artworks through curatorial selection processes. I argue that by doing so, many curators write themselves out of the object histories and end up downplaying persisting inter-klas hierarchies. In chapter three, I will analyze the politics of emotions produced by the socially-engaged art project called Ghetto Biennale. This art event takes place every two years in the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue Magasin de L’Etat in Port-au-Prince. It is curated by Leah Gordon and André Eugène and intends to reverse the logic of conditional hospitality by making the members of Atis Rezistans hosts of their own art event. I conceptualize the Ghetto Biennale as an artistic form of poverty tourism and as a curated social situation that is trying to bridge klas barriers. The art event is a challenging emotional endeavor which produces “politics of pity” (Luc Boltanski 2004: 21) as a coping mechanism through the direct interaction of (white) privilege with (Black) marginality. This challenging social situation often leads visiting artists to produce harmonious performances of inter-klas togetherness that risk silencing critical community voices behind a façade of excitement and heroic entitlement. Chapter four analyzes how the infrastructure of power of the art community living at Gran Ri has been fundamentally altered since the Ghetto Biennale has started to take place in downtown Port-au-Prince. André Eugène could establish himself as the leader of the group and has developed a gwo-nèg (big man) system that draws many resources and attention to his musée d’art. The anger articulated by other artists living in the neighborhood, who refuse to follow the script of harmonious inter-klas togetherness, is frequently read not as a form of critical resistance against persisting forms of privilege, Whiteness, and inter-klas dependencies but is instead trivialized and banalized as envy or bitterness by visitors from abroad. Instead, I offer a reading which approaches these articulations of anger by highlighting their critical agency. The banalization of community antagonism and the inability to accept the critical agency contained in these emotions deflects responsibility away from the situation and increases the affective alienation of local artists from the Ghetto Biennale. In the second half of the

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chapter, I shift the focus away from the founding fathers of the group and introduce two artists who have so far received less international attention: Getho Jean Baptiste and Alphonse Jean Jr. a.k.a. Papa Da. Taking all previous chapters into account, I argue in chapter five that attempts to include cultural and socio-economic alterity in the form of reified and commodified art objects in highly policed exhibition environments are seldom a real threat to a given order, as their critical agency remains limited. The Ghetto Biennale exemplifies on the other hand that abandoning art institutions altogether and traveling to the ‘margins’ does not leave a racialized common sense behind, as it is not only manifest in institutions but also in our minds and feelings. I suggest that decolonial approaches have to start as projects of mental and material decolonization that seek to deconstruct precisely that racialized common sense in all of us. However, it is also necessary to go further and leave the field open for specialists of ‘originating communities’ to integrate their disobedient musealities in art institutions in order to dismantle the persisting colonial logic of museal systems, which often manifests in (1) a rhetoric of generous inclusion, and (2) in a progressive racist logic that performs white progressiveness rather than actively seeking to dismantle racist epistemologies. In conclusion, I explore the question if autonomous curations of Black artists from lower socio-economic strata can effectively contribute with their politics of deviance to a decolonial modification of the official chain of power in the globalized artistic milieu without being merely inscribed into white pedagogies as alleviative objects that perform emotional labor for white audiences. As conclusion and outlook, I argue that the artistic field should aspire to the creation of new sites for a radical reformulation of relationality and establish intersectional solidarities outside common social contracts.

1

Sharing Silences: Inter-klas Dialogues in the Art Scene of Port-au-Prince

In the following two chapters, I will analyze the process of how the group Atis Rezistans emerged in the art world of Port-au-Prince in the late 1990s, and how curators have presented these artists from weak socio-economic backgrounds in different curatorial frameworks around the world in the last sixteen years. While the members of the group are living in a bidonvil (shantytown) and struggle with extreme poverty on a daily basis, their art objects are presented in museums by international curators, discussed by scholars, and consumed by educated elites. Since their first exhibition at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA in Port-au-Prince in 2001 the artists and their artworks have moved between extreme socioeconomic strata and within hierarchical social interactions. I will analyze the strategies that the artists developed to be able to attract the attention of the diverse and heterogeneous audiences for Haitian art. These strategies helped the founding members of the group, Jean Herald Celeur and André Eugène, to dissociate themselves from being perceived as solely producers of ‘tourist craft’ and to transition into the prestigious field of contemporary art. The exhibition history of the group started in the late 1990s, when Eugène opened his own atelier as a musée d’art (art museum) and invited art enthusiasts to witness the artworks produced in the informal neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat in downtown Port-au-Prince. Although it is important to recognize Celeur as the founder of the movement1, I consider both Celeur and Eugène

1

I understand that this perspective is of particular importance for Celeur, because I found several early publications which named Eugène incorrectly as the ‘progenitor’ of Atis Rezistans and even labeled Eugène Celeur’s teacher (e.g. Gordon 2007; Beasley 2012). Celeur’s prime importance for the movement is not contested in any way within the group and is repeatedly stated by everybody involved.

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the two founding fathers of Atis Rezistans. While Celeur was the first artist who brought the new artistic style rekiperasyon (recuperation) into the neighborhood and developed a new artistic language to dissociate art aesthetically from ‘tourist craft’ produced in the area, Eugène, on the other hand, was the first artist who significantly re-branded his atelier as a musée d’art (art museum). He offered his own museal framework for artworks produced in the neighborhood and reappropriated a supposedly boujwa (bourgeois) art institution for his own local terms. This decision established a community-based form of art tourism by employing a language that the globalized contemporary art world could easily understand and recognize. Celeur’s new artistic style in conjunction with Eugène’s museum framework quickly attracted the attention of an art milieu from higher socio-economic strata. The sculptures and assemblages travelled in the following years first to the art institutions of Port-au-Prince, like Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA, the MUPANAH museum, and L’Institut Francais, and expanded from there into the wider Caribbean, to Barbados, Jamaica and Cuba. Since 2004 the art objects have been presented in the United States, and since 2007 in European art museums. Attached to these different locations are also different curators who express a variety of ideological agendas within their curatorial practices. Cultural theorist and curator Bruce Ferguson (1996) understands exhibitions as ideological media. He argues that exhibitions are by no means neutral rhetorical transmissions of information but “strategic system[s] of representation” (ibid. 1996: 178). Following Ella Shohat and Robert Stam 1994: 180), I argue that it is not enough to say that art is constructed; we have to ask: constructed for whom, by whom, and in conjunction with which ideologies and discourses? The story of Atis Rezistans is mostly narrated by a central emphasis on their socio-economic position in society as a group of artists living and working in a bidonvil in Haiti. Because of this socially marginal living situation, the artists are often wrongfully understood as isolated from the larger established contemporary art network in Port-au-Prince. Since the early 2000s curator, artist and art historian Barbara Prézeau Stephenson and her Port-au-Prince-based institution for contemporary art, La Fondation AfricAmericA, helped the first generation of Atis Rezistans, namely Eugéne, Celeur and Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, to connect quickly with a network of established art actors from Port-au-Prince. I will describe the artistic field of Port-au-Prince through the case study of Atis Rezistans as a dynamic, shifting, and evolving process of different inter-klas negotiations and thus distance myself from approaches which tend to describe Atis Rezistans in generalizing terms as a self-contained, isolated artistic and social sphere within popular Haitian culture.

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I will concentrate on Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial groundwork with a special focus on her sculptures urbaines exhibition series developed in the early 2000s. This series introduced the Gran Ri artists to a contemporary art milieu and paved the way for their international recognition in the Caribbean, Europe, and the United States. Prézeau Stephenson also helped Eugène and Celeur to open up the area to attract visitors to come and see the art produced within the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat. I will discuss in chapter three the social dynamics and politics of emotions of this artistic poverty tourism at lengths. This chapter also focuses on renowned painter and installation artist Mario Benjamin’s direct artistic influence on two generations of rekiperasyon artists in Haiti since the 1990s. His influence on artistic production and exhibition modalities from artists from weak socio-economic strata demonstrates, similarly to Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work, that we cannot understand the ‘popular’ and the ‘elite’ artistic spheres in Port-au-Prince as two isolated social and aesthetic strands. While many foreign curatorial descriptions seem to underline aspects of social friction in Port-au-Prince, local curators and artists, by contrast, produce shared narratives of commonality and intend to bring Haitian artists from different milieus closer together.

1.1 NARRATING CLASS FRICTIONS Cultural historian Richard A. Long underlines the historical tensions which existed between artists from two different socio-economic strata in Haiti since the foundation of Le Centre d’Art in 19442:

2

American painter Dewitt Peters founded Le Centre d’Art in Haiti in 1944. Le Centre d’Art offered art education and exhibition spaces for a wide range of artists coming from very different sections of Haitian society: “The Centre d’Art was opened to all, regardless of their social origins or lack of artistic training, but the unexpected arrived: popular artists came with works that ignored Western conventions. The first were stacked in a closet and disregarded by unappreciative curators until the Cuban art critic José Gomez Sicré pointed out their originality. […] Early photographs of Vodun temples have revealed that these so-called primitive artists were part of a greater pictorial tradition that developed alongside the growth of the popular religion.” (Alexis 2012: 118) These popular artists have been rebranded as ‘primitive’ or ‘naïve’ artists and attracted the attention of French Surrealist André Breton and Cuban painter Wifredo Lam. Both visited Le Centre d’Art in 1944. Breton claimed that these ‘naïve’ Haitian artists were fellow Surrealist and organized several exhibitions for them in Europe (Stokes 2012: 235). The promotion of ‘primitive art’ as the only true Haitian

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“[I]t is obvious that tension has existed between the widely known ‘primitive’ artists of Haiti, who are predominantly of lower class origin and relatively unschooled, and the trained, academic artists, who are almost exclusively bourgeois in their social origins and are products of Haiti’s francophone culture. This friction has been felt primarily by artists of the latter group. Furthermore, certain members of the Haitian elite are uncomfortable with the representation and interpretation of their land and culture by these popular painters.” (Long 1995: 66)

According to Long, we need to accept that, “[a]ll of these artists, their activities and achievements belong to the narrative of Haitian Art” (ibid.: 68). Art historian Wendy Asquith observes that, historically, “[d]espite the evident exchange between ‘bourgeois’ or ‘sophisticated’ artists and ‘popular’ or ‘primitive’ artists at the Centre d’Art, these two strands of Haitian art and art history have usually been treated as separate developments” (2012: 41). Similar divisive narratives, which put a strong emphasis on class frictions in the artistic milieu of Port-auPrince, are in place and common today.3 Literary scholar Carolyn Duffey states

art tradition quickly overshadowed efforts by artists that developed art within a modernist tradition, as they were regarded as derivative copyists following European trends. Conversely, art historian Gerald Alexis argues: “Yet the most important factor that allowed for a transition to modernism was the coexistence within the Centre of both self-taught artists and those who had received some formal training. The primitive artists’ formal qualities as well as their continual reference to myths and legends relating to Vodun beliefs informed the work of their academically trained peers.” (Alexis 2012: 120-121) 3

For a more general perspective on the ambivalent relations of Haitian elites to ‘popular culture’, see (Trouillot 1990). Trouillot describes that besides the historical elite’s obvious admiration for French culture, the Haitian elite also proudly engaged with several ‘indigenous’ practices and the Kreyòl language: “Haitian writers [for example] have rarely presented the West as a sociocultural ideal in toto, even though they clearly saw France, Germany, Holland, and the United States […] as imitable superiors in specific domains. But even those specific achievements did not imply the innate superiority of the ‘whites’, inasmuch as many Haitian literati genuinely believed in the perfectibility of all human groups – the ultimate primacy of culture over nature. Within that framework, the recognition of Western achievements did not carry with it the need to reject all indigenous practices. Thus, while the Haitian elites placed French literature on a pedestal, they reserved for themselves the right to speak the native language, to sing Creole songs, to write the beauty of the peasant woman in verses patterned after what they perceived as the latest Parisian literary style. […] While they

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in an article published in 2017: “the ‘bourgeois’ Haitian artist establishment actively disapproves of the work of Atis Rezistans” (2015). I heard several times similar assessments by visiting foreigners in conversations during my fieldwork in Haiti. These, however, are generalizing statements that need closer analysis. The relationship between Atis Rezistans and the established artistic network is commonly narrated in terms of friction, conflict, rejection, and isolation. Eugène’s own argumentation on why he decided to open his own art museum apparently comes along with an explicit ‘class narrative’. He explains: “I had the idea of making a museum in my own area, with my own hands, because the artists here never had their own thing. They always let the Big Man exploit them.” (Eugène 2010: 492) Eugène expresses the desire to create an autonomous art space where visitors are able to see the artworks without mediation and support from a klas piwo a (higher class). The current manager of the group, British photographer, filmmaker, and curator Leah Gordon also introduces Atis Rezistans often by highlighting the importance of class for the group of artists: “Atis Rezistans had noticed how class, rather than race or nationality, seemed to be a barrier of entry to the so-called ‘globalised’ international art circuit. The two or three Haitian artists that seem to repeatedly represent Haiti in Venice, Johannesburg and São Paulo biennales were all from the middle to upper class of Haitian society.” (Gordon 2015) These two or three Haitian artists who have been occasionally given the task—and burden—to represent Haiti internationally have, in fact, also been the first central support-network for Atis Rezistans since the early 2000s. This network is very much part of the struggle to plug Atis Rezistans into global art networks. Although surely more privileged—in terms of education and financial resources—than the members of Atis Rezistans, this contemporary art network invested a lot of energy and time into promoting the artworks by Atis Rezistans locally and internationally. ‘Class friction narratives’ are central to Atis Rezistans’ global recognition and can be seen as a crucial mechanism to open doors to include Atis Rezistans into institutionalized networks. These narratives enabled the artists to participate in exhibitions in prestigious art venues like the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011, the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014, or the Nottingham Contemporary in Nottingham in 2012. Atis Rezistans presented in art museums seem to get repeatedly reintroduced, re-institutionalized and rediscovered in a circular motion and in repetitive processes of inclusions. Despite severe social inequalities, the art world

proudly adopted European manners, they also engaged proudly in many indigenous practices that they judged worthy of their time and attention.” (116)

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of Port-au-Prince is not a homogenous entity: while some art professionals may disapprove of the Gran Ri artists and feel misrepresented by their numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States, we will see in this chapter that several art actors based in Port-au-Prince have been crucial for their global recognition. Since the early 2000s, especially Barbara Prézeau Stephenson has helped Atis Rezistans to connect with a network of established art actors living in Haiti, like installation artist and painter Mario Benjamin, curator Giscard Bouchotte4, gallerist and curator Reynald Lally, video artist Maksaens Denis, art historian Sterlin Ulysee, or gallerist and curator Mireille Pérodin Jérome, among others. Prézeau Stephenson also helped to introduce the artists to new international audiences through her cooperative biennale project titled Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain. So far, there has been little academic research that examines exactly these inter-klas dynamics and local supportive art networks. Instead, the sculptors are mostly culturalized through their marginalized socio-economic position in society and described as an expression of an allegedly ‘authentic’ ‘working class’ culture of the mas pèp-la (common people) and as a form of autonomous ‘subaltern’ resistance from below. Several art actors from Haiti complained in interviews with me that they feel treated with hostility by ‘Western’ art professionals who sometimes label them as “selfish, privileged bourgeois” in conversations. What are the politics behind these narratives of ‘class friction’, which seem to be incapable of accepting and reviewing Atis Rezistans’ long-lasting partnership with a network of local supporters from higher socio-economic strata? Gordon stated in a conversation with me in 2013 that, in her eyes, the only ‘authentic’ form of art produced in the Caribbean region is the one produced by the Haitian working-class and that her residency project Ghetto Biennale enables ‘Western’ artists to engage with an ‘authentic’ slum neighborhood in the ‘Global South’. However, Stuart Hall deconstructs the idea of ‘popular culture’ as an ‘authentic’, separate ‘way of life’ by arguing that there is no separate, autonomous or ‘authentic’ layer of working-class culture “outside the field of force of

4

Curator Giscard Bouchotte collaborated multiple times with the artists of Grande Rue and Rue Magasin de L’Eta for several group exhibitions. He crucially helped to integrate the artists into global art trajectories for contemporary art. See for example: 1st Haitian Pavillon Haiti Kingdom of this World at the Venice Biennale in 2011, Global Caribbean III Haiti Kingdom of this World in Miami in 2011, Haïti Royaume de ce monde at Halle Vital in Jacmel in 2013, Nuite Blanche in Port-au-Prince in 2015, among many others. He also has been part of La Fondation AfricAmericA and Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain in the early days of his career in the 2000 years.

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the relations of cultural power and domination” (1998: 447). Hall proposes instead a definition of popular culture, which has to be analyzed in dialectical relations to a dominant culture: “[W]hat is essential to the definition of popular culture is the relations which define ‘popular culture’ in a continuing tension (relationship, influence, and antagonism) to the dominant culture. It is a conception of culture which is polarized around this cultural dialectic. It treats the domain of cultural forms and activities as a constantly changing field. Then it looks at the relations which constantly structure the field into dominant and subordinate formations. It looks at the process by which these relations of dominance and subordination are articulated. [...] Its main focus of attention is the relation between culture and questions of hegemony. What we have to be concerned with, in this definition, is not the question of the ‘authenticity’ or organic wholeness of popular culture. Actually, it recognises that almost all cultural forms will be contradictory in this sense, composed of antagonistic and unstable elements.” (Hall 1998: 449)

This definition is all the more important in the context of Atis Rezistans because we are dealing with a group of artists from weak-socioeconomic strata who acquired ‘high cultural value’ within the field of contemporary art in Haiti since the early 2000s and explicitly describe their assumed and preferred target audience as blan (foreign) visitors and museums from abroad. Inter-klas connectedness and complex inter-textual artistic exchanges in this context are very much a given and contradict the idea of a particular ‘working-class authenticity’ in the art milieu of Port-au-Prince. I do not want to imply here that inter-klas relationships in the art world of Haiti are free of conflict—quite the contrary—but we will see in this chapter that the history of Atis Rezistans cannot be understood without this formative local network of support. Michel-Rolph Trouillot helps to contextualize this in the wider societal context of Haiti: “The danger for taking Haiti for a caste society lies not in the observations upon which that analysis is based—Haiti is undeniably a society split in two—but in focusing on the split between elites and masses, rural and urban, mulâtre and black, French and Creole, or Christian and Vodoun believer, we run the risk of masking the exchanges and contacts underlying these oppositions.” (1990: 81)

Leftist-motivated ‘Euro-U.S. American’ supporters of Atis Rezistans often use Marxist terms to describe the sculptors’ position in Haitian society by highlighting Haiti’s social class divide. Marxist terms as analytical categories are unsatisfactory in the specific context of Haiti because Haiti historically never possessed

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a bourgeoisie but a merchant class. Cultural anthropologist Mark Schuller (2012: 58) therefore recommends the culturally meaningful distinctions kouch sosyal (social stratum) and klas (class) as alternative, emic terms. My interlocutors use the terms klas anba (lower class), klas piwo a (higher class) or klas privilèjye (elite) to describe their own position in Haitian society, and I therefore use these terms throughout this book. I will put a strong focus in the second half of this chapter on Prézeau Stephenson and her early curatorial work with Atis Rezistans between 2000 and 2006. My focus on Prézeau Stephenson highlights that she has proposed an important counter-narrative that barely finds recognition in current discourses of the presentation of the Gran Ri artists in Europe and the United States. My focus on Prézeau Stephenson’s individual curatorial practice is not meant to substitute a Haitian ‘truth’ for ‘Euro-U.S. American’ ‘falsehood’. But it is symptomatic and telling that a female Haitian curator who works predominantly in Haiti and strongly favors horizontal, decentering, and pan-Caribbean artistic networks can still barely find recognition for her work in Europe and the United States. Haiti’s first biennale project for contemporary art curated by Prézeau Stephenson since 2001, Le Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain, unfortunately has received little academic attention; Leah Gordon’s Ghetto Biennale, by contrast, attracts widespread scholarly attention. The focus of my work is mainly informed by hierarchical inter-klas relationships between members of Atis Rezistans and their various curators, but it is equally important to explicitly underline the existing hierarchical constellation between different curators, which I intend to describe in a wider global framework of whiteness and privilege in the globalized artistic milieu. The following two chapters also seek to give an answer to the question why different curators dealing with similar artistic productions from Haiti in their curatorial work have achieved very different degrees of attention in the ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art world. A central argument of this book is that we need to understand how narratives of ‘class friction’ are not only a mechanism to produce attention for artworks by Atis Rezistans but they are also a mechanism for white curators to gain symbolic capital on the artistic field for generously paying attention to artworks produced by the ‘urban poor’. I encountered in my fieldwork in Haiti a certain paradox: while Haitian curators dealing with Atis Rezistans seem to get eyed with suspicion for their supposedly privileged position in Haitian society, equally privileged white curators can stage themselves as generous helpers of the urban poor for a similar task—and their symbolic capital rises exponentially. I argue that the widespread narrative of ‘class friction’ should not be understood solely as an innocent, empathetic identification with the urban poor; it also needs to be analyzed as a discursive

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mechanism which re-centers white curators in the discourse about Caribbean art as naming authorities. If travelling curators are able to convincingly produce a narrative that proves that the local art scene in Haiti—and the Caribbean at large—actively disapproves of the artworks by Atis Rezistans, these travelling curators can successfully provide that supposed lack of support and become heroic helpers for artists from a bidonvil neighborhood in Port-au-Prince. Travelling curators can thus camouflage their ontological complicity with hierarchical systems of power like class, nationality, and skin color by redirecting and deflecting the discussion about this complicity onto established art agents from Port-au-Prince. The conversation about class is often presented in these narratives as more relevant than talking about race. By constructing the entire established local art world of Port-au-Prince as a problem, white curators and scholars are able to present themselves to be part of the solution. Colin Dayan describes a similar process in a wider context of metaphorical representations of Haiti in relation to the US: “If Haiti stands as a metaphor for misery, for helplessness, then the outsiders can assume that such a nation needs the United States to save it.” (2010) I will relate this discussion in chapter two to Miranda Fricker’s (2007) concept of epistemic injustice and how certain groups are denied the capability to make sense of their own social and emotional experiences in unbalanced relationships of power; some social groups have less epistemic credibility than others. Narratives of ‘class friction’ run the risk of ignoring and passing over the hard work of local, established art actors and recentering white curators as naming authorities within the discourse of contemporary Haitian art in the global arena. Atis Rezistans become in this reading an authenticating mechanism for white scholars and curators and their work. Class narratives can be seen as a mechanism which articulates in a museum or university context, ‘you and me, we are standing on the same hierarchical position, when it comes to the urban poor in Haiti’ and thus ‘we are both equally legitimate to speak about Haitian art and culture.’ But these imagined ‘you’ and ‘me’ are not necessarily in the same position of power when it comes to the larger globalized artistic field where BIPoC curators and scholars find less institutional support.5

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Ryan C. Briggs and Scott Weathers analyzed for the academic context that Africanbased scholars are systematically cited less than others even within the ‘ethnic slot’ of research about Africa. They found evidence in support of the claim that most of what is received as knowledge about Africa is produced in the ‘West’. They explain that Africa-based scholars are more likely to write on a small number of countries and are less willing to generalize about the whole continent. Articles published by Africanbased academics in African Affairs and The Journal of Modern African Studies are de-

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Many white curators, however, do not see this power imbalance because of ontological denial produced through ontological complicity. Hence, these curators prefer to take up neutral, observing positions and do not include themselves into descriptions of the hierarchical power relations they often criticize. We will see in the wider context of my book that the members of Atis Rezistans have themselves stakes in helping to produce the desire in visitors to feel accomplished and heroic in their socially-engaged endeavors and to become generous helpers of the ‘urban poor’. The members of Atis Rezistans often play directly into the hands of this discourse, which I will also describe in chapter two and three as a form of progressive racism (Ahmed 2016) that re-centers a white subject to remain in the position to be the one who feels active, heroic and giving to nonwhite others. It may be easy to criticize ‘Western’ curators working in Haiti for remaining ontologically complicit with systems of power and taking advantage of their structural position. However, I am more interested to show in this book how these mechanisms are indirectly ensured and actively concealed through narratives of empathetic identifications with the ‘urban poor’. In the article The Dark Side of Empathy, cultural anthropologists Rane Willerslev and Nils Bubandt (2014) challenge the widespread tendency to associate empathy merely with a morally and socially ‘good’ virtue. This perspective ignores the multiple ways in which empathy can be deployed for deceptive purposes of manipulating, seducing, and even dehumanizing others. The narrative of empathetic identification in my discussion can be described in Bubandt’s and Willerslev’s term as a form of “tactical empathy” (ibid.: 6), especially if curators from abroad stage themselves as committed partners of the ‘subaltern’ klas in Haiti by distancing themselves from the local established art community. I argue that it is crucial to ask who produces narratives of ‘class friction’ from which social position and for what particular purpose? Who is speaking for whom, when it comes to debates about class within the artistic field, and who can and who cannot acquire symbolic capital through these debates? A central concept that underpins my overall argument is asymmetrical interdependence (asymmetrische Interdependenz) by sociologist Larissa Buchholz (2008). Based on a sociological field analysis as developed by Pierre Bourdieu, Buchholz presents a pessimistic and critical evaluation of the state of the decentralization of global art, which still gravitates dominantly around the symbolic

clining over time. They argue, “[w]e present evidence suggesting that this decline is being driven by low and falling acceptance rates for African-based authors rather than declining rates of submission” (Briggs Weathers 2016: 2).

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capital of ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art institutions and their actors. Her analysis of biographies of ‘non-Western’ artists shows that physical presence within the ‘Western’ art centers is required for being able to accumulate symbolic capital. The majority of ‘non-Western’ artists who have been able to position themselves successfully between 1970 and 2005 in the artistic globalized milieu were dominantly living in artistic centers like New York, Paris, or Amsterdam for long periods of time (ibid. 2008: 224). It is equally significant to acknowledge that institutions in these cities are often still homogeneously white spaces.6 The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation partnered with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) to conduct a demographic survey within art museum staff in the United States. In 2015, 84 percent of the average museum’s staff members in the curatorial, educational, and administrative departments are ‘non-Hispanic’ and white, only four percent are Black and three percent are Hispanic (Mellon Foundation 2015). The objects and artists on display seem to be able to get increasingly diversified in the discourse on Haitian art but the control remains in white curatorial hands and frameworks supported by monthly paychecks.

1.2 ARTISTIC KLAS ISOLATION The several members of Atis Rezistans became a common motive for artistic and journalistic portrait photos since the early 2000s. Photographers and artists like Alice Smeets, Paolo Woods, Leah Gordon, Felipe Jácome, Fred König, Laura Heyman7, and Ben Depp, among others, have portrayed the artists throughout the

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Arlene Dávila’s work complicates the debate. She describes for the ‘U.S. American’ context how US Latin American artists who grew up in the United States also have been systematically excluded from survey shows on Latin American Art for being not ‘authentic Latin American’: “At this time, while still marginalized in comparison with mainstream art, Latin American art began to be the subject of more attention and exposure, though this interest did not benefit all ‘Latin American artists’ equally. In particular, art scholars were quick to note that U.S. Latino/a artists, that is, artists who were born in the United States or have lived and worked most of their lives here, and who are therefore likely to be considered bicultural U.S. minorities rather than citizens of Latin America, were especially passed by the ‘Latin art boom’.” (Dávila 2008: 121)

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Laura Heyman’s portraits of the artists differ from the common perspective of portrait photographs I describe in this chapter. She created for example a photo studio in the Gran Ri neighborhood during the 1st Ghetto Biennale, where she asked individuals from the community to sit for free portraits in front of a backdrop that was fading out the larger context of the bidonvil surrounding. Curator Myron Beasley describes this

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years. What many of these portraits have in common is that the artists are often depicted in a similar, staged setting within the Gran Ri neighborhood. They are repeatedly presented within their local neighborhood standing, sitting, or working in their ateliers surrounded by an overwhelming multitude of different art objects.8 A common example for such a portrait photo was shot by Canadian photographer Paolo Woods for his photo series LETA (State).9 The series was published in book format in 2014 and portrays a wide cross-section of contemporary Haitian society: from politicians, street merchants, NGO workers, artists, American Evangelicals, farmers, police officers, to school children. One of Woods’ portraits shows the two young artists Romel Jean Pierre and Racine Polycarpe sitting on a table in the community area in Eugène’s musée d’art. Both are looking intently at a laptop screen while Eugène’s huge assemblages build the backdrop for the composition. The two young artists are overshadowed by these big assemblages and positioned in the lower right corner of the photo. Presenting artists within the spatial setting of their ateliers and in relation to their artworks relates of course to a common art historical tradition for artist portraits. But the bodies of the members of Atis Rezistans are also virtually fixed within the confines of the surrounding of their local neighborhood. A quick google search for the category ‘Atis Rezistans Haiti’ shows the redundancy of this circulating motif which, I argue, overemphasizes the social immobility many of these artists experience in their lives and produces a metonymic relationship between Black bodies, informal neighborhood, and recuperation art. This over-

project as follows: “Photographer Laura Heyman, whose roaming formal portrait studio occupied the middle of the neighborhood, invited families and individuals from the community to sit for a free portrait as they, the subjects of the images, decided how they wanted to be photographed. Reminiscent of the L’Age d’Or movement of African photography, where the subjects of the images, decided how they wanted to be photographed.” (Beasley 2012: 73) 8

I want to thank Port-au-Prince-based photographer Josué Azor for the important observation on the fact that Atis Rezistans are rarely presented outside the confines of their local neighborhood.

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Paolo Woods teamed up with Swiss journalist Arnaud Robert and published the series as a book. It was an important concern for Woods and Robert to show the portraits in Port-au-Prince. They organized an open-air exhibition at Champ de Mars in 2014 to reach a wide audience and they presented twenty-five prints glued to the outside walls of the Faculté d’Ethnologie. Le Nouvelliste reported several times about the exhibition (Ladouceur 2014).

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emphasis disguises the fact that Atis Rezistans are constantly moving in different socio-economic strata in Port-au-Prince. They are moving within inter-klas networks in the cityscape of Port-auPrince and participate in dialectical and intersectional social exchanges in the local art world: They visit cultural events of international embassies, participate in openings at the Institut Française or La Fondation AfricAmercA, they give interviews in hotel restaurants to international journalists, go to parties of befriended expats, and travel abroad following invitations to attend congresses and exhibition openings. Institutions like La Fondation AfricAmericA as well as commercial galleries for the ‘naïve painting’ tradition illustrate that ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ forms of art in Port-au-Prince are intertwined with each other and are not produced in neat social and artistic isolation. Portrait photos depicting the members of Atis Rezistans dominantly within the confines of their neighborhood are part of this wider discourse, which reproduces Atis Rezistans as somehow fixed within the territorial boundary of their neighborhood—almost as if their ateliers were their ‘natural’ habitat. Nirmal Puwar describes an affective discomfort that cultural anthropologists can experience when they encounter their ‘native’ interlocutors outside their expected framework: Fig. 3: Portrait of André Eugène and Jean Herald Celeur in front of Eugène’s sculptures, photo taken by Felipe Jacome in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Felipe Jacome

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“The arrival of a feathered Indian with a Parker pen (an instrument of technology that has written the world into being) into the reading-room (a place from where the world is contemplated) is discomforting not merely because the analytical categories of this scholar are not sophisticated enough to fit the image, but, more importantly, because the very identity of the intellectual as sovereign knower of the world is called into question. By moving out of the frames through which s/he is known, the ‘native’ is not just dislodging how s/he has been classified, but also how the Western scholar has framed himself. […] What becomes evident in this encounter is that there is a psychic/social/physical territorial boundary which marks the separation between the ever so interesting and even ‘wise’ cultures of ‘other’ worlds and the place of the Western intellectual who brings the voice of reason to each of his collections.” (Puwar 2004: 44-45)

The question arises if a similar discomfort manifests in those circulating portraits that fix the members of Atis Rezistans in their neighborhood and, therefore, do not give them a chance to escape the spatial confines of their social klas background, preferring instead to normalize their physical bodies in a ghettoized everyday environment? The importance of inter-klas artistic dialogues for the development of art in Haiti is rhetorically often only a subordinate clause or a footnote when it comes to the descriptions of Atis Rezistans in exhibition catalogues. Curator Donald Cosentino mentions in passing that Atis Rezistans’ point of reference is “not only the nearby Vodou temple and National Cemetery, [...] but also the hipper galleries of Pétionville, as well as avant-garde studio artists such as Mario Benjamin, Jean Camille Nasson, and Edouard Duval-Carrié, all of whom have had significant influence on the development of their work” (2011: 150); he does not, however, elaborate in more detail. Similarly, cultural anthropologist Katherine Smith mentions that “the artists had collaborated with Nasson and Marion Benjamin, two established Haitian artists who helped Atis Rezistans gain recognition” (2012: 123), but also does not seem to pay further attention to that subject matter. Another curatorial example for the lack of interest in inter-klas artistic dialogues in the museum setting is the exhibition Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou jointly curated by Leah Gordon and Alex Farquharson at the Nottingham Contemporary in Britain in 2012, which discusses explicitly popular art from Haiti and how it is influenced by the religious system vodou. The exhibition did not display any Haitian artists who did not grow up in weak socio-economic circum-

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stances.10 Farquharson defines the category ‘popular’ for the exhibition framework as “derive[d] from its French sense of relating to the culture of the working class” (2012: 10). “Few artists in Kafou worked or work in isolation: most learnt from the example of others, belong to collectives, received formal training, or produced their work in conscious dialogue with historical or contemporary developments in the larger art world. For the same reason, in a densely populated country whose culture in highly familial, social and collective, the label ‘outsider’, with its connotations of extreme isolation, applies to very few Haitian artists. ‘Popular’ has the advantage of stating a meaningful socio-economic fact about most of the artists’ background – one that has far-reaching causal connections with the politics and histories […] without typifying that art in culturally qualitative and hierarchical terms.” (ibid.)

The curatorial statement in the exhibition catalogue further states that the exhibition is supposed to create “fresh encounters between contemporary art and popular art, minimize the distance of both sectors and position [popular art] centrally within the world of today’s art” (ibid.). But these ‘fresh encounters’ seem to ignore entirely the local situation of artistic inter-klas dialogues. Contemporary Haitian artists do not need a British art museum to produce generously ‘fresh encounters’ within the field of contemporary art, as these encounters are constantly taking place within the artistic scene in Port-au-Prince through committed art actors like Prézeau Stephenson, Mario Benjamin, Giscard Bouchotte, Maksaens Denis, or Reynald Lally as well as, of course, the members of Atis Rezistans who are actively searching for these dialogues. Many Haitian artists—regardless of their social position in society—have also at least one series dedicated to vodou in their artistic oeuvres. Works by Denis, Prézeau Stephenson, Pascale Monnin, or Josué Azor besides many others could have been easily integrated into the exhibition framework ‘vodou-inspired art from Haiti,’ but their socio-economic position in society was used to exclude them from the

10 The only exception to this artist selection in the Kafou exhibition is US-based Haitian artists Edouard Duval-Carrié. The catalogue does not elaborate why he was the only artist accepted within this otherwise ‘popular’ framework. Farquharson only states that his art is an original response to the legacy of Haiti’s popular painting tradition: “Indeed the Vodou-infused history of paintings of Eduard Duval-Carrié (who is otherwise exceptional in this exhibition in having studied in Paris), whose work is an original response to the legacy of Haiti’s popular art, appear on the covers of many studies of Haitian history and culture.” (Farquharson 2012: 16-17)

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exhibition framework. Farquharson suggests that “[p]opular artists have different creative advantages [compared to artists from ‘elite’ backgrounds] that arise from more immediate access to a rich national vernacular visual culture—in particular the visual culture relating to Vodou” (2012: 10, emphasis added). What Farquharson calls ‘different creative advantages’ seem to call forth Gordon’s search for ‘working-class authenticity’ and the idea that popular Haitian artists have a ‘more authentic’ access to vodou. Although Farquharson made a point to articulate that the popular classes are not isolated, these inter-klas negotiations are still not discussed through objects on display. The exhibition Kafou isolates Atis Rezistans into a narrative of ‘popular’ art without trying to incorporate aesthetic influences and inter-textualities between ‘popular’ and ‘elite’ social spheres. It is misleading to believe that the longstanding involvement of artists from the klas piwo a with Atis Rezistans did not lead to strong aesthetic exchanges between both milieus.11 We will see in the second half of this chapter that artistic inter-klas dialogues are crucial for understanding the historical development of rekiperasyon in Haiti and particularly the formation of Atis Rezistans. What are the reasons which lead curators to ignore those interactions between different artistic milieus although art historical methodology is commonly rooted in a comparative analysis of different art objects? Why is the influence of Haitian supporters from higher socioeconomic strata only a subordinate reference in ‘Western’ art museums? I gave a first answer to this question already in the beginning of this chapter: If the established Caribbean art world is convincingly staged as a problem, ‘Western’ curators and institutions can fill the lacking position of support and can become part

11 This leftist-motivated curatorial perspective, which highlights exclusively popular art from Haiti, also tends to neglect leftist intellectual traditions in Haitian visual arts which are not articulated by ‘subaltern’ groups. A small group of artists around abstract painter Lucien Pierce split for example from the Centre d’Art in the 1950s and founded the Foyer des Arts Plastiques and then the Academy of Fine Arts. These artists split from the Centre d’Art because they critiqued the commercialization of the ‘naïve painters’ and were concerned with socio-political issues. “Supporters of the Centre were deeply opposed to the development of modern art in Haiti and, much akin to the spirit of the McCarthy era, they considered modern art to be communistinspired and were accordingly doubtful of the practice. Increasingly, political art works were additionally perceived as a threat to the tourist industry, as visitors were understood to prefer images of the tropical picturesque rather than works addressing comparatively more difficult and distressing social issues.” (Alexis 2012: 121)

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of the solution. This perspective legitimizes and re-centers the curatorial position of white curators in the discourse of Contemporary Haitian art on a global scale. Thus, it is not surprising that the Kafou exhibition was curated by two white British curators and accompanied by an exhibition catalogue with new commissioned texts by mainly white scholars. I will come back to this situation in chapter two when I describe this situation more closely as a prejudicial dysfunction between two social groups which inflicts a credibility deficit onto art professionals from Haiti (cf. Fricker 2007). The clear production of a distinction between ‘the people’/‘not the people’ in the Kafou exhibition seems to produce a narrow understanding of popular culture as somehow isolated from the rest of Haitian society. Contrary to this approach, Hall argues: “We can’t simply collect into one category all the things which ‘the people’ do, without observing that the real analytic distinction arises, not from the list itself – an inert category of things and activities – but from the key opposition: the people/not the people. That is to say, the structuring principle of ‘the popular’ in this sense is the tensions and oppositions between what belongs to the central domain of the elite or dominant culture, and the culture of the ‘periphery’. It is this opposition which constantly structures the domain into the ‘popular’ and the ‘non-popular’. [...] For, from period to period, the contents of each category change. Popular forms become enhanced in cultural value, go up the cultural escalator – and find themselves on the opposite side. Other things cease to have high cultural value, and are appropriated into the popular, becoming transformed in the process. The structuring principle does not consist of the contents of each category which, I insist, will alter from period to another. Rather, it consists of the forces and relations which sustain the distinction, the difference: roughly, between what, at any time, counts as an elite cultural activity or form, and what does not.” (Hall 1998: 449)

The members of Atis Rezistans are frank about their intention to produce contemporary art for international museums and visiting clients from a klas piwo a, and they do not have predominantly popular Haitian audiences in mind. When I proposed in 2011 the idea to Eugène to invite more international artists to participate in the Ghetto Biennale from marginalized or indigenous backgrounds who struggle to overcome similar problems to those faced by the members of Atis Rezistans, he reacted with a complete lack of interest. Loosely paraphrased, he responded, “what use would it have for us, in this neighborhood, to invite and meet artists from other parts of the world who are likewise socio-economically challenged and who are also desperately searching for new financial and artistic opportunities?”

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The art institution Nottingham Contemporary also seems to shy away from a debate about its own functionality as a neo-imperialistic device of klas legitimization and klas valorization through a dominantly white gaze. Most objects selected for the Kafou exhibition have been imbued already with high cultural value by Haitian institutions like La Fondation AfricAmericA or the Le Centre d’Art. Nottingham Contemporary’s exhibition also misses a self-critical stance towards its own complicity with mechanisms of institutional klas power as a ‘high cultural’ institution, which polices the boundaries between ‘art’ and ‘popular culture’ through its own curatorial selection processes. This becomes evident when Farquharson writes: “Other exhibitions that have focused on Vodou have combined art with ceremonial objects, exploring the wider visual culture from anthropological perspectives. [...] This approach relates less well to Nottingham Contemporay’s artistic and philosophical purpose, and Kafou, by contrast, is very much an art exhibition, one that acknowledges rather than blurs the interstice between work of art and ritual object [...].” (2012: 9)

Farquharson’s statement expresses discomfort with broadening the category popular culture any further than necessary, and he does not intend to cross over into any “grey anthropological area”, as did, for example, the exhibition The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) by Donald Cosentino. Thus, he only selects art pieces from popular Haitian artists for the exhibition, which had already moved up the cultural ladder and could be identified as art pieces with an autonomous aesthetic value: “For Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou, the gallery walls remain white and the art works are evenly spaced and lit—as is customary in exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. By sticking to type we sought to minimize the distance between Kafou and more mainstream contemporary art [...].” (Farquharson 2012: 10) The mechanisms of a normalized museum display are used uncritically to produce a framework of universal sameness. This framework of sameness legitimizes and valorizes in return popular Haitian art in a white mainstream contemporary art environment. We will see in the following chapter that the rhetoric of legitimization is central in the discourse of ‘generous inclusion’ of Haitian art. These processes of inclusion often function within a logic of “conditional hospitality” (Ahmed 2012: 43) where Haitian artists are allowed to become temporal guests of someone else’s home. Frameworks of inclusion determine who is host (who is in the legitimate position to recognize the value of someone else) and who is guest (who needs to find recognition, including epistemic recognition).

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There is a long intellectual tradition of Black feminists—Barbara Smith and the Combahee River Collective (2017), bell hooks (2014), Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), Frances Beal (2008), Audre Lorde (2007), Cathy J. Cohen (2004), Angela Davis (1983), Marsha P. Johnson, Jennifer C. Nash (2019), KeeangaYamahtta Taylor (2016), Natasha A. Kelly (2019), among others—who developed or drew on analytical tools and concepts like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘double jeopardy.’ These scholars and activists have taught us that we cannot think about racism as a structure of oppression without thinking at the same time about the interlocking entanglements it sustains with capitalism, sexism, heterosexism, transphobia, able-ism, and so on. Class as an analytical category for dismantling systems of oppression remains also flawed if we refuse to place it in relation to other complex vectors of socio-political oppression. With the description of the specific experiences of women who are Black and lesbians, the Combahee River Collective anticipated already in 1977 what would later be coined intersectionality by Crenshaw (1991). The statement of the collective reads: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” (Combahee River Collective 2017: 22-23) Blackness is never a monolithic identity but multifaceted and complex. The narratives of ‘class friction’ I have analyzed in this chapter reveal a tendency to banalize discourses on race and the situation shows a refusal to think about inequality and power along multiple, intersecting vectors. I will show in the next section of this chapter how Prézeau Stephenson’s concept of urban sculptures presents Haitian art as an intersectional practice and positions contemporary Haitian art from diverse socio-economic backgrounds side by side. The exhibition framework of urban sculptures virtually re-enacts the urban reality of Port-au-Prince as an artistic space for inter-klas negotiations, exchanges, solidarity, and conflict. Prézeau Stephenson also opened up the Gran Ri neighborhood for international audiences interested in contemporary art and helped to increase inter-klas exchanges in Haiti.

1.3 INSTITUTION BUILDING: BARBARA PRÉZEAU STEPHENSON AND LA FONDATION AFRICAMERICA Barbara Prézeau Stephenson is one of the leading advocates for contemporary art in Haiti. She was the first art historian to introduce the term art contemporain for the Haitian art world in the early 2000s (Ulysee 2017). She founded La Fondation AfricAmericA in 1999 in Port-au-Prince as an art collective and administrative structure to support contemporary artists from Haiti from an autonomous,

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local position. Prézeau Stephenson intended to create new sustainable spaces for artistic self-articulation for artists coming from different layers of Haitian society and to counter the lack of institutional support for the visual arts in Haiti. The importance of self-articulation for people of color was adroitly summarized in the writings of Black queer feminist Audre Lorde: “For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that if we do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined by others–for their use and to our detriment.” (2007: 45) Fondation AfricAmericA’s homepage formulates its mission statement as follows: “Notre mission se réparti en trois modules qui sont: la formation des créateurs, la promotion et la diffusion de la création contemporaine.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2013) In one of my interviews, Prézeau Stephenson described La Fondation AfricAmericA emphatically intended as an inter-klas institution for the visual arts: “Fondation AfricAmericA is a place where different social categories can meet. I don’t close myself off in a social category. I never lived like that. I would even argue that there are more interesting artists coming from popular neighborhoods in Haiti than from the wealthy suburb Pétion-Ville. And Fondation AfricAmericA mirrors my opinion.” Many artists supported by La Fondation AfricAmericA like Patrick Ganthier a.k.a. Killy, Dubréus Lhérisson, David Boyer, José Delpé, Joseph Marc Antoine a.k.a. Zaka, Eugène, Celeur, Guyodo, and many others are not formally or academically-trained artists. Elsewhere, Prézeau Stephenson (2003: 15) pointed out the need for collective action as a central guideline for artists working in the field of contemporary art in Haiti: “After ten years of study and artistic endeavors in Canada, France and Senegal, the act of coming back to live in Haiti and assessing the general state of affairs (and particularly that of the artistic community) has converted me to the opinion that any meaningful action must be collective in nature. After exploring the focal points of creativity in this city and, by extension, acquainting myself with those who create, my work—has also become part of this collective.”

Prézeau Stephenson also launched through La Fondation AfricAmericA the art center Le Centre Cultural AfricAmericA in 2002 and the biennale project Le Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain in 1999. Le Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain intends to strengthen transnational bonds and exchange between contemporary artists from Haiti and art professionals from the wider Caribbean, Africa, the Americas, and Europe. Prézeau Stephenson’s strong focus on horizontal networks and South-South relationships stands in a historical and symbolic trajectory with the first installments of La Bienal de la Habana of the 1980s and early 1990s as an artistic space of decolonial resistance that “provide[s] al-

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ternative space to the art routes inherited from modernity” (Niemojewski 2010: 100). Cuban art historian Yolanda Wood also highlights the importance of transcultural exchange established by the Forum: “Il offre également un moment de rencontre et d’échange très important, pas seulement entre les invités de différentes régions du monde, mais surtout avec les artistes et créateurs locaux. La dimension transculturelle devient évidente lorsque l’on peut justement confirmer des éléments communs sur le thème proposé par le Forum et, dans le même temps, constater une grande variété au niveau de l’approche et du regard des artistes et du public. La diversité s’est imposée, et j’ai trouvé cela extraordinaire [...].” (Wood)

Fondation AfricAmericA has launched seven Forum Transcultural d’Art Contemporain since 2000 about socio-politically relevant topics like Corps Exploités (2006), Terres et Migrances (2008) and Creation & Contrepouvoirs (2015).12 Autonomous, artist-run initiatives like Fondation AfricAmericA in Haiti, Alice Yard in Trinidad and Tobago, NLS in Jamaica, L’Artocarpe in Guadeloupe, and Fresh Milk in Barbados claim important decolonial functions for the visual arts in the Caribbean that often struggles with a lack of institutional support within the region and invisibility in a trans-regional context. Haiti’s established gallery scene has a specific focus on the sale and promotion of the so-called ‘naïve painting’ tradition, which is dominantly produced by artists from lower socio-economic strata but under the control of merchant families from a klas piwo a. The profits obtained through the trade of ‘naïve paintings’ or art that is labeled ‘outsider art’ or ‘art brut’ offers these galleries the most profitable sale options (Prézeau Stephenson 2008: 104). Other artistic genres are often underrepresented in these galleries and hence have problems to find local recognition. It was an important concern for Prézeau Stephenson to create an independent artistic network that runs parallel to this existing commercial art market catering to a large degree directly to U.S. American demand (ibid.). La Fondation AfricAmericA was a starting point for the careers of many artists presented today in the international exhibition circuit as the new ‘canon’ for con-

12 The themes of the editions of the Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain have been: Identité et diversités au seuil du 21ème siècle 1st Forum 2000, Nouveaux Mondes / Mondes Nouveaux 2nd Forum 2002, Codes Noirs 3rd Forum 2004, Corps exploités 4th Forum 2006, Terres et Migrances 5th Forum 2008, projet _trans- 6th Forum 2011, Creation & Contrepouvoirs 7th Forum 2015.

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temporary art from Haiti.13 Survey shows like the exhibition Haïti - Deux siècles de création artistique at the Grand Palais in Paris curated by Régine Cuzin and Mireille Pérodin-Jérôme or the travelling exhibition Haiti: Royaume de ce Monde curated by Giscard Bouchotte feed on Fondation AfricAmericA’s sixteenyear long groundwork on contemporary art in Haiti. Prézeau Stephenson’s starting point for Fondation AfricAmericA was rooted in a pragmatic principal: contemporary artists from Haiti need administrative, financial, and educational support to be able to get recognized on a supra-regional level. Art historian Erica Moiah James also argues in favor for a certain pragmatism in the establishment of sustainable art infrastructure in the Caribbean region when she writes: “In the Caribbean, a strong dose of pragmatism is helpful in the drive to move art forward. One learns to accept stasis as a part of the natural ebb and flow of cultures and economies, and the natural process of dissolution and reformation of powerful things—much like what happens as hurricanes continually form and reform. I am trying to trust these periods and places where it may seem as if nothing is happening, in order to maintain faith that something is always happening, even if we cannot see it. […] It tests one’s belief in utopias. What is possible is the potential for change and a belief that every community—no matter how reluctant it may seem— has the desire and the power to stimulate and embrace change.” (James 2016: 11)

Prézeau Stephenson described to me the importance for the development of administrative structures: “I personally don’t particularly need AfricAmericA to exist as an artist. The institution was always mainly established for artists from popular neighborhoods. They need art spaces to be seen, a proper organization and administrative structure to be able to invite other artists and to have a secretary which takes and answers their emails.” Administrative, supportive structures are crucial for artistic careers to be able to acquire network capital, which is indispensable in a mobile milieu like the contemporary art circuit. Sociologist John Urry defines network capital as dependent on access to communication technologies, transport, meeting places, and the social and technical skills of networking

13 I use the term ‘canon’ here rather loosely. Contemporary Haitian Art in Europe and the United States is like most art from the Caribbean region predominantly presented in regional or national survey exhibitions. These survey exhibitions often present recurring groups of artists. The three founding members of the sculptors between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat, André Eugène, Jean Herald Celeur and Guyodo, have been quickly integrated in this particular group of artists for survey exhibitions coming from Haiti.

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as crucial for sustaining social networks: “Network capital is the capacity to engender and sustain social relations with those people who are not necessarily proximate and which generates emotional, financial and practical benefits. […] Those social groups high in network capital enjoy significant advantages in making and remaking their social connections, the emotional, financial and practical benefits.” (Urry 2007: 197) Despite these challenging economic circumstances for the visual arts, this does not mean that Caribbean artists are not capable of producing vibrant artistic environments and trans-Caribbean networks; La Fondation AfricAmericA is a great example for this.

1.4 URBAN SCULPTURES AS UNHAPPY OBJECTS Prézeau Stephenson’s collaborations with the first members of Atis Rezistans started in the early founding years of La Fondation AfricAmericA in 2000. The two founding members of the group, Jean Herald Celeur and André Eugène, took the initiative into their own hands, introduced themselves to Prézeau Stephenson at the opening of Le Centre Culturel AfriAmericA and invited her to come and see their sculptures in their neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat. Prézeau Stephenson curated their first exhibition outside the neighborhood in the following year with the title Baka, Monstres et Chimeres (sculptures urbaines II) at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA. The local context of artistic production within the neighborhood became simultaneously an important curatorial mechanism to show the sculptures of Atis Rezistans in their own studios and musée d’art (art museums). We will see in chapter three that Prézeau Stephenson established the first guided tours through the neighborhood in collaboration with the artists on occasion of Le Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain to give art professionals like Cuban art historian Yolanda Wood, Trinidadian artist Christopher Cozier, or Togolese artist Kossi Assou, among others, the chance to witness the artworks in the urban context of their local production. Prézeau Stephenson’s interest in Atis Rezistans originated in an art historical reflection: she indented to show the shift of artistic production in Haiti from an understanding of Haitian art as predominantly produced by a ‘peasant’ milieu to new urban sites of production. The early, so called ‘masters’ of Haitian art— Hector Hyppolite, Jasmin Joseph, or Philomé Obin—worked at a time when 89 percent of the Haitian population was still employed in the agricultural sector whereas today over 40 percent of Haitians live in urban centers and take part in a transnational urban culture (Prézeau Stephenson 2012: 64).

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Fig. 4: Five artworks by Jean Herald Celeur from the exhibition Baka, Monstres et Chimeres (sculptures urbaines II), 2001; Fig. 5: Untitled assemblage by André Eugène from the exhibition Baka, Monstres et Chimeres (sculptures urbaines II), 2001

Prézeau Stephenson links this shift in location of artistic production to a shift in artistic media from painting to sculpture (2012: 66). Sculpture had been largely overlooked as an artistic medium in the context of Haiti and had been seen mainly as craft produced for tourist economies: “As a matter of fact the local art market still gives preference to traditional painting; this is due to the fact that its development is closely linked to the expansion of tourism in the 1960s and 1970s and linked to the exploitation of the country’s past reputation, as established by the accounts of André Breton and André Malraux.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2012: 66) Prézeau Stephenson goes on to explain that wooden sculptures, despite a large number of different workshops in Port-au-Prince, were deemed craft and cumbersome: “[W]ooden sculptures [...] rather than being encouraged by the market, were being developed to the status of tourist souvenirs, such as the mahogany pieces that can be found on market stalls at the Marché au fer, or Iron Market.” (2012: 67) Art historian Carlo Célius analyzes the new development towards three-dimensional objects in relation to the economic embargo initiated by the United States in 1991 that affected many artists at this time: “[Artist] Lionel St-Eloi’s shift from painting on canvas to the construction of threedimensional objects using recycled materials! He discovered this new approach at the beginning of the 1990s as a way of circumventing the difficulty of acquiring tubes of paint during the economic embargo imposed upon Haiti following the ousting of Jean-Bertrand Aristide.” (2016: 121)

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The new interest in Haitian sculpture can also be traced back to four central catalysts starting around 1989: (1) Curator Jean-Hubert Martin’s exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (1989) at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which presented Haitian metal sculptors from the commune Kwadèbouke (Croix-des-Bouquets) like Patrick Vilaire, George Liautaud, and Gabrial Bien Aimé within the context of contemporary art; (2) Donald Cosentino’s promotion of his new Haitian ‘discoveries’ Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise in the exhibition The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1996) at the Fowler Museum in the United States; (3) Marianne Lehmann became an important art patron in Port-au-Prince for artists from lower socio-economic strata and started her collection of ritual vodou artifacts; (4) Prézeau Stephenson launched two new exhibition series dedicated to Haitian sculpture in Port-au-Prince. These two series have been the sculptures urbaines (urban sculptures) exhibition series and the art festival Fete de la Sculpture (starting in 2005) in collaboration with the cultural institutes Institut Francais and FOKAL (Fondation Connaissance et Liberté). Both exhibition series highlighted the importance of the medium sculpture within the contemporary urban art milieu of Port-au-Prince. As Prézeau Stephenson puts it: “The artist today is urban. The production of these art works is urban. And their artistic language is definitely urban as well with their use of new media, the cinema, the telephone, the Internet, and their new mobility, and their increasing contact with foreigners.” (2014) Haitian art as seen by Prézeau Stephenson is not a matter of internal, isolated production but relates to a larger cross-cultural, urban network of references. Since the beginning of Atis Rezistans’ curatorial presentation, the socioeconomic position of these artists has become a central framework in the presentation of their artworks. The first members of the group, Eugène, Celeur and Guyodo, were presented explicitly as artists coming from an informal neighborhood living in the urban city center of Port-au-Prince. Their artworks became culturalized expressions of a marginalized position in society. For Prézeau Stephenson, urban sculptures are intimately linked to the brutal social reality of people living in the city center of Port-au-Prince: “Daily violence, hunger, thirst, air and water pollution, and the constant clamor of engines and horns, have distorted, bent, and compressed the torsos, faces, and jaws [of the sculptures by Atis Rezistans] packed into the city center workshop/garage.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2008: 101) In an interview Prézeau Stephenson (2014) told me that she reads Atis Rezistans’ art objects mainly as autobiographical expressions of a precarious living situation. Thus, the new style rekiperasyon (recuperation) has become closely associated with the socio-economic marginality of the artists.

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Fig. 6: Installation of André Eugène’s artwork Bawon at the exhibition Sculptures Urbaines IV, Barbados, 2003; Fig. 7: Installation of Jean Herald Celeur’s artworks at the exhibition Sculptures Urbaines IV, Barbados, 2003

According to Prézeau Stephenson, “[i]t is not a fantasy. It really came by necessity. The artists started using garbage because they did not have money to buy important materials. [...] We really fight to present this aspect of Haitian art at international events.” (cited in Garcia-Navarro, 2005) This conceptual curatorial framework set the course for Atis Rezistans to find recognition in the art world of Port-au-Prince but also helped them to arrive in international art exhibitions. The 4th urban sculpture exhibition was held in Barbados in 2003 on occasion of the Annual Congress of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) on the topic Popular Art and Public Art and was the first exhibition that presented the artworks by Eugène and Celeur internationally. Prézeau Stephenson presented sculptures at the Central Bank of Bridgetown by Eugène and Celeur alongside pieces by Maksaens Denis, Killy, Jean Camille Nasson and her own artworks. This exhibition presented the artistic milieu of Port-au-Prince as an explicitly urban milieu through the parallel presentation of artists from different socio-economic strata and educational backgrounds. She presented one of Eugène’s sculptures, named after the vodou deity Bawon, on top of a mountain of discarded metal materials shipped from the studios of metal workers from Gran Ri, as if the artwork grew out of this glut of discarded materials. One central piece of the exhibition was a chair created by Celeur in the late 1990s. Prézeau Stephenson was the first curator who showed this particular object as a contemporary art piece and highlighted its autonomous aesthetic value. Celeur has produced similar pieces anonymously for Marianne Lehmann’s collection in the mid-1990s.

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The Lehmann Collection is an ethnographic art collection of mainly ritual vodou artifacts by Swiss, Port-au-Prince-based art collector Marianne Lehmann.14 Lehmann became one of the central patrons in the 1990s for ritual vodou artifacts and she attracted the attention of a large network of craftsmen/craftswomen. However, the ritual or religious use of many objects that found their way into Lehmann’s collection was brought into question during my research by several art professionals working in Port-au-Prince. It is safe to assume that many objects have been produced directly on Lehmann’s demand and never saw a hounfour (vodou temple) from the inside.15 Curator Donald Cosentino describes how the Haitian artists Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise found a market for their vodou-inspired collages in Lehmann’s collection long before he ‘discovered’ them at the Marché En Fer (Iron Market) for showcasing their art in the exhibitions The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou (1995) and Lespri Endepandan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture (2004) (Cosentino 1998: 40). Barra and Cassaise were able to sell their artworks anonymously to Lehmann’s collection through a middleman called Toto (ibid.). While many Haitian artists like Barra, Cassaise, Celeur, Lhérisson Dubréus, and David Boyer worked anonymously in the early phases of their careers, many of them transitioned from the anonymous sphere of being perceived as ‘vodoucraftsmen and vodou-craftswoman’ into the field of contemporary art as individually recognized artists through the new support they received by curators like Prézeau Stephenson, Reynald Lally, or Cosentino. Prézeau Stephenson made a clear point by integrating especially Celeur’s ‘chair’ piece into a contemporary art setting that draws a clear line between ‘ethnographic ritual artifact’ and autonomous ‘contemporary art object’. Celeur confirmed to me in an interview that the works he produced for Lehmann were never intended for any ritual use. Furthermore, he explained that the production of these commissioned objects had earned him a bigger amount of money than he could have ever hoped to achieve for objects produced for the tourist craft sector (Celeur 2014). Early on in his career, he had experienced that the production of vodou-inspired sculptures could lead to economic benefits. This situation shows a significant overlap of different fields of activities for Haitian artists from lower socio-economic strata: Artists like Celeur are able to produce simultaneously for (1) tourist economies, (2) ethnographic vodou collections, and (3) contemporary art exhibitions.

14 A selection of objects of the collection travelled in Europe from 2009 till 2010 and could be seen in ethnographic museums in Geneva, Berlin, and Amsterdam. 15 See also Carlo Célius’ (2009; 2016: 130–31) analysis of the situation.

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Prézeau Stephenson helped in the early 2000s to open up the Gran Ri neighborhood decidedly for a new art clientele interested in contemporary art. It is noteworthy that her first descriptions of the group factored out the use of vodou iconography as a source of inspiration for these artworks. This perspective stands in sharp contrast to all follow-up exhibitions of artworks by Atis Rezistans after 2004, which predominantly orbit around the category vodou in presenting the Gran Ri sculptors. Prézeau Stephenson toned down the existing vodou narratives or at least shifted the focus to their sociopolitical relevance by encouraging the artists to respond to current sociopolitical events in Haiti. She strategically undermined anticipations of cultural alterity that have adhered to Haitian art since the foundation of the Centre d’Art in 1944 by highlighting the sociopolitical within her curatorial framings. I mentioned above that art historian Wendy Asquith speaks of a hyper-visibility of Haitian popular artists, but this hypervisibility did not lead to an open integration in art historical narratives; instead, it marked these painters discursively as ‘primitive’, ‘naïve’, or simply as ‘unchanging’ (Asquith 2014: 6). A name closely associated with this exoticizing perspective on Haitian painting was writer, art dealer, and curator Selden Rodman. According to art historian Edward J. Sullivan, Rodman’s books from his Renaissance in Haiti: Popular Painters of the Black Republic (1948) to his volume entitled Where Art is Joy (1988) created one of the most vigorous stereotypes that exist within the domain of Caribbean art (Sullivan 2012: 362). The ‘joyous nature’ of Haitian art described by Rodman made sure that the vast majority of the public in the United States and Europe would associate the colorful Haitian cultural production from the lower kouch sosyal with the “joyful”, the “intuitive”, and the “child-like” (Sullivan 2012: 362). Rodman attributed that joy to the religious system vodou and argued that vodou gives these peasants their deep “spiritual satisfaction” (Rodman 1988: 18). The aspect vodou in these artworks became aligned with the affective dimensions of joy and spiritual satisfaction. The presentation of Haitian art comes along with the preconceived idea that Haitian art is supposed to be without real dependency on sociopolitical reality and thus without any political discourse. Prézeau Stephenson’s engagement with a new generation of artists from lower socio-economic strata challenged exactly these former, apolitical discourses of Haitian art which portrayed it as a socially unaware artistic-cumreligious practice: “[The sculptures by Atis Rezistans are] disrupting the comfortable points of reference of our intelligence, our morals; each one of their sculptures is a cry of revolt. All three live and work in the heart of the city. Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines [Grande Rue], an in-

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expressible hell, is a zone among others where any survival depends on skill at ‘swimming’ (the current term) beyond even the irrational. This ‘theater of the atrocious’ acts for them at once as a matrix, a home, a workshop, and a bearing.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2008: 103)

Since the foundation of the Centre d’Art in 1944, the misery and socio-economic reality of artists from weak socio-economic strata have often been camouflaged by picturesque market scenes and exotic vodou imagery in colorful figurative paintings of allegedly joyful peasants at ease. Although the ‘naïve painters’ have been hyper-visible in Europe and the United States, their political motivations were of no particular interest. Rodman associates the ‘naïve painting’ tradition very directly with joy and happiness and helped to produce a touristic commodity that evokes quite literally Sara Ahmed’s concept of happy objects (2010a). Ahmed explains a link between certain objects and positive affects. Objects carry an emotional dimension through their association with particular pleasant cultural codes. The arrival of these objects is desired because they are meant to bring us happiness: “Objects become ‘happiness means’. Or we could say they become happiness pointers, as if to follow their point would be to find happiness.” (Ahmed 2010a: 34) We orient ourselves and move towards these objects because they are supposed to give us pleasant feelings. Ahmed describes further how these objects become actors in the construction of shared social identities: “Groups cohere around a shared orientation toward some things as being good, threatening some things and not others as the cause of delight.” (ibid.: 35) Unhappiness, in turn, becomes restrictive when a particular group of human beings (for example “unhappy queers”, “feminist killjoys” or “melancholic migrants”) does not share that happiness: “The freedom to be happy restricts human freedom if you are not free to be not happy. Perhaps unhappiness becomes a freedom when the necessity of happiness is masked as freedom.” (ibid.: 193) The second group of people becomes in turn affectively alienated to a shared emotional norm because they neglect to share a similar orientation toward certain objects as being good objects because they do not find the object that allegedly promise happiness to be so appealing and promising. The three initial members of Atis Rezistans, however, started to present their socio-economically fragile position in society directly and by no means in euphemized terms. Celeur, for example, illustrated his artistic practice in an interview by showing me a small newborn kitten living in his atelier at Rue du Magasin de L’Etat, which was born blind with bloody tumors on its eyelids. Thus, their artworks are affectively alienating the pleasurable dimension that the “na-

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ïve painting” tradition was supposed to evoke.16 Prézeau Stephenson’s concept of urban sculptures transformed the historical category ‘where art is joy’ into ‘where art is born out of socio-economic misery’. Because vodou in Haitian art has been coded as a means for happiness it could be argued that Prézeau Stephenson shifted the focus away from it in order to be able to highlight instead the socio-economic unhappiness that these three artists experience on a daily basis in their fragile lives. We will see in the following chapters how the artworks by Atis Rezistans are again becoming transformed into ‘happiness means’ for ‘Western’ art institutions and white audiences through the promotion of those institution’s supposedly successful endeavors for recognizing cultural alterity. Prézeau Stephenson’s first exhibitions outside the neighborhood stirred quite a shock in her audience in Port-au-Prince. The museum’s board asked to dismantle one of her exhibitions at the private museum Musée d'Art Haitien du Collège St Pierre shortly after its opening. According to Prézeau Stephenson, the art pieces had been considered to be simply too vulgar and too ugly by the muse-

16 Gallerist and artist Pascale Monnin similarly explained to me during a conversation in March 2014 that she has difficulties to sell art objects to collectors for Haitian art which do not conform to certain aesthetic norms of being perceived as ‘beautiful’. She mentioned Jean Camille Nasson’s oeuvre as an example. Nasson’s oeuvre consists of two different sides: he created both beautiful angels and madonnas but also vicious demons and devils. Monnin stated that she has problems to find clients to sell the latter. This perspective also explains why the members of Atis Rezistans have severe difficulties to find gallery representations in Haiti. Their particular aesthetic does not fit into the common aesthetic schema for Haitian art normally presented in those galleries. Clients of commercial galleries cannot easily consume these art objects as ‘happy objects’. While this lack of gallery interest is often narrated by curators from abroad as further prove of the klas divide in the art scene of Port-au-Prince, this exclusion actually relates more directly to the aesthetic of the art objects produced by Atis Rezistans than to the artists’ socio-economic position. The gallery scene in Pétion-Ville presents predominantly artists from weak socio-economic strata but these artists need to produce art in rather narrow, predetermined aesthetic schemas, e.g. ‘Naïve Painting Tradition’. Nasson, as the progenitor of Atis Rezistans, could find gallery representations for his recuperation sculptures in Port-au-Prince. Nasson’s success also made the situation for the members of Atis Rezistans more complicated because some gallerists saw their art produced at Gran Ri in the beginning as derivative of Nasson’s art. When I conducted my fieldwork in Haiti, I saw several art objects from the Gran Ri neighborhood presented at commercial galleries in Pétion-Ville (for example Les Ateliers Jérôme and Gallery Nader).

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um’s staff and other art professionals working in Port-au-Prince: “I have been asked why we have to show these horrible things in exhibitions? And my answer to them was that reality is a lot uglier than these art objects. When you go to their place at Grande Rue, this art piece is beautiful in comparison to what you are going to see.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2014) Cultural anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister (2002: 61) described in her study on Haitian rara the hidden political dimension that can be expressed through betiz (vulgarity, obscenity, and sexual innuendo) in popular Haitian culture as a politics of deviance. McAlister reads these vulgarities within postcolonial conditions as the last bastion of uncensored speech for the mas pèp-la (common people) in the public sphere in Haiti. Vulgarities and obscenity give the mas pèp-la a free space unmolested by the literate klas. The literate klas in Haiti is in return able to confirm their own status as being more “civilized” and more refined in relation to these popular obscenities: “Vulgarities, expected of the poor by the rich, are the lyrical route by which disenfranchised Haitians carve out expressive space in the public arena. Because of the cultural politics wherein obscenities are disdained and dismissed, obscenity becomes a form of speech that allows the powerless to navigate into spaces of opposition, community, and a certain kind of powerful publicity.” (McAlister 2002: 65)

Prézeau Stephenson’s first exhibitions have been censored because she broke down this inter-klas agreement: By transferring the allegedly ‘subaltern’ obscenities from the streets of Port-au-Prince into cultured ‘high art’ spaces of the klas privilejye and by framing them as contemporary art. Her collaborations with the three artists also took place primarily in an extremely precarious period for Haiti. In fact, the interim period between 2004 to 2006, following presidents Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s departure, is considered one of the worst in Haiti’s history, marked by an extreme rise and spread of violence, including many kidnappings and rising numbers of victims of gun violence (Schuller 2008: 200). Prézeau Stephenson’s urban sculpture exhibitions reflect this delicate social situation by giving one of the most vulnerable and marginalized groups in Port-auPrince a platform for their art pieces. On occasion of her 4th ForumTranculturel d’Art Contemporain with the title Corps Exploits (Exploited Bodies), she organized the Sculpture Pour La Paix exhibition at Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien (MUPANAH) together with Celeur, Guyodo, Eugéne and visiting artist Kossi Assou. During a workshop each artist created a sculpture out of weapons for the yard of the MUPANAH museum. These weapons had been confiscated by the Mission des Nations Unies

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pour la Stabilisation d’Haiti (MINUSTAH) in neighborhoods experiencing gang violence in Haiti and had been made available for the artists (Prézeau Stephenson 2014). The exhibition at the MUPANAH museum was also a first important sign that the literate klas became quickly accustomed to Atis Rezistans’ aesthetic productions. In 2006, the Ministry of Culture commissioned as a response a carnival float that was jointly created by Celeur, Eugène and Guyodo with the artistic supervision of installation artist Mario Benjamin. Both projects brought Atis Rezistans a large amount of local but also international attention that lead to exhibition projects in Europe and the United States like the Freedom! sculpture project commissioned for Liverpool’s International Slavery Museum in 2007 (cf. Asquith 2013: 230). Haiti’s socio-political reality was not only discussed through sculptural productions but also broke literally into Prézeau Stephenson’s exhibitions during that time. One exhibition at the city hall in 2002 was destroyed when many Atis Rezistans’ sculptures were burned to the ground by a group of protestors during a demonstration that led to violent riots. In one of our interviews, Prézeau Stephenson described her early collaborations with Eugène, Guyodo and Celeur as a learning process, because she had tried to teach them to be better prepared to work in the contemporary artistic field. The three artists had not been formally trained and Prézeau Stephenson had taught them basic art methodological knowledge in the beginning of their collaboration. One of her main goals, besides offering them a practical administrative structure through La Fondation AfricAmericA, had been to demonstrate to them how to install their own exhibitions in an institutional setting. Prézeau Stephenson, as a trained art historian, was not afraid to use “art historical standards” and her position of power to engage with the artists. She was dealing with the strong hierarchy that exists between her and the sculptors by trying to coach the artists to be better prepared to work autonomously in institutional art settings. This perspective of course risks becoming paternalistic and forces artists from lower socio-economic strata directly into ‘assimilative’, boujwa concepts of art presentation. But Prézeau Stephenson simultaneously increased the audience for the artists’ own exhibition spaces between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat by bringing art professionals into the neighborhood to make them witness the musée d’art and ateliers on their own terms. By keeping both social spheres in mind, Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work offered mediation between two different exhibition modalities. At several Forums Transculturel d’Art Contemporain, art professionals were able to witness both social spheres next to each other and they could compare the artworks presented by Eugène, Celeur and Guyodo in their own musée d’art with exhibitions in more institutional art environments like Le Centre Culturel AfricAmeri-

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cA, the Institut Francais or the Hotel Marriott. It is important to note that most art spaces in Haiti are extremely modest and cannot be compared with prestigious museum architectures in Europe and the United States. It is always a challenge for art professionals working in Haiti to find adequate spaces to exhibit their artworks. Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA in Pacot, for example, was a remodeled gingerbread house and many of Prézeau Stephenson’s other exhibitions have been produced with small budgets and presented art in backyards, vestibules, and other challenging, public spaces. Art exhibitions in Haiti often reveal quite directly the socio-economic lack of artistic infrastructure and funding possibilities through the presentation of art in ‘semi-public’ spaces. I see Prézeau Stephenson as a cultural broker, who mediates between different socio-economic milieus. Cultural anthropologist Christopher Steiner (1994), with reference to Robert Paine, describes cultural brokers as middlemen/middlewomen who interpret, modify, or comment on knowledge which is being communicated between two social groups. “While purveying values that are not his own the cultural broker is also purposively making changes of emphasis and content. Hence, rather than simply facilitate the relationship between two different groups separated by social, economic, or political distance, the broker actually constitutes, molds, and redefines the very nature of that relationship.” (ibid.: 154-155)

Prézeau Stephenson laid the groundwork with her curatorial work to open the Grande Rue neighborhood to a new contemporary art clientele and helped to free the artists from being perceived as merely producers of craft or ethnographic artifacts in order to gain access to contemporary art networks. We will see in chapter five that Prézeau Stephenson also experimented with transferring the autonomous curations by the Gran Ri artists into institutional environments. Guyodo’s first solo exhibition in 2004 is particularly interesting in this regard. Instead of using the exhibition space as a legitimizing gesture to imbue the artworks with a new ‘high cultural’ value through modernist exhibition modalities (e.g. white cube), Prézeau Stephenson brought the installation modality developed in the popular neighborhood virtually into Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA as a politics of deviance.

1.5 REKIPERASYON IN PORT-AU-PRINCE What motivated Celeur to begin with rekiperasyon in the late 1990s? It is a difficult endeavor to try to answer this question. I see three crucial factors for this

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development: (1) Celeur’s relationship with artist Jean Camille Nasson, who started with rekiperasyon in Haiti in the late 1980s; (2) Celeur’s creative desire to escape from the sole reproduction of prefabricated models for the tourist art sector; (3) the socio-erotic attraction and financial possibilities which come along with the prestigious field of contemporary art. Atis Rezistans artist Romel Jean Pierre concisely described this development to me as a desire to be perceived as different and exceptional: “Celeur started with recycling for different reasons besides commercial ones. He explained to us young artists that it is a way to be different from others. I was one of Celeur’s students in the beginning. It was not only to make money. He was a master in artisanal craftwork, he knew everything about it, but he wanted to be different from that […]. When you live in a ‘Third World’ country your inspiration comes from what you see. In your country, you grew up with a lot more influences than we have: access to Internet, access to television, access to education, etc. etc. Imagine how Celeur grew up. The only person that was different from his community was Nasson. Therefore, it is normal that he started to copy Nasson before he developed his own style.” (Romel 2015)

My review of Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work shows that the framework urban sculpture in its relation to the style rekiperasyon offered Guyodo, Celeur and Eugène a new possibility to commodify their own socio-economic marginality into portable art objects for exhibitions, which quickly attracted the attention of an art milieu from higher socio-economic strata. Taking up the style rekiperasyon was a central development which enabled the Gran Ri sculptors to dissociate themselves successfully from the stigma of being perceived as sole producers of craft and to plug themselves into contemporary art networks. When I asked artist Getho J. Baptiste, what he thinks his art is capable of achieving, he responded: “A lot! For example, relationships. The boujwazi [bourgeoisie] used to treat us not better than animals. We are considered nothing compared to them and their money. But because of our art they come here, they stay with us, they speak to us, they even eat with us. They stay here to discuss our work. This is what our work can achieve for us.” (Getho 2014)

Récup-art or recuperation art is commonly understood as motivated by a socioeconomic necessity and thus as a cultural practice of improvisation or a ‘way of life’ by groups of artists living in poverty (cf. Duffey 2015). German art historian Kerstin Schankweiler (2012: 159) defines récup-art as an artistic method that

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re-uses or recycles found and used objects in sculptures, assemblages, and installations and hence bestows these objects with new meaning. She describes récup-art as developed out of a cultural everyday practice, which has been developed in African societies and separates récup-art from the tradition of objets trouvés: “Im Gegensatz zur Tradition der objets trouvés verweist die récupération auf den alltagskulturellen Umgang mit Dingen und deren Wandelbarkeit und funktionalem Potenzial, wie es in der Gesellschaft umgesetzt und wertgeschätzt wird. Die Verbindung von Kunst und Gesellschaft, wie sie die Objektkunst wieder herstellen wollte oder will, ist hier originär. Zweifellos hat sich die récup-art aus der alltagskulturellen Praxis heraus entwickelt. […] Insofern récup-art beispielsweise explizit für den ‚westlichen‘ Markt produziert wird, kann sie auch systemkritisch darauf hinweisen, dass Europa—überspitzt formuliert— seinen Müll in Afrika ablädt (und seine Konsumgüter absetzt), der jedoch nun als récupObjekte in transformierter und ökonomisierter Form wieder rückgeführt wird, häufig als Souvenirs für Touristen.” (Schankweiler 2012: 164)

Cultural anthropologist Hans Peter Hahn (2005: 42-43) pointed out that societies with less personal property (“Gesellschaften mit geringerem Sachbesitz”) have often also less clearly determined use-values for particular objects; objects in these societies are less quickly classified in the category ‘garbage’, and their meaning can mutate and shift multiple times throughout the individual biography of an object before it gets discarded. Schankweiler also explains: “Durch die soziale Kunst der Improvisation des Mangels und der Bricolage im Umgang mit den Dingen bleiben sie länger im ökonomischen und kulturellen Kreislauf, was eine Wertschätzung ausdrückt.” (Schankweiler 2012: 159) Recuperation art in this reading becomes culturally legible. But the desire of the ‘West’ to exhibit African art repeatedly in the framework of ‘recycling’ or récup also points to an often-critiqued cliché for African art, which relates to the cultural archive described by Wekker (2016) in my introduction. Eva Langret, head of exhibition of London’s gallery Tiwani Contemporary, describes this situation as follows: “That’s another European obsession with African art: the recycling trope, the artist-makerdesigner. I think there’s been a disproportionate representation of such practices in European exhibitions. As much as it is true to say that boundaries between art, craft and design are much more fluid in Africa (and I can see much potential in extending this idea to the fields of design and architecture here), I think this trope plays into the stereotype of the

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self-taught artist who has a quasi-mystical connection with materials. It disturbs me.” (Langret in Simpson 2015)

Curator Okwui Enwezor states that “[w]e have to rethink concepts like ‘recycling’, ‘reconfiguration’, ‘impoverished’ or ‘informal’ anew, to transfer them productively into the present age and to overcome our image of deficit, which we commonly associate with Africa” (Enwezor 2017). Récup-art closely overlaps with a common understanding of art from the ‘Global South’ as driven by socio-economic necessity; it can thus produce strong emotional responses in audiences. ‘Western’ audiences who encounter récup-art risk reassuring their common knowledge about art produced in the ‘Global South’ as intimately linked to deficit and socio-economic misery without further reflections on these artworks. To rupture these longstanding, prejudicial images produced by a racialized common sense through discursive means alone is a tremendously difficult endeavor; for récup-art plays into a wider context of the politics of visual representation of the ‘Global South’ and thus triggers deeply embedded racist reactions in audiences. Wekker describes a quasi-identical relationship between poverty and Blackness in the racist imagination of white people in the Netherlands: “For many white people, there is an automatic equivalence between being black and being lower class; these two axes of signification are closely related, quasi-identical. Retaining the connection between whiteness and class superiority, that is, securing white superiority, requires automatically assigning Blacks to lower-class status.” (Wekker 2016: 47) Keenga-Yamahtta Taylor describes something similar for the U.S. American context: “[T]he majority of poor people in the United States are white, but the public face of Amerian poverty is Black. It is important to point out how Blacks are overrepresented among the poor, but ignoring white poverty helps to obscure the systematic roots of all poverty. Blaming black culture not only deflects investigation into the systematic causes of Black inequality but has also been widely absorbed by African Americans as well.” (Taylor 2016: 49)

Poverty, Blackness, and recuperation art form a tight, quasi-identical triad especially if they become also attached to geographical categories like Haiti, Africa or the ‘Global South’—all three of which are also racialized categories. The members of Atis Rezistans participate directly in this discourse of the overrepresentation of the poor as Black as soon as their artworks travel to Europe and the United States.

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Gordon (2012: 24) emphasizes that rekiperasyon for the members of Atis Rezistans is only partially born out of socio-economic necessity but has to be understood as a political commentary on Haiti’s position in the current capitalist world order. The most common explanation for the favored style rekiperasyon by the members of Atis Rezistans can be summed-up by the following quote by Eugène, which mirrors Gordon’s description: “The Americans send us their trash, we use it and transform it, then sell it back to them to put it in their living rooms.” (Eugène in Gordon 2012: 109) Romel Jean Pierre reminded me during an interview that the emergence of rekiperasyon in Port-au-Prince also contains an emotional dimension: “We are talking here also about emotions. You have to remember that when Celeur and Eugène started with rekiperasyon. Sometimes it is beyond that. Sometimes creativity relates to emotions. When they [Celeur and Eugène] started to make art, it was when the mayor of the city put a lot of garbage on their football playground and used it as a dumb. Creativity comes along with emotions and not only with poverty. It is more a feeling in my eyes.” (Romel: 2015)

Rekiperasyon in this narrative was born out of anger and defiance because the municipal government under Emmanuel ‘Manno’ Charlemagne (mayor of Portau-Prince from 1995 to 1999) took away an important space for leisure activities for the Gran Ri community. The appropriation of this space in order to dump detritus was seen as extremely offensive by the people living in the neighborhood who felt further dehumanized through this action. Eugène, by contrast, explains his particular use of different discarded materials through a neatly arranged system of referential compositions: “My art is crude and refined at the same time, but there’s a method. Sculpture forms the basis of the work, while wood, nails, iron, steel, and rubber are keys to the message. I find them, all the bits and pieces, here in the ghetto. I use nails to represent hair. And as the iron combines with the wood, it looks more fierce. Wood is more prevalent in my works as it represents the masses, the lower class, us, the ghetto. But iron, iron is the privileged class. The rubber forms a kind of link. It is a medium between the iron and the wood. Do you know what I mean? I mean, the rubber is the middle class. Part of it is that rubber in Haiti is widely used as a means of protest. They burn rubber a lot here, and it pollutes the air, and causes the death of some people, so I use the same rubber to produce works of art, to eliminate this pollution. My work is about recovery and resistance, class struggle and social injustice. But I think you have to be inspired to do this work.” (Eugène in Barrow 2015)

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This quote shows clearly how Eugène’s assemblages become a social commentary and klas narrative; they are a discursively constructed piece of art semantically filled with meaning by the artist. What do we really learn anew about Eugène’s artwork when we label these sculptures with the generalizing term récup-art that quickly sparks simplifying, racialized understandings of poverty and Blackness? I argue that we risk culturalizations by reproducing a myth, which relates strongly to Wekker’s racialized common sense and affectively overwrites discursive artistic maneuvers like the one described by Eugène. Most of the materials used by the members of Atis Rezistans, like wood and metal, are also bought and not found. Even discarded pieces of rubber are nowadays embedded in a micro-economy, because inhabitants of the neighborhood started to hide materials to sell them occasionally to the artists’ workshops since the Gran Ri neighborhood has become a famous sightseeing attraction for visitors. We will see in the following chapters that Haitian artists are very much aware of the demand and desire of visiting curators to find their common knowledge of Haitian culture as a culture of socio-economic deficit confirmed. Fig. 8: Four assemblages by André Eugène presented in his musée d’art in Haiti

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Fig. 9: Archangel Michael by Camille Jean Nasson, sculpture created for church in Furcy

Thus, some of them are catering directly with their art productions to this particular art world demand in a nearly ‘auto-orientalistic’ manner, while others try to resist these narrow foreign ascriptions. Curatorial frameworks focusing on Atis Rezistans’ marginal socio-economic position help to increases a process in the Gran Ri neighborhood which can be described as a staged marginality because the artists are encouraged to reify their own marginal position into portable art pieces for global consumption. The term staged marginality was coined by Graham Huggan following Dean McCannel’s concept ‘staged authenticity’ (MacCannell 1999: 98). Huggan (2001: 85-86) describes the process by which marginalized individuals tactically dramatize their ‘subordinate’ position for the imagined benefit or entertainment of a majority audience. He explains further that this performance of staged marginality “is not necessarily an exercise in selfabasement; it may, and often does, have a critical or even a subversive function” (ibid.). Many members of Atis Rezistans do not share my concern when it comes to culturalizing interpretations of recuperation art. Romel Jean Pierre, for example, responded to my concern with the following statement: “Of course, you see the ‘Third World’ in our artworks. Why do you say it is not like that? We cannot say it is not true. We live in a ghetto in the ‘Third World’. But it is still art. Art can be anything. Your inspiration as an artist comes with where you live actually. If I would live in Beverly Hills my art would probably look very different. […] But I was born in Haiti, in a ‘Third World’ country and I started to create art from the most common things I encountered around me every day. Which can be garbage, which can be tires, because they burn tires every time when there is a political problem in the country. Maksaens [Denis] for example works with video, I work with video too. But you still see

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‘Third World sujets’ in his artworks. […] His first inspiration that got him into the art world was the ‘Third World’.” (Romel 2015)

Nonetheless, I try to disrupt the assumption that rekiperasyon in Port-au-Prince is necessarily born out of a socio-economic deficit as an everyday cultural practices of survivalist improvisation in order to avoid automatic culturalizations. Instead of looking for culturally intelligible answers within the informal neighborhood downtown in Port-au-Prince to explain the emergence of rekiperasyon in Haiti, I propose to look also ‘upwards’ into the artistic practice of artists from higher socio-economic strata. The origin of rekiperasyon in Haiti is not exclusively related to a socioeconomic reality and a “way of life”, or the ‘subaltern’ critique of a particular aggressive capitalist world order, but to a great extent also related to Mario Benjamin’s art of the 1990s. I understand rekiperasyon as a particular Haitian art historical trajectory and, importantly, an inter-klas negotiation which enables a group of artist from weak socio-economic strata to claim their contemporaneity and acquire attention from the global art world. When Celeur started to develop his own strand of rekiperasyon, his predecessor, Jean Camille Nasson (19612008), had been already presented in commercial galleries like Galerie Monnin or Le Ateliers Jerome in Port-au-Prince. Nasson has also won the first competition Concours National de Sculpture de Port-au-Prince in 1999. Celeur found out about this national prize for sculptors in an article run in the newspaper Le Nouvelliste in the same year. This article, which fostered Nasson’s success, inspired Celeur to start working in a similar style. Nasson and Celeur shared several years earlier a stall at the Marché En Fe in the mid-1990s where Celeur could already acquaint himself with Nasson’s artworks. Celeur explains, “I met Nasson downtown and we talked often. One time when we met we talked about a Kreyòl proverb. It was about something that we use to say here in Haiti: If you don't have imagination, they say, ‘you don't see further than your own nose’. So I started to think about that. I thought it was an amazing proverb. I always wanted to be on Nasson’s creative level. Afterwards, I decided to start working. Cheby [Ronald Bazile] was with me in the streets to find the right materials. People around here said that I was crazy. But I kept on working with Cheby. We looked everywhere in the streets to search for more materials. In that moment Eugène became interested and watched from a distance. You can ask everyone in the neighborhood, I was the first one that started this movement. 90 percent of the artist in our group today thought in the beginning that I am crazy.” (Celeur 2014)

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Rekiperasyon entailed a socio-erotic promise to attract the attention and recognition of an art milieu from higher socio-economic strata and a claim to contemporaneity.17

1.6 THE ROOM OF MARIO BENJAMIN The history and emergence of rekiperasyon in Port-au-Prince is intimately linked to installation artist and painter Mario Benjamin. Benjamin is an internationally renowned artist who enjoys the reputation of being Haiti’s enfant terrible in the artistic scene and is often touted to be “the most famous contemporary artist from Haiti.” He described himself to me as a self-taught artist but also names his friendship with African-American Harlem Renaissance artist and art teacher Lois Mailou Jones a central starting point for his artistic development (Njami et al 2012). He began his career as a successful portraitist and photo-realist painter but subsequently rejected this mimetic work, which he has come to understand as an endorsement of the “bourgeois power base” of Haitian politics: “Since his rejection of hyperrealism, Benjamin has begun drafting an alternative visual language for Haitian art through painting, sculpture, and installation work that consistently subverts imposed stereotypes of Haitian visual language.” (Mosaka 2012: 52) He established himself throughout his global artistic career as an important source of inspiration for a younger generation of emerging contemporary artists from Haiti: Sebastian Jean, Manuel Mathieu, Josué Azor, and also Nasson refer to Benjamin as an important source of artistic inspiration. Eugène, Celeur and Guyodo also mentioned the importance of Benjamin as a central creative influence for their artistic development in many conversations with me. Benjamin has directly collaborated several times with the members of Atis Rezistans on several occasions. The most important collaborations were (1) Fete de la Sculpture at the Institut Francais and FOKAL in Port-au-Prince in 2007, (2) a carnival float created for the carnival parade in Port-au-Prince in 2006 and commissioned by the Haitian Ministry of Culture, and (3) Freedom! Sculpture for the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool in 2007 (Asquith 2013). While most curators spark biting critique from many Gran Ri artists today, Benjamin is unanimously praised for his creative encouragement and genuine interest in their art-

17 According to Prézeau Stephenson, the relationship between Nasson and Celeur was far less harmonious than Celeur’s recollection in our interview. Nasson explicitly voiced his concern about the artworks produced by Atis Rezistans because he saw Celeur’s new art practice as a form of plagiarism.

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works. In an interview with me Celeur describes his relationship with Benjamin as follows: “I met Mario at my first exhibition at AfricAmericA in 2001. He was interested and wanted to see my work. I invited him home and he saw everything. He promised me afterwards that every time when he meets someone interested in art, he will come to our neighborhood with this person. So, in that way he worked with us. I can say that he is the one who really helped us grow in the field. We met Leah [Gordon] because of Mario. He is the one who is everything. When we had an exhibition in England, they only wanted Mario to come. But Mario told them that he would not come without us. […] [Mario] always said that he felt comfortable with us. He even said that our work inspires his own work. He never wanted to have any percentage of whatever we sold. He never wanted to use us for his own benefit. He was already a big artist when he decided to collaborate with us. [Other curators] are only using us for their own benefit.” (Celeur 2015)

Benjamin, on the other hand, explains his affection towards the Gran Ri sculptors with a shared experience of silence. Benjamin draws attention to a central aspect of being a contemporary artist living and working in Port-au-Prince and to the severe lack of opportunities to be seen and to get exhibited locally: “The artists of the Grande Rue play an important role in my life because it’s very good to meet up with artists whom you regard as being either stronger than, or as strong as you. And they always bring something new in their work, they are always searching. [...] When I visit them, it’s a way to replenish me with energy. […] I really like their work. I can relate to it and also to the people behind the work, their strength of character, their capacity to resist the Haitian reality, which is not necessarily open to their work. In this we share the same situation. It is true that our work is not aimed at a lot of people. Our work has a much larger audience in other places. Briefly said, on a day to day basis, we are surrounded by silence. [...] But what really impresses me is their strength, their power, the need they have to express themselves in spite of everything and which is in fact starting to bear fruit.” (Benjamin in Lichtenstein 2008)

Benjamin produces in this narrative a shared bond between artists from different socio-economic backgrounds. While many ‘Western’ curators emphasize local klas frictions, Benjamin, on the other hand—quite similar to Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work—has tried to establish a common ground by formulating shared experiences between both milieus. I experienced Benjamin during our conversations as a very charming provocateur. He fought his entire career to resist racist perceptions of Haitian art in

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European and U.S. American art exhibitions. He described several times to me that he resented that Caribbean artists have been ‘ghettoized’ in geographicallyframed survey shows since the 1990s, and that he understood these exhibitions as a racist strategy to subdue artists from the Caribbean as ethnographic spectacle for a white foreign gaze. Benjamin has a strong de-exoticizing agenda in his art and he made sure during our conversations that I would understand the complex spectrum of art produced in Haiti. According to Benjamin, many visiting foreigners tend to simplify art to the Gran Ri narrative of poverty and marginality and refuse to pay attention to other art traditions coming from Haiti. It was an important concern for him that I would see and understand the Haitian art world as a complex network of interacting art actors from a variety of different socioeconomic backgrounds. However, Benjamin has distanced himself from the members of Atis Rezistans since 2009. Besides personal conflicts with the group, he explained to me that the increasing and redundant integration of Atis Rezistans into exoticizing, stale, and stereotypical discourses in ‘Western’ art exhibitions was also a reason why he decided to limit his collaborations with the artists. Before Benjamin started to collaborate with Atis Rezistans in several projects, he had already encountered artist Jean Camille Nasson and his wooden carved sculptures at his stall at the craft market Marché En Fe (Iron Market)18 in the early 1990s. Nasson was part of a group of young sculptors growing up in Rivière Froide, a southern suburb of Port-au-Prince. Nasson was encouraged in his youth by a priest of his local parish, Léonel Dehoux, to carve wooden statues of Catholic saints, angels, virgins and devils. According to Prézeau Stephenson, art in Haiti had “[n]ever [...] been so close formally to European medieval art, chromatic religious sculpture and popular or naïve sculpture, yet paradoxically so remote semantically, since Nasson’s work essentially revolved around the Vodou creed” (Prézeau Stephenson 2012: 68). Nasson’s expressive wooden composition attracted Benjamin’s attention at the Marché En Fe because, according to him, they resembled

18 Prézeau Stephenson explained to me that she sees The Marché En Fe (Iron Market) as a popular art laboratory for the mas pép-la in Haiti. Several art historians, curator and cultural anthropologist use the Marché En Fe as a popular device to discover new artistic talents from the lower socio-economic strata. Donald Cosentino also encountered Pierrot Barra and Marie Cassaise at the Marché En Fe and helped them to acquire modest ‘Outsider Art’ market attention in the United States through a new institutional legitimization by integrating their assemblages into museal frameworks. See also (Cosentino 1998: 7).

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“demonic creatures in emotional turmoil and pain” and they reminded him of the German Gothic period. Benjamin explains, “Nasson, est l’un des premiers à avoir introduit la violence expressive dans sa manière de travailler. Je vois en lui l’inspirateur de tout ce qui a suivi dans le travail du bois et de la récupération. Quand Nasson apparait sur la scène en Haïti, il frappe et tranche par sa dimension très noire, obscure, hanté. Le public haitien, jusqu’alors, entretenait plutôt une idée gentile, convenue, esthétisante de la beauté. Nasson intervient avec une dimension plus grave, plus violente.” (Benjamin in Lèvy 2007: 136)

Nasson is considered to be the initiator of the style rekiperasyon in Haiti. It is significant for our discussion that he started to change his artistic style after he visited Benjamin’s house in the early 1990s. In retrospect, Benjamin described in the catalogue to the exhibition Fete de la Sculpture (2007), curated by Reynald Lally and himself, his first encounter with Nasson at Marché En Fe: “Quand j'ai rencontré Nasson, il y a une dizaine d'années, au Marché en Fe, j'ai été frappé chez lui par une sorte de force gothique, et par un expressionnisme latent. Je lui fis alors découvrir une série d'œuvres à mon avis proche de son travail. Entre nous s'est établie une collaboration, dont il demeure encore quelques témoignages. Il m'apportrait des sculptures, qui consistaient surtout en de la statuaire en bois. J'y fixais des objects, des clous, je reconstruisais, je déplacais, il en sortait quelque chose de nouveau.” (Benjamin in Lèvy 2007: 130-131)

Benjamin invited Nasson to come and visit his house and encouraged Nasson to combine and decorate his expressive wooden compositions with layers of metal and discarded materials, similar to his own art practice at this time. Thus, the starting point of rekiperasyon can be seen as an inter-klas dialogue and collaboration between two artists from different socio-economic backgrounds. During these visits, Nasson must have also encountered that Benjamin had dramatically altered the interior and garden of his house into an all-encompassing art installation (Prézeau Stephenson 2005: 104). In the late 1980s, Benjamin combined performance art with installation art and used everyday materials during performances, theatre happenings and assemblages (Njami et al 2012). His house became an artistic backdrop for these performances. The internal space and garden were transformed through the aggregation of a variety of everyday objects and discarded materials into the virtual fabric of an all-encompassing, walk-in art installation. Benjamin’s home became itself a dramatic art piece constantly ex-

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panding, shifting and always in flux. Curator and art critic Simon Njami describes his experience visiting Benjamin’s house as follows: “When I found myself there for the first time, I was a bit disconcerted by the way in which what had once been an ordinary home had been transfigured, remodeled, so as to become the antithesis of classic comfort, the negation of the bourgeois ideal of beauty and balance. [...] It was a manifestation of outsider art, of art brut in the sense of total and as one speaks of ‘literature in the stomach’. It was art in the stomach, brutal, uncompromising. [...] The room seemed to be like a museum into which no curator would have ever set foot. The slightest object constituted a work of art. The room itself was a work of art, and I thus made my way to the center of the age-old question of creativity. Where is one to set the boundary between the everyday and the sublime?” (Njami 2012) Fig. 10: Mario Benjamin with redesigned furniture, photo taken by David Damoison in Benjamin’s house in 1994 for Revue Noire, © David Damoison

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Photographs of Benjamin’s bedroom show how he transformed entire walls into collages through the aggregation of his own paintings with newspaper articles, mirrors, homoerotic pornography, animal depictions, family photographs, pages from art books and diverse found objects like dolls and sequin fabrics. Furniture got transformed in assemblages by covering them with metal and wooden objects and he painted them expressively in broad strokes. Other walls were broken through, while Benjamin built new ones out of piled-up heavy stones interspersed with everyday objects like television screens, wheel rims, and wood billets, all merged together with thick layers of cement. Prézeau Stephenson labels Benjamin’s installation art as a “Caribbean baroque sensibility” that defies all categorizations: “The baroque sensibility came to our continent in 1492 in the luggage of the Conquista Its Catholic and triumphant gold-painted stratagems and artifices, its grand gildings, arabesques, trompe l’oeil, and expressive theatricality, became ingredients in the vast enterprise of colonization. It was a question of persuading the ‘barbarians’ and nonbelievers of the total power of the Roman Apostolic Church. [...] Mario Benjamin is among those artists who exploit this language with facility and virtuosity. Benjamin’s practice of installation is not derived from the Western avant-garde but emerges spontaneously from this inheritance, which he explored in his early stage sets, particularly for the theater. The eclecticism of his project defies categorization. Benjamin uses every medium at hand: painting, collage, ready-made, decoration, lighting, projection, photocopies, sculpture. In the early 1990s, he transformed a home in Port-au-Prince, integrating his large paintings of hyperrealist figures—faces and bodies lacerated—into elements of actual decor: drapery, faux antiques, columns, mirrors, frames—themselves drawn from great painters: El Greco, Géricault, and others. Dramatic lighting imposed on these intimate landscapes led him to multimedia practice.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2005: 104)

She also explained to me that Benjamin’s installation art became a major disruption in the art world in Port-au-Prince in the 1990s. Instead of acknowledging Benjamin as an installation artist, his house has been first read as a bizarre side effect of his bi-polar mental disorder, which started to severely affect his life in the same time period for the first time. While the local established art community seems to have denied Benjamin recognition, the global art world started to pay attention. Benjamin explained in a conversation with me that there is barely any audience or market for his installation art in Haiti. His local artistic career revolves mainly around large-scale abstract paintings while his installation art achieved wide international attention in the art world. His installations have been commissioned for biennales in Havana (1997 and 2009), Dakar (2010), Gwangju

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(2008) and Venice (2007 and 2011) by famous star curators like, for example, Okwui Enwezor. By transforming his own house into a walk-in art installation, Benjamin was able to offer visitors coming to Haiti a space where they could experience his dramatic art installations also locally. Benjamin explains that his house became an experimental artistic space to develop his art further: “Before I was invited to any international event, I did installations in my private space. My house is an installation. I had stained-glass windows, my previous house was very baroque, very rich, with a lot of Voudoun banners. I bought 20 of them to make a huge mural. This house had been an integral part of my life, always. But since there is a market for conceptual art—even though the painters are coming back—, I prefer to do conceptual projects when I am invited overseas, because it is an occasion to celebrate my mind in a way I cannot do in my own country.” (Benjamin in Lockward 2012)

Benjamin also integrated Nasson’s wooden sculptures into his own assemblages. One example I encountered is a photo of a chair assemblage called Shrine, which Benjamin built for art performances in 1989. Fig. 11: Assemblage The Shrine (1989) by Mario Benjamin with a carved, wooden head created by Jean Camille Nasson, © Fred Koenig; Fig. 12: Guyodo’s assemblage Reggae Musician, monochromatically sprayed silver

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This monochromatic chair assemblage was covered with a variety of materials like nails entangled with wires, cow horns, a mirror, and a large wooden head carved by Nasson, which Benjamin positioned centrally on top of the chair. The whole composition is monochromatically colored in silver with spray paint. It is telling that we can find a similar technique in Guyodo’s assemblages today. Guyodo often sprays many of his sculptures monochromatically silver before these art objects travel to exhibitions in galleries and museums. The above descriptions of Benjamin’s installation art in his house call forth Atis Rezistans’ particular exhibition modality developed for their art spaces at Gran Ri which we see today in their neighborhood. The Gran Ri art spaces mirror directly Njami’s description of Benjamin’s house as a “negation of the bourgeois ideal of beauty and balance”. Celeur, Eugène and Guyodo developed a strong interconnectedness between their houses and art objects which have architectonically restructured the entire neighborhood. There are no borders between exhibition spaces and living spaces and the art objects follow the artists into their bedrooms. Instead of concentrating solely on the production of singularized sculptures and assemblages, the entire neighborhood was altered to become a dramatically staged art installation quite reminiscent of Benjamin’s Gesamtkunstwerk of the early 1990s. The assemblages of the group engross the entire neighborhood and transform the area similar to Benjamin’s walk-in art installations. We will see in chapter five that these overcrowded ateliers are often read by visitors as expressions of a socio-economic deficit, described through a lack of storage facilities and limited space within a bidonvil neighborhood. I see Benjamin’s installation art as a formative influence for the Gran Ri artists and many of them pointed out to me that Benjamin was already internationally famous when he decided to collaborate with the Gran Ri artists. Benjamin embodies for the Gran Ri artists a prototypical successful contemporary artist for emulation. The medium of installation art is also often described to be a dominant medium of the current globalized contemporary artistic scene: “installation, with its capacity to declare a space of open-ended provisionality, is now an artistic genre so ubiquitous that is has become the main medium of contemporary art, as distinct from Modern art” (Smith 2008: xiv). Media theorist Boris Groys (2008: 76) also describes installation art as the leading contemporary art form. Contrary to Walter Benjamin, he argues that installation art is a central medium of the ‘reauratization’ of artistic practices: “Installation art, nowadays the leading form in the framework of contemporary art, operates as a reversal of reproduction. The installation takes a copy out of an allegedly unmarked, open space of anonymous circulation and puts it – even if only temporary – in a

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fixed, stable, closed context of a topologically well-defined ‘here and now’. This means that all the objects placed in an installation are originals, even when - or precisely when – they circulate outside of the installation as copies. Artworks in an installation are originals for one simple topological reason: it is necessary to go to the installation to see them. The installation is, above all, a socially codified variation of individual flaneurship as described by [Walter] Benjamin, and therefore, a place for the aura, for ‘profane illumination’.” (Groys 2008: 74)

Every object presented within the confines of this topological framework gets its aura restored and becomes an original through “reauratizations, relocations, and new topological inscriptions of a copy” (ibid.: 74). Through their installation art, the Gran Ri artists seem capable of re-auraticating their entire neighborhood into a framework of contemporary art. Every object presented in this topological framework becomes read as contemporary art. Benjamin also highlighted in our interviews the importance of the medium installation art for the global recognition of his artistic practices. Enwezor, for example, encouraged Benjamin to develop his installation art further and did not pay any particular attention to Benjamin’s expressive paintings when they worked together. Installation art in conjunction with the new style rekiperasyon enabled the Gran Ri artists to dissociate themselves from the stigma of being perceived as producers of craft and they could transition into the prestigious field of contemporary art; they also had Benjamin’s artistic practices (and success) as an inspiring example. Benjamin became a direct artistic guideline for Atis Rezistans’ claim to contemporaneity. I propose to use the Kreyòl term reciperasyon to speak about récup-art from Haiti to capture this particular local nuance and historical trajectory of this art form as an artistic, inter-klas negotiation which enabled a milieu, formerly associated with the production of tourist craft, to become contemporary artists. When I conducted my interviews with Benjamin in his house in 2014 and 2015 for my Ph.D., most of his art had been taken down and transferred to stock. Instead of being immersed into a seductive ‘baroque’ experience of installation art, I conducted my interviews with Benjamin in an empty, barely-furnished apartment with empty walls. The only visible art piece left in his house was a monumental, blue, metal sculpture by Guyodo with the title Housebreaker. This blue metal sentinel that welcomes visitors at the entrance reminds them of the close creative relationship that Benjamin developed with two generations of rekiperasyon artists in Haiti. Benjamin has returned the favor and the ateliers of Guyodo, Celeur and Eugène have several of his paintings hanging on their walls pointing to their creative dialog with Benjamin. Although Benjamin took down

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the art installation at his house, his art practice lives on in a different spatial setting at Gran Ri. Fig. 13: Collage, Mario Benjamin’s house, photo taken by Roberto Stephenson in Portau-Prince in 2001, © Roberto Stephenson

2

Conditional Hospitality: Atis Rezistans in European and U.S. American Art Institutions

Gloria Wekker argues that “[t]he main model for dealing with ethnic/racial difference is assimilation and those who cannot or will not be assimilated are segregated” (2016: 7).1 Surprisingly, none of my interlocutors in Port-au-Prince complained during our conversations and interviews about any assimilative pressure they would encounter while collaborating with curators, artists, and researchers from abroad. But many of them repeatedly discussed with me their frustration and anger that blan (foreigners)—researchers, curators, artists, and tourists—are often exclusively interested in their relationship to the religious system vodou. Several artists mentioned that as soon as they refused to become interlocutors about the religious system, they would not be able to see that particular researcher again for a follow-up interview and hence would be in danger of vanishing from the discourse. My first research proposal for my Ph.D. project in 2011 came from a similar point of departure: I intended in the beginning of my research to analyze ritual functions in the artworks by the Haitian ‘vodou artists’ after I encountered Leah Gordon’s documentary The Sculptors of Grand Rue (2008). In her documentary, Gordon presents Eugène, who is ritually feeding a human skull integrated into one of his sculptures in his musée d’art, while vodou drums play in the background. One of the first conversations I had with the artists in Port-au-Prince started with Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo respond1

Parts of this chapter were previously published as Frohnapfel, David. 2018. “Anticipations of Alterity: The Production of Contemporary Haitian Art through Inter-Class Encounters,” In Reshaping Glocal Dynamics of the Caribbean: Relaciones y Desconexiones, Relations et Déconnexions, Relations and Disconnections, edited by Anja Bandau et al, 171-191. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing.

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ing in anger to my introductory question about the extent to which his art is inspired by the religious system. He gave me the following short, but decisive answer in English: “Oh please, fuck vodou!” I was surprised to see that vodou as an artistic inspiration is actually a source of representational conflict within the neighborhood, and I have never encountered any ritual use of any artwork onsite during thirteen months in Port-au-Prince. I had intended to approach vodou as an important mechanism of decolonial resistance, but Guyodo’s response helped me to see that my own scholarly interest was also interwoven with a neoprimitivist desire for cultural alterity produced by my white gaze. This chapter engages with the question of the boundaries between decolonial options, autoorientalist catering, and neo-primitivist desire. In video artist Maksaens Denis’ first documentary about Eugène and Celeur in 2002, titled E Pluribus Unum, Celeur formulated the importance of vodou for his artistic practice with the following words: “I also became a Vodou practitioner. So, I told myself it is better to work within Vodou. For it is much more natural. The other styles are a form of language. But Vodou is a language that says more. Because when I began to work by taking inspiration from Vodou, I felt more liberated. I express myself much better...Vodou is merely an inspiration. Many people believe that Vodou is sorcery. Diabolic stuff. But they do not see the true aspects of Vodou which are a specific language. A freedom to think. The defense of human values.” (Celeur in Denis 2002)

Celeur’s affirmative understanding of vodou as a decolonial “freedom to think” seems to have radically changed in the last thirteen years since the group became involved in a foreign art circuit. Celeur described thirteen years later in one of our interviews a typical situation where vodou is used by curators and visitors from abroad to fix his artistic expressions in narrow confines: “For an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris I created three large bird sculptures. Visitors repeatedly asked me which lwa [vodou spirit] represents a bird in Haiti. I had to laugh about this question. It was ridiculous actually. Afterwards I explained to them why I was laughing and told them what my birds are really all about: When I visited Britain a couple of years ago I saw a swarm of beautiful birds playing in a park. My British friend explained to me that these birds are only here in summer but will return to Africa in winter. Triggered by this story I imagined a world without borders. If my daughters would become birds they could just leave Haiti and travel freely around the world without restrictions. But anything you do as a Haitian artist they try to limit and reduce to vodou. If you make glasses for a sculpture they will probably ask you, ‘so which lwa is using glass-

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es in Haiti. It must be a gede spirit, right?’ Anything I create becomes vodou in their imagination. It is so ridiculous and it limits my creative vision.” (Celeur 2014)

What happened between both conversations in a timespan of thirteen years? Why did Celeur change his understanding of vodou as a form of free expression into an understanding of vodou as a confinement for his creativity? In this chapter, I argue that the members of Atis Rezistans had to realize that—just like for many other artists from the ‘Global South’ predating them—the most valued attribute required of them is their “cultural difference” (cf. Oguibe 2004: xii). By analyzing the systems of representation which frame the curatorial presentations of the artworks by Atis Rezistans in ‘Western’ art museums, particular ideological formations come to light which often reveal more about curators’ anticipations of Haiti than about artists’ individual points of view. Guyodo describes the situation thus: “One of our curators said once to us, if we don’t work about vodou, people abroad will never pay attention to us. I realized in this moment that curators only want us to say what they want to hear.” (Guyodo 2014) A tension between curatorial framing and individual artistic statements is of course not particular to the situation of Atis Rezistans but a common feature in the art world where “curators prioritized a method of exhibition making by using extant art objects and artifacts, employing them as illustrative fragments [...]” (O’Neill 2012: 5). I argue, however, that this situation is further aggravated in unbalanced situations of power. I am speaking of aggravation because this disconnect seems to become all the more revealing when artists and curators are separated by their socio-economic positions, control over recourses, formal education, and ethnic backgrounds. One of Atis Rezistans’ main purpose in being included in international exhibitions is precisely to mediate their Haitian popular culture, and Haitian popular culture, in turn, is frequently equated with the vodou religion. The artists are required to represent not themselves as creative individuals but their Haitian popular culture. Artist, scholar, and curator Rasheed Araeen described how BIPoC artists are often pressured to articulate ethnic and racial identities through their artworks: “[Artists] may even critique the dominant culture (so long as they don’t threaten the system). But whatever they do, they must not escape from their specific ethnic or racial identity. For them to adopt an autonomous subject position, like their white contemporaries, would deprive them of the link necessary to authenticise [sic] their positions. This is based on the nineteenth century belief [...] by which ‘others’ are ontologically linked to their own cultural roots (African or Asian), and are presumed to be incapable of entering the world of modern ideas without this link.” (Araeen 2000: 62)

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Fig. 14; Fig. 15: Three different versions of the motif zwazo (bird) by Jean Herald Celeur

BIPoC artists, according to a postcolonial critique of the 1990s and early 2000s, are mainly appreciated in white ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art systems within tight confines as “anthropological spectacles” (Puwar 2004: 74). Since the postcolonial critics rejected this particular position in the 1990s, the question arises if Atis Rezistans assumed exactly this position in order to alleviate the nostalgic longing for postmodern pluralist Otherness within the artworld? bell hooks describes the desire not to reject but to eat the Other as a source of enjoyment, which does not dismantle but reaffirm structures of domination: “When race and ethnicity become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power-over in intimate relations with Other.” (1992: 23) It is difficult to frame the artistic interest of the members of Atis Rezistans by a single term. They are a large group of artists with a variety of different ideas and aspirations. Their work includes but is not limited to (1) critical topics about Haitian society, (2) global political themes, (3) vodou-inspired works, (4) animal depictions, (5) autobiographical stories, (6) scenes from everyday life, (7) historical narratives, (8) popular anecdotes from television, and (9) objects without narratives. All these topics (and more) are presented next to each other in the artists’ autonomous exhibition spaces in Haiti. Conversations with the artists often start with a first clarification that vodou is only one aspect among many of their

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artistic interests. As soon as the art objects travel to art institutions, however, vodou and poverty become the main defining frameworks to speak about the group of artists. In other words, their sculptures become illustrated fragments, which highlight their art through semantic oppositions: (1) socio-economic alterity and (2) cultural difference. Vodou and poverty become mechanisms for the artists to increase credibility in order to be able to acquire visibility in white art systems. But what grants them visibility also makes them invisible, because it ties the artists to racist anticipations. The dominant ways, according to Nirmal Puwar, in which racialized bodies are received continue to be embedded in longstanding racializing traditions that put a strong emphasis on “the spiritual, authentic, exotic, religious, ceremonial, innocent and barbaric” (2005: 69). In many curatorial framings, the members of Atis Rezistans seem to continue this specific tradition and are rewarded by curators as soon as they produce art for these particular expectations for racialized bodies, which relate to the cultural archive of the racialized common sense. Most of the Gran Ri artists are careful not to disappoint these anticipations, and we will see in this chapter that selection processes by curators strategically foster effects of Otherness. Mario Benjamin described to me his experience as a Haitian artist working in the ‘Western’ art system since the 1990s with the following narrative: “As soon as links to poverty and vodou are left out, Western audiences and curators start to feel uncomfortable and even suspicious. They seem to feel a deep disappointment in artistic productions from Haiti which do not conform to their preconceived notion of what Haiti is really all about.” (Benjamin 2014) Benjamin’s description of the sentiment of disappointment is significant for my discussion. The sentiment of disappointment reveals a prejudicial dysfunction between hearer (white audience) and speaker (Haitian artist). This prejudicial dysfunction shows that the perception of Haitian art is closely tied to the cultural archive and hence to a preconceived idea of what Black art is supposed to be. Miranda Fricker (2009) explains: “I shall argue that identity power is an integral part of the mechanism of testimonial exchange, because of the need for hearers to use social stereotypes as heuristics in their spontaneous assessments of their interlocutors’ credibility. […] Notably, if the stereotype embodies a prejudice that works against the speaker, then two things follow: there is an epistemic dysfunction in the exchange – the hearer makes an unduly deflated judgment of the speaker’s credibility, perhaps missing out on knowledge as a result; and the hearer does something ethically bad – the speaker is wrongfully undermined in her capacity as a knower.” (16-17)

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She goes on to elaborate that prejudicial dysfunctions operate on social stereotypes that can produce either (A) a credibility excess or (B) a credibility deficit for specific speakers: “The idea is rather that prejudice will tend surreptitiously to inflate or deflate the credibility afforded the speaker, and sometimes this will be sufficient to cross the threshold for belief or acceptance so that the hearer’s prejudice causes him to miss out on a piece of knowledge.” (ibid.: 17) The recurrent disappointment experienced by Benjamin reveals exactly this sort of prejudicial dysfunction. When audiences do not encounter a direct link to the religious system vodou or the socio-economic marginality of the artist they become suspicious and the Haitian speaker loses credibility to speak from a position of being ‘authentically’ Haitian. Speaking about vodou, on the other hand, produces credibility excess because this is what Black Haitian artists are supposed to do and know. I experienced several times during my research how Benjamin’s klasposition in Haitian society is explicitly used by white curators, artists, and expats to deflate his credibility as a Haitian artist. One of my interlocutors stated, “I really cannot come up with interest for Haitian artists, who have probably never cooked a meal in their lives.” If Benjamin does not conform to the prejudicial idea that the majority of Haitians are poor and marginalized, he produces deep disappointment in his artworks. Purwar (2004: 62) describes how racialized bodies of minorities are highly policed in white institutions and how they become burdened with the representation of entire groups. As a biracial minority in the ‘Western’ art system, Benjamin’s experience reveals how he becomes burdened with representing the Haitian ‘whole’. If he does not represent this minority properly, or at least in accordance with preconceived, stereotypical ideas about this social group, he produces a prejudicial dysfunction and loses his credibility as a knower. Benjamin becomes a disappointment for being perceived as something he had never asked to be: a paradigmatic Haitian artist representing Haiti. The art system thus sets up its own circular disappointment: expecting ‘authentic’ artistic Haitianness in geographically framed art exhibitions and being disappointed if they cannot find the ideal type of the ‘subaltern’, ‘non-Western’ artist. Fricker argues that being “wronged in one’s capacity as a knower is to be wronged in a capacity essential to human value. […] [T]he subject is wronged in her capacity as a giver of knowledge. The capacity to give knowledge to others is one side of that many-sided capacity so significant in human beings: namely, the capacity for reason.” (2007: 44) In Nancy Hoffman’s exhibition Who More Sci-Fi Than Us: Contemporary Art From The Caribbean (2012) at Kunsthale KAde in Amersfoort, Benjamin, frustrated for getting trapped into this particular position for racialized minorities

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in the discourse about geographically defined contemporary Caribbean art exhibitions, decided to show a large artwork depicting a white woman laughing. He often refuses to play the culture game for a white gaze in Europe and the United States and understand his artworks as a hidden transcript countering a prejudicial and racializing white gaze. According to him, his artwork was also a somewhat ironic response to Jamaican artist Ebony Patterson’s glittering collages, which unapologetically celebrate Caribbean urban Blackness in the same exhibition. Patterson’s large colorful triptych Di Real Big Man (2010) was presented facing Benjamin’s two laughing white women. Puwar (2004: 70) following Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, explains that the inclusion of minorities in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ institutions often proceeds through a benevolent imperialism that enables women of color, for example, to speak—but only in a confined ‘ethnic slot’ and as a gesture of charity or guilt: “The participation in modernity of racialized ‘others’ is thus as marked subjects who can’t escape their ‘ethnic’ identity. The racial particularity are said to carry is highly visible, while the particularity of whiteness […] is invisible. Furthermore, the artwork itself is seen to be, at some point or another, mimetically linked to an ethnic specificity. It is on these limited and narrow terms that recognition is most easily granted.” (ibid.: 69)

White institutions where ‘ethnic’ or ‘Black slots’ are made available as speaking positions often intertwine these concrete anthropological expectations for racialized bodies with different schools of thought like Marxism—and they do not come exclusively from the anthropological archive: “[T]he anthropological is interwoven with certain versions of Marxism, and its vision of what the subaltern is, or rather should be. When they don’t fit into reified notions of the ideal type, they evoke big disappointment.” (ibid.: 75) If BIPoC actors do not resist capitalism, for example, then they can be read to be already corrupted by a ‘Western’ system and be understood as an ‘inauthentic’ representative of the ‘Global South’. Curator and manager of the group Atis Rezistans, Leah Gordon, described to me that Atis Rezistans’ unique selling point is that they live in a slum and they make vodou art. This perspective clearly positions Atis Rezsitans within a preconceived ‘ethnic slot’ that makes the artists easily readable, consumable, and classifiable for white audiences. The curatorial presentation of Atis Rezistans constructs these artists in a way that makes them conform perfectly to the ‘ideal type’ of the ‘subaltern’ artist: they are living in allegedly ‘authentic’ poverty, relate with their artistic practices to the Afro-Caribbean, i.e. ‘non-Western’, religious system vodou, and articulate critical opinions about the current state of the aggressive racist capitalist world order.

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Ahmed describes processes of including racialized bodies in predominantly white institutions as being based frequently on a logic of conditional hospitality: “Whiteness is produced as host, as that which is already in place or at home. To be welcome is to be positioned as the one who is not at home. Conditional hospitality is when you are welcomed on condition that you give something back in return. [...] People of color in white organizations are treated as guests, temporary residents in someone else’s home. People of color are welcomed on condition they return that hospitality by integrating into a common organizational culture, or by ‘being’ diverse, and allowing institutions to celebrate their diversity.” (2012: 43)

We will see in this chapter that Haitian artists are welcomed in white ‘host’ institutions but under similar self-serving interests. Members (and dropouts) of Atis Rezistans who have become critical about their ‘ethnic slot’ are often indirectly silenced in curatorial processes of selection that tend to favor those members of the group who are more willing to conform to prejudicial ideas about urban Blackness. They can lose their status as legitimate interlocutors as soon as they produce a prejudicial dysfunction that deflates their credibility as a knower capable of representing the entire group as a homogenous entity. Guyodo describes: “It happened several times to me that I refused to speak about vodou in interviews. I met these motherfuckers from abroad [curators, researchers and artists] again walking around in my neighborhood but I never got the chance for follow-up interviews. When they come here they have already something in their minds they want to hear and want to see. They heard about Haiti as the vodou country and they come here to hear more about it. When they don’t find what they are looking for, it is a deep disappointment for them. I hope your research will not fall into the same trap.” (Guyodo 2014)

What Guyodo describes mirrors Fricker’s analysis: “those social groups who are subject to identity prejudice and are thereby susceptible to unjust credibility deficit will, by the same token, also tend simply not to be asked to share their thoughts, their judgments, their opinions. […] This kind of testimonial injustice takes place in silence.” (2007: 130; emphasis added) It is crucial to note, however, that Atis Rezistans are not just mute ‘subalterns’, manipulated by curatorial ideas; they also actively employ their own agency by reacting with their artistic practices to the different anticipations for Haitian art which oscillate between dissimilating, assimilating, and exoticizing curatorial frameworks. But in unbalanced hierarchical situations of power, artists

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often have to cater directly to the expectations, desires, exoticisms, or instructions of their curatorial networks in rather ‘auto-orientalistic’ manners in order to fit neatly into the ‘ethnic slot’ prepared for them by the conditional hospitality of the ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art system. Although Atis Rezistans are celebrated by their curators as a direct form of ‘subaltern’ resistance from below and as ‘authentic’ artistic expressions of a popular klas, it is important to keep in mind, “[that] most of the political life of subordinate groups is to be found neither in overt collective defiance of powerholders nor in complete hegemonic compliance, but in the vast territory between these two polar opposites” (Scott 1990: 136). Cultural anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister reminds us that the question whether popular culture in Haiti is conservative or progressive and characterized by resistance or accommodation misses the point: “The relevant question may be: How does popular culture help people survive?” (2002: 180) And she goes on to explain that “repressive contexts tend to generate double-voiced, allegorical, and parodic expression” (ibid.: 180). Stuart Hall similarly explains that “we tend to think of cultural forms as whole and coherent: either wholly corrupt or wholly authentic. Whereas they are deeply contradictory; they play on contradictions, especially when they function in the domain of the ‘popular’.” (1998: 448) The question, how art can help the members of Atis Rezistans to survive, is the central guideline for my subsequent analysis throughout this book. Although curators often present themselves rhetorically as empathetically concerned about Black artists, they remain power holders in hierarchical inter-klas relationships and ontologically complicit with systems of inequality. I realized through my participatory observation in Port-au-Prince—and my own curatorial work there—that curators barely leave the position of being discursive authorities in their relationships with the members of Atis Rezistans. They remain the ones who centrally define what counts as artistic Haitian expressions through selection processes for exhibitions and written descriptions. Oguibe (2004) describes this situation by analyzing the hierarchical situation of power which influences an illustrative interview situation between art critic and scholar Thomas McEvilley and Ivorian painter Ouattara. According to Oguibe, McEvilley uses artists like Ouattara as an interlocutor for anthropological data and pushes interviews in this particular direction. He remains characteristically calm throughout this interview and deflects Ouattara’s anger when Ouattara repeatedly and politely tries to make the point that he would prefer to talk about his artistic oeuvre rather than his cultural background. But McEvilley pushes towards a realization of his preferred narrative with a catalogue of questions that are not intended to reveal the artist as subject but rather to display him

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as the object of an exotic fascination: “How big was your family? What school did you go to? What language was spoken in your home? What religion did your family practice? Did it involve animal sacrifice?” (ibid.: 12) According to Oguibe, the ‘non-Western’ artist is unmistakably brought up to accept “that in dealing with the power that McEvilley represents, he is engaged in an illmatched game of survival, a game that he must play rather carefully if he must avoid profound consequences, a game that he must negotiate with patience to avoid his own erasure, his own annihilation, a game that he must ultimately concede in order to live” (ibid.: 10-11). This description is very characteristic for the power dynamic many members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans described to me in interviews. There is a clear awareness of the necessity to make friends with ‘control officers’ of the global art system. If artists refuse to engage in vodou scripts, for example, and refuse to become informants for this particular data in exhibition projects, they can easily be erased from the context. By now, the members of Atis Rezistans are so numerous that scholars and curators will always find an obliged member who is willing to play the desired ‘culture game’ with them. Eugène describes the situation for Atis Rezistans with the metaphor of a game: “We are like a football team. They [curators] select people to be part of the game. Maybe you will never be playing for the team on the field. They will only select eleven players for a game. You can be here in my museum, you can train, you can work, but you will not play for us. Not everybody will be able to play on the field.” (2014a) And he goes on to specify that although he could position himself as the leader of the group, “I am not the one who has the choice to select people to play on this field. The person, the kliyan (client) who comes here will select the artists or the artwork he [she or they] wants to present in exhibitions.” (ibid.) Curators function as benevolent ‘control officers’ of the global art system which the Haitian artists have to persuade to be able to plug themselves successfully into the global art circuit. Many curators downplay this hierarchical situation of inter-klas power, which expresses itself in a rewarding system as well as ‘auto-orientalist’ artistic expressions that speak to the racialist common sense of visiting foreigners. By highlighting instead supposedly ‘authentic’ dimensions within the art practice of Atis Rezistans, these curators are also obscuring their own influence on the history of these objects and their power to police the artworks through curatorial selection processes. They actively camouflage their influence by emphasizing cultural and socio-economic alterity as a culturally intelligible, ‘authenticating’ mechanism that invents new local meanings for the artworks.

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My intention in this chapter is not so much to review the complex reasons why particular Haitian artists may decide to work about vodou, whether as a matter of discursive strategy, political practice, religious belief-system, or as a heritage claim; rather, I intend to show how vodou is related to processes of inclusion through an inter-klas rewarding system, which grants Haitian artists visibility within the narrow confines of the ‘Western’ art system’s self-serving interest in claiming a declarative position of benevolent white progressiveness that performs ‘benign tolerance’ without dismantling a system of inequality. I argue in this chapter that, by renouncing vodou in their artistic practices, Haitian artists intend to regain their representational autonomy after vodou has been used to reify—and banalize—their artworks as something easily consumable and readable for white audiences.

2.1 THE VODOU ART NETWORK: CONTEMPORARY HAITIAN ART AS POST-APOCALYPTIC IMAGES We saw in chapter one how Prézeau Stephenson tries to circumvent and navigate clear anticipations for Haitian art by highlighting underrepresented socio-critical aspects within the work by Eugène, Celeur, and Guyodo. The curatorial work by Prézeau Stephenson is informed by her own experience working as a female Haitian artist who, like Benjamin, has taken part in this confined ‘ethnic slot’ system for Caribbean artists in Europe and the United States since the 1990s. Prézeau Stephenson’s decision to zoom out the aspect vodou for several exhibitions can be understood as a curatorial strategy that tries to counter redundant and generalizing expectations for Haitian art and to break away from the idea of Haitian art as an apolitical discourse. Vodou as a Haitian artistic discourse is very much a given in the common understanding of Haitian art and culture. I would even argue that vodou and Haiti are quasi-identical in foreign anticipations. Prézeau Stephenson actively opposes naturalizations of expected discourses, which historically and redundantly have used vodou as a stimulus for exotic desires and—as we saw earlier—as a “happiness means” for white audiences and their emotional economies. Art historian Wendy Asquith identifies expected types of content for Haitian art as “vodou, naiveté, primitivism, market scenes, and idyllic landscapes” (2013: 227). Asquith calls these expected types of content “easy associations” (ibid.) and rightfully adds “catastrophe” as a new central expectation for artistic productions from Haiti since the earthquake of 2010. Focusing on Haiti through the lens of disaster is not limited to the domain of visual art but has become a dominant framework for most international media coverage since 2010. I realized through reactions after conference papers and editing pro-

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cesses of articles how de-exoticizing perspectives, which counter a white foreign gaze on Haitian art, tend to call forth a strong prejudicial dysfunction and a credibility deficit for Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work in Europe and the United States. As soon as the foreign art circuit became involved, Prézeau Stephenson’s apprehension proved to be true and vodou became again the central defining characteristic for Atis Rezistans—besides and along with their socio-economic position. Prézeau Stephenson’s emphasis on socio-economic alterity from her urban sculptures series became interwoven with a strong interest in religious alterity. It is important to point out that I do not want to imply here that Prézeau Stephenson understands political resistance and vodou as oppositional to each other. To the contrary, both categories have of course been closely intertwined historically since the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804 (cf. e.g. Dubois 2003; Dayan 1998; Dubois 2005; Fischer 2004; Ramsey 2014) and her work as an artist and scholar is evidently informed by this awareness (cf. Prézeau Stephenson 2020). Vodou also remains a medium to articulate strong political and decolonial agendas for a contemporary ‘subaltern’ milieu.2 Karen Richman points out that Haitians’ humiliating and oppressive encounter with Catholic and U.S. American imperialism led in the beginning of the 20th century to a nationalist search for an alternative anchor of identity that could challenge hegemonic narratives: “This anchor was found and reproduced through state-sponsored folklore studies of the

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Haitian writer and intellectual Jean Claude Fignolé describes that vodou manifests itself in every aspect of political life in Haiti. He argues: “This continued after independence as Vaudou became intimately intertwined with every articulation of Haitian life…There is no political life in Haiti without Vaudou. Same goes for cultural life where the Vaudou imprint is increasingly clear. In works of art, on canvases, you can feel the presence of Vaudou. This is true even within the church, where Vaudou rites are increasingly adopted in religious song. The end result is that Vaudou is in the process of colonizing Christianity rather than the other way around. [...] As I have said, Vaudou finds itself manifested in every articulation of Haitian public life and particularly in political life. There is no doubt in my mind that Vaudou is influencing both Catholicism and Protestantism, because they have not been able to make it disappear, given that it is strongly ingrained in the Haitian conscience. Increasingly, what we need is a greater willingness by cultivated and wise Vaudou practitioners to affirm themselves publicly and denounce the practice of the religion as something secretive. The more they affirm themselves, the more they will be listened to, particularly in the political arena. There is a deep wisdom in Vaudou which we do not listen to and which we do not utilize effectively.” (Fignolè in Mier 2016)

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‘African’ religion of Vodou.” (2012: 269) McAlister describes how particularly the gede spirits can function as a form of social critique ‘from below’: “In Vodou, jokes using betiz are the special province of Papa Gede, the bawdy spirit of sex and death who tirelessly works, jokes, and heals. The Gede are quick to satirize the ruling order in general, and with it anybody in authority or in a position of respect. Elsewhere I have written that by linking sex irrevocably with satire, the Gede spirits are the ultimate social critics in Vodou, uniquely able to make political commentary in both domestic and national arenas. Through the jokes and betiz, both Papa Gede and the Rara bands become free to parody, to question, and to laugh...This is because betiz opens a philosophical space for opposition and rejection of the suffering of the world through laughter.” (2002: 60-61)

The gede or Guédé are a family of vodou deities (lwa), which are closely connected to death, life, sexuality, and the cemetery. They often function as comical relief at ceremonies, which is why Alfred Métraux (1998: 83) described them as ridiculous and horrifying at once. But vodou has also become a crucial mechanism to other and exoticize Haitian society since the U.S. American occupation between 1915 and 1934. It is no coincidence that exactly around this time the U.S. American movie industry started to transform the pan-African religion into a racist trope of horror and fear. It was part of a larger racist discourse that tried to legitimize and reinterpreted the USA’s aggressive hegemonic expansion into the Caribbean as a ‘civilizing’ mission by demonizing Haitian society and culture in the process (Hurbon: 1995). Pseudo-ethnographic, racist writings such as William Seabrook’s The Magic Island (1929) were crucial in this process. The imaginary of Haiti has become closely intertwined with these varied exotic and racist projections produced by the epistemic regime of U.S. American imperialist expansion.3 Consequently, audiences are not blank slates when they are coming

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An important historical development was also François Duvalier’s use of the vodou religion to strengthen the power of his regime since coming into power in 1957. From the beginning Duvalier constructed himself as a père spiritual (spiritual father) by using visual motifs associated with the gede spirits and Bawon Samdi in particular. Thus, he encouraged rumors to be himself a powerful spiritual leader. Kate Ramsey describes: “Although Haitian governments had long regarded Vodou as a potential parallel power, no president had attempted to co-opt this decentralized religion on the scale undertaken by Duvalier. […] Just as Duvalier sought to install members of his secret police, the tonton makout (themselves named after a childhood bogeyman), in the hierarchies of the governmental, military, and civil society institutions, so he re-

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into exhibitions but primed by a racialized common sense. Thus, every exhibition today about vodou art or vodou-inspired art still faces racist imaginations in audiences. A network of white curators and scholars around Donald Cosentino, cultural anthropologist Katherine Smith, art historian Marilyn Houlberg, and Leah Gordona, among others, puts a strong emphasis on vodou, and the gede spirits in particular, as a cultural, religious, and political framework for making the artworks by Atis Rezistans culturally intelligible. This network counters racist representations of Haitian culture by highlighting political dimensions in vodou aesthetics, which evoke McAlister’s description above and debate Haiti’s history of Black revolution. The most important exhibitions in this vodou/gede trajectory have been Lespri Endependan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture (2004), Vodou Riche (2007), Vodou Resistance (2007), Death & Fertility: Haitian Pavilion at Venice Biennale (2011), In Extremis: Death & Life in 21st Century Haitian Art (2012), and Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou (2012). Haitian musician and hotel owner Richard Morse also played a crucial part in the narrative. At the yearly vodou festival Fete Ghede, Morse is offering the members of Atis Rezistans the possibility to show their artworks in the yard of his Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince. This festival coincides with a big concert event taking place at the hotel on 2nd of November every year. All these exhibitions helped to integrate the members of Atis Rezistans seamlessly into a historical narrative of vodou-inspired arts of Haiti. Backed up by important art institutions in Europe and the United States this network of curators was able to produce a discourse that has quickly become naturalized and widely disseminated through multiple channels like art exhibitions, academic writings, and a documentary as a dominant framework for the artists and their audiences. The exhibition Lespri Endependan: Discovering Haitian Sculpture curated by Donald Cosentino and Elizabeth Cerejido took place at the Frost Art Museum in Miami in 2004 and can be seen as a starting point for this process. Similar to Prézeau Stephenson’s exhibitions, Lespri Endependan dealt with the importance of sculpture as an artistic medium in Haiti. An important link between Prézeau Stephenson and Cosentino is Port-au-Prince-based art collector Reynald Lally

cruited oungan, manbo, bòkò, and sosyete sekrè officers to join his force and, after 1962, to serve in his civil militia, the Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale (VSN).” Duvalier used the image of Bawon Samdi to visualize his authority and power (Ramsey 2011: 251). Trouillot describes that this civil militia was made up to a large percentage of the rural and urban poor, which have been acknowledged to be citizens of the nation for the first time (Trouillot 1990a: 191).

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(Galerie Bourbon-Lally) who collaborated with both curators separately and helped to raise local and international awareness for the new importance of Haitian sculpture since the 1980s. Cosentino presented the history of Haitian sculpture mainly through the recurring influence of vodou religion and through a historical narrative that links Haitian sculpture to African roots: “[Haitian sculpture’s] roots go back to Africa, to those old world liturgical myths and rituals which were melded into Vodou, Haiti’s national religion. Originally inspired by the ritual needs of Vodou, Haitian artists continue to sculpt objects that represent, invoke, contain, assuage, channel or divert the energies of the lwa.” (Cosentino 2004: 8) The general term vodou shifted towards the subcategory of the gede spirits. This shift offered Cosentino a possibility to link two types of expected content for Haitian culture, namely vodou and catastrophe: “None of this postmillennial apocalypse has escaped the consideration of Haitian artists. They have continued to represent and reinterpret these unfolding disasters with unflinching vision and imagination. As things have grown worse and worse, their art has grown richer, bolder, stranger...To an ever-greater degree Gede presides over all this postapocalyptic creativity […] Gede is still a ‘joker’ […], but if anything, his contradictions have grown more extreme.” (Cosentino 2012a: 51)

Thus, this new curatorial framework superimposes the general place image of Haiti onto the artworks of Atis Rezistans. Sociologist Rob Shields describes a place image as a set of core representations which “forms a widely disseminated and commonly held set of images of place or space” (1991: 60). The place image of Haiti relates intimately to the categories poverty, vodou, and catastrophe. In the exhibition In Extremis (2012), Cosentino produces a clear causal and culturalizing link between the increase of social misery and continuing instability in Haiti which supposedly produces bolder, stranger, and more morbid artistic expressions as an artistic response reaction (Cosentino 2012a: 51). Writer and journalist Amy Wilentz describes in her review of Cosentino’s, Smith’s, and Gordon’s joint exhibition In Extremis (2012-2013) that the framework of the gede spirits represents a voyeuristic outsider expectation of Haitian culture: “How the visiting anthropologists, ethnographers, writers, artists, actors, and dancers love these dark, violent, unpredictable gods and minigods! These fickle and volatile spirits conjure up for us boring one-goddists all the things impermissible in our public lives and religious practices. While we sit rigidly and kneel and daven and cross ourselves and eat wafers and pray and bow down, forehead to the ground, the Gede (in the form of worshippers

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possessed by Gede) supposedly flirt, fuck, masturbate, shit, and do all the weird depraved natural things the species is known to do when not dressed in Sabbath or Sunday finery. [...] I was a little surprised that the Gede were so prominent in the show. I’ve been to many and many a Vodou ceremony and never have I seen the Gede appear, except at the party on the roof of the Fowler museum after the opening of In Extremis, where the Gede were part of a hired performing band.” (Wilentz 2013)

She goes on to call the exhibition “exhibitionist” and clarifies further: “Let’s not pretend that the show says much about the heart and soul of Haiti, or about Death and Life in Haiti in the 21st Century. It’s a very small part of Haiti’s art world and says more about outsider perceptions of Haiti and voodoo than it does about the real Haiti and Vodou.” (ibid. 2013) Wilentz’s critical opinion also mirrors Atis Rezistans artists Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a. Papa Da’s astonishment when I asked him why Atis Rezistans centrally celebrates the gede spirits in their artistic practices, as many curatorial descriptions imply. Alphonse Jean Junior is the only member of Atis Rezistans who is also a practicing houngan (vodou priest) and can be understood as Atis Rezistans’ specialist on all questions concerning vodou. He was astonished and asked me in return why I came up with such a wrongful assertion? He explained to me that he did not see the gede spirits of particular interest for his own artistic practice, and that he dealt equally with all lwa (vodou spirits). Following Wilentz, I argue that the focus on the gede spirits has to be understood as an expression of a wider discourse that dramatizes Haitian art in a sensationalistic gesture and plays into the hands of socio-voyeuristic excitement that comes along with misery, poverty and catastrophe. A recurring term used repeatedly by Cosentino and Gordon to describe the artworks by Atis Rezistans is postapocalyptic or apocalyptic and is rooted in a similar dramatizing gesture. As Gordon puts it: “Their often monumental works reference their shared African cultural heritage, the practice of Vodou and a dystopian sci-fi view of the future” (Gordon 2007: 222); and elsewhere: “Their assemblages transform the detritus of the world’s failing economies into distinctly urban apocalyptic images, whose take on Vodou evoke a cyber-punk science fiction vision.” (Gordon 2012d: 24) Gordon goes on to call the artworks “prophetic”, and she compares them to a biblical new-born Adam that “leaps from postindustrial waste, raising specters to haunt the dark landscape of globalization” (Gordon 2012a: 109). I have mentioned in the introduction that art historian Leon Wainwright (2011) pointed out that the aspect of time is crucial for understanding why art history has failed to contemplate the Caribbean. While the ‘naïve painters’ of Haiti have been marked as timeless and anachronistic and positioned in an archa-

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ic time before the narrative of art history, their contemporary counterparts, by contrast, seem to have hurried ahead into the post-apocalyptic future. Both descriptions have in common, to speak with Johannes Fabian (2002), that they position Haitian popular artists in a time that is not ours. The discourse remains allochronic and therefore creates once again an asymmetrical temporal opposition. Fabian defines the denial of coevalness as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse” (2002: 31). Anthropologists and ‘natives’ do not appear as partners in dialogue because they are not positioned in the same time narrative. Instead of acting as interlocutors, people of other cultures become temporally other (ibid.). For Louis Parkinson Zamora (1989: 11), the emergence of apocalyptic modes of thought and expression is a predictable reaction to social disruption and temporal uncertainty. I argue, however, that the terms post-apocalyptic or apocalyptic should not be understood descriptively for the artworks by Atis Rezistans but rather as a critical comment on curators’ understanding of the current world order. The poverty of the group needs to be constantly re-evoked in post-apocalyptic frameworks because the sculptors are metaphorical stand-ins for millions of anonymous urban poor suffering under the circumstances of colonial, racist, heteropatriarchal capitalism. In the aforementioned quotations, Gordon reflects on the devastating downside of neo-liberal capitalism and expands Prézeau Stephenson’s national and individual socioeconomic discourse to a global systemic level when she describes the artworks by Atis Rezistans as “a Mad-Max-like vision of a free-market economic future going to hell in a handcart” (Gordon 2012d: 24). The members of Atis Rezistans as victims of the global economic system become an abstract metaphorical category and figure of temporarlity to discuss capitalist oppression in narratives motivated by leftist critiques of neoliberal capitalism.

2.2 VODOU AS AN ‘AUTHENTICATING’ MECHANISM Although the vodou inspiration of some of the artworks connects them to a wider system of visual culture from an anthropological and religious perspective, most curators define these objects as secular art pieces produced specifically for exhibition spaces and as discursive art practices: “These new artists were not making Vodou art, they were making art about Vodou.” (Cosentino 2012a: 27-28) Cosentino goes on to explain that art about vodou has become a secular genre in the Haitian art world since the foundation of the Centre d’Art in the 1940s. Far-

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quharson highlighted similarly in his curatorial statement for the exhibition catalogue Kafou the secular aspect of the artworks presented in his exhibition: “Other exhibitions that have focused on Vodou have combined art with ceremonial objects, exploring this wider visual culture from anthropological perspective. They have presented objects of ritual, reconstructed altars and presented documentary material on Vodou ceremonies within atmosqueric and immersive exhibition scenographies – and sometimes even commissioned Vodou priests to perform ceremonies within the museum itself. This approach relates less well to Nottingham Contemporary’s artistic and philosophical purpose, and Kafou, by contrast, is very much an art exhibition, one that acknowledges rather than blurs the interstice between work of art and ritual object – however slim it may be in some cases – as well as the larger separation between exhibition space and hounfor.” (Farquharson 2012: 9)

Gordon, on the other hand, offers a more ambiguous reading contrasting these secular understandings. Around 2009, she became the unofficial manager of Atis Rezistans after she had met the artists through Benjamin. She is working as a cultural broker and has established herself as a curator for the presentation of artworks by Atis Rezistans parallel to the rising international interest in the sculptors. She was part of the larger curatorial staff of In Extremis and cocurated Kafou with Farquharson. Her documentary The Sculptors of Grand Rue (2008) was screened in both exhibitions to give a local context for the art pieces and offered the Haitian artists a platform to talk about their art, their experiences living in an informal neighborhood, and their relationship to the gede spirits. The documentary that can be found online helped to disseminate the gede framework widely. One scene in this documentary is of particular interest for my discussion: Gordon presents her partner Eugène in the interior of his exhibition space, ritually feeding a human skull integrated in one of his sculptures. I also witnessed at a conference in Birmingham in 2014 at a joint panel with Gordon how she selected this particular scene as a general introduction to speak about Atis Rezistans to her audience. This scene introduces into the discourse a new component, which Prézeau Stephenson explicitly denounced: a ritual use for the art objects. A similar example is an interview between Gordon and Atis Rezistans’ artist Jean Claude Saintilus published in the exhibition catalogue to In Extremis. Saintilus shifted places with a gede spirit called Mazaka La Kwa several times in the course of the interview (Gordon 2012). She presents the conversation as a continuous monologue by Saintilus and leaves out her own interview questions in the process. Throughout the interview, Saintilus dissolves into a passive avatar of the gede

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spirit and is barely speaking about his artistic practice. The interview transforms him into an interlocutor for Haitian spirituality. His perspectives on his art, his aspirations, or points of view on a discursive level are to a large degree absent from the conversation or solely expressed in tight relationship to his spirituality. This conversation between Gordon and Saintilus evokes Oguibe’s interview descriptions from the beginning of the chapter. I am not disputing here Saintilus’ religious worldview or the fact that this conversation actually happened in this form. However, the specific selection of that particular conversation in order to represent the group Atis Rezistans as a whole in an art exhibition in the ‘West’ produces a discourse that creates a strong cultural Otherness that seems to blur the line between contemporary art and religious practice. While the boundaries between art and religion can, of course, on theoretical and methodological grounds be legitimately interrogated, in my personal interactions with the members of Atis Rezistans the line between art and religion seemed always clearly defined. Gordon’s interview with Saintilus ostensibly intends to give a voice to a ‘subaltern’ artist but is unfortunately muting Saintilus in the process by focusing mainly on his religious worldview. Gordon’s curatorial motivation to understand these sculptures in relation to a religious practice resonates with previous primitivist anticipations for African and Afro-Caribbean artworks. Cultural anthropologist Shelly Errington (1998) argues that the category ‘Primitive Art’, established in the early 20th century, led to a situation where African ethnographic objects had to be religious or transcendental in nature in order to be recognized and institutionalized in European and U.S. American museums.4 Cultural anthropologist Christopher Steiner (1994) also describes in his ethnography on art traders in Cote d’Ivoire in West Africa how artists strategically stage a ritual use to satisfy the demand among ‘Western’ clients for ‘authentic’ objects, which can only be received as ‘authentic’ when proved to have

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Errington describes in her study, “[t]he terms ‘ceremony’, ‘ritual’, ‘rite’, ‘initiation’, ‘sacred’, ‘sacrificial’, ‘ancestor’ and ‘totemic’ occur again and again in the Rockefeller Wing labels […] My point rather is that these objects are drawn overwhelmingly from the realm of the ‘sacred’ as contrasted to the ‘secular’. Primitive Man is obsessed with ritual, or at least that primitive art expresses higher realities. Part of the reasoning that underlies the selection of ritual objects as art rather than more mundane items, it seems probable, is the eighteenth-century distinction between mere craft and high art. Obviously functional objects do not qualify as art. […] The selection of ritual objects over utilitarian ones as primitive art is undoubtedly multiply determined. For one thing, ritual use links an object to the transcendent, a way that art in general is validated rhetorically.” (Errington 1998: 90-91)

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been produced without a European demand in mind and mainly for a popular local milieu. Steiner describes how the ascription of a ritual use of art objects becomes an authenticating mechanism for European collectors because it imbues art objects with a local meaning that transcends the relationship-triad between object, local artist, and visiting collector. Therefore, African traders wittingly responded to this demand and replicated the shiny, worn patina that results from years of object handling, reproduced surface accumulation of smoke, soot and dust, or imitated the encrustation of blood, feathers, and kola nuts resulting from repeated sacrificial offerings (Steiner 1994). Prézeau Stephenson (2012: 70) describes a similar practice for the Haitian context: La Fondation AfircAmericA’s artists David Boyer and Lhérisson Dubréus developed a technique to make drapo vodou (vodou flags) look older and ritually used by blackening them with smoke from burning tires. One of their central clients is Swiss-Haitian collector Marianne Lehmann, who searches mainly for ritual vodou artifacts for her Port-au-Prince-based collection and worked with Celeur in the mid-1990s. Eugène often seems to perform what Boyer and Dubréus developed at the level of their material drapo: He is acting as the ‘native’. While curatorial framings offered by Prézeau Stephenson in the early 2000s can be described with James Scott’s term as a public transcript for her exhibitions, Eugène offers his own subversive, more hidden transcripts. “If subordinate discourse in the presence of the dominant is a public transcript, I shall use the term hidden transcript to characterize discourse that takes place ‘offstage’, beyond direct observation by powerholders. The hidden transcript is thus derivative in the sense that it consists of those offstage speeches, gestures, and practices that confirm, contradict, or inflect what appears in the public transcript.” (Scott 1990: 4)

At the day of the opening of the 4th urban sculpture exhibition in Barbados, Eugène dressed himself with dark sunglasses, which had colorful skull images printed on its lenses, and wore a black silk hat. Skulls, sunglasses, and silk hats are symbols for the gede spirits.5 Eugène performatively countered Prézeau Stephenson’s more ‘assimilating’ curatorial approach with his own embodied vodou narrative and thus re-inscribed vodou into the discourse. While Prézeau Stephenson tried to forestall potential stereotypical interpretations of Haitian art by giv-

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Curator and former director of the National Gallery of Jamaica, Veerle Poupeye, attended the 4th urban sculpture exhibition in Barbados in 2004. She drew my attention to André Eugène’s self-presentation at the day of the opening in a personal conversation. I want to thank her for her comment.

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ing less weight to the common vodou narrative, Eugène willingly brings them back into the discourse and proudly claims his Haitianness through accessories and clothes that reference vodou. Within a Bourdieuan framework of field theory, one must possess a predisposed habitus to enter a specific social field like the artistic field to be able to play its game. One must possess at least a minimum amount of knowledge, skill, and habitus to be accepted as a legitimate player on the field of cultural productions (cf. Johnson 1993: 8). As guests of a generous white institution, the members of Atis Rezistans are often not considered to be legitimate players on the artistic globalized field of cultural production. Instead, they become exceptional outsiders within art institutions. Because of this exceptional outsider status, they become generously exempted from the rules of this game and exempted from certain mechanisms of power within a contemporary art system where a MA in Fine Arts has become increasingly obligatory. When a person does not have the habitus, knowledge, or degree necessary to play the game, being produced as the exceptional Other can afford structural possibilities to still be positioned within the field as “an exotic reification” (Puwar 2004: 149) that is not pressured into the rules of the game. But according to Ahmed (2012: 43), exactly this structural position of being received as a guest, outsider, or space invader (Puwar 2004) allows acts of inclusion to retain a form of exclusion. Eugène seems to play the culture game quite virtuously—at least within the confines he was assigned to. But by accepting that ‘ethnic slot’, Eugène is inside and outside at once. One of the members of Atis Rezistans, Claudel Casseus, explained to me the intimate relationship that exists between foreign anticipations of Haitian art and vodou: “In general, foreigners are always very interested in vodou. We are all aware of this. It is a widespread and well-known idea about foreigners coming to Haiti. Since Haitian artists are very poor and don’t have any money, and even though they may create artworks with different topics as well, they will explain to you that it has something to do with vodou to be able to sell it quickly to visitors to eat a meal in the evening.” (Casseus 2014)

In Casseus’s reading, vodou becomes a mechanism to attract attention from a klas piwo a and to be perceived as having a credibility excess about this particular topic, which produces academic and curatorial interest. While artistic spaces construct Atis Rezistans as exceptionally different, vodou on the other hand can afford them a structural position from which they are perceived as legitimate knowers. One of the most common stereotypes regarding blan (foreigners) I encountered in Port-au-Prince seems to be that visitors from abroad are always in-

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terested and fascinated by vodou. Eugène performatively plays on these stereotypical exotic fascinations in an ‘auto-orientalist’ manner by helping Gordon to give his sculptures a new ritual meaning. Shohat and Stam (2012) describe the re-appropriation of established stereotypical discourses as a central artistic strategy in postcolonial art. They explain that “[postcolonial] aesthetics share the ju-jitsu trait of turning strategic weakness into tactical strength. By appropriating an existing discourse for their own ends, they deploy the force of the dominant against domination” (ibid.: 41). This strategy also mirrors Christopher Warnes’ description of “ontological magical realistic writing” (2009: 12), which tries to evoke culturally-specific, ‘nonWestern’ ways of relating to the world in postcolonial literature. Specifically ‘non-Western’ world views in Caribbean literature are often expressed by postcolonial writers through indigenous and/or Afro-Caribbean religions like santería, palo monte mayombe or vodou, which lift the ‘magical’ onto the same epistemic level than the ‘real’ in such a way that “neither of these two realms is able to assert a greater claim to truth than the other” (ibid.). Gordon’s use of vodou in her documentary and curatorial practice can be understood in relation to this perspective of faith-based magical realistic writing. “As a postcolonial response to colonialism’s often brutal enforcing of a selectively conceived modernity, magical realism of this kind seeks to reclaim what has been lost: knowledge, values, tradition, ways of seeing, beliefs.” (Warnes 2009: 12) Gordon inscribes religious ways of relating to the world into Atis Rezistans’ artworks, which also evokes Alejo Carpentier’s concept of “lo real maravilloso” (2004: 121). At the same time, the ontological faith-based perspective endangers the Haitian artists because they risk becoming again an exotic reification. This sort of religious or magical realist framing already produces generalized approaches like the following, by literature scholar Carolyn Duffey: “The simultaneity of life and death is also always evoked in the works of the artists in their training program, as it is in the vodou altars in the homes/ateliers of the Atis Rezistans, who define themselves as oungans (priests).” (Duffey 2015) Duffey incorrectly transforms every artist in the neighborhood into practicing houngan (vodou priests) and gives the vodou-inspired artworks a culturalizing dimension instead of asking about individual discursive reasons for the use of vodou in particular artworks. This perspective also demonstrates disregard towards local houngan, who lose the status of being religious specialists, because Duffey implies that every member of Atis Rezistans can easily become or be considered to be an houngan.

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Fig. 16: Anj (Angel) by Jean Claude Saintilus, 2014, deceased person unknown (skull); Fig. 17: Vodou deity Grand Brijit by Jean Claude Saintilus, 2014, deceased person unknown (skull)

I noticed during my fieldwork that culturalizing interpretations along the lines of “vodou is just what they do” are a very common way for visitors to make sense of Atis Rezistans’ musée d’art and ateliers. But this culturalizing perspective obstructs access to other sources of inspiration besides vodou. It also obstructs discursive meanings for vodou as an inspiration for carefully manipulated and constructed pieces of art. This perspective shows little interest in differentiating the multiple reasons why different artists may decide to speak about vodou—or refuse to do so. All artistic expressions, which do not relate to vodou risk becoming invisible because, after all, “vodou is just what they do.” It is therefore important to remain sensitive to how political and socio-critical content in the artworks may not be narrated exclusively through the lens of the gede spirits. I asked Celeur in an interview how important it is for artists to be honest, after I realized that many artists seemed to adjust the descriptions of their art pieces to my initial scholarly interest in vodou. Celeur responded: “Let‘s just say that the foreigners who are coming to this neighborhood are only interested in our truth in relation to vodou. They want us to be vodou, so we give them vodou. They come here and want to know everything we know about vodou and not only about our art pieces. Maybe therefore many of the artists here don’t say what they really think.” (Celeur 2014) Viewed against this background, Gordon’s

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‘faith-based’ approach contains the risk that Haitian artists are transformed once again into a reified, neo-primitivist desire that only offers Haitian artists a place in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ exhibitions if they are capable to prove that they embody a redemptive and exotic alternative to ‘Euro-U.S. American’ modernism and remain ‘authentically’ other. I argue that in this particular case a dissimilating mechanism of presentation becomes indeed a cultural Othering that pretends to correspond to a reality in the daily life of these artists but displays the artist instead as an object of an exotist fascination: as a culturally, temporally, and racially asymmetrical opposition. By staging a local ritual use for these art pieces, Gordon and Eugène jointly invent a new local meaning that produces in return new credibility, which deflects from the hierarchical relationship of curators and artists and the rewarding system in place. The discourse also incorporates Atis Rezistans into the problematic history of ‘naïve art’. Carlo Célius examines a similar development in his analysis of artist Hector Hyppolite (1894–1948): “[Hyppolite] was not simply ‘discovered’; he played a determining role in his own exposure. He was the source of his own legend–the legend that undergirded his celebrity. […] Hyppolite is emblematic on several levels. He rose to the rank of model of the ‘authentic’ Haitian artists and served to confirm the thesis of Haitian authenticity founded in Vodou. The character of Hyppolite supplied the theme of the artist who creates in a state of spirit possession […]. Hyppolite’s work emerged within a context of encounters, exchanges and dialog. All of these parameters must be taken into consideration.” (Célius 2016: 128-129)

I do not wish to imply here that we can reduce the use of vodou solely to a hierarchical negotiation between foreign demand and local supply. Coming back to Celeur’s first quote shows the importance of vodou as a heritage claim and also as a decolonial space for creative thinking. But a simultaneous dimension of cultural, temporal, and racial Othering risks fixing the artworks by Atis Rezistans as an easily consumable and understandable commodity for ‘Western’ audiences in relation to vodou. It is no longer the Haitian artist who is able to decide what vodou means for his or her artistic practice. This process has culturalized, reified, and banalized the artworks so that they conform to a common knowledge of Haitian culture and produced a fixed reality. Vodou is seldom represented as a source of representational conflict or a topic of controversial discussion within the neighborhood but tends to be normalized, reified, and culturalized as simply ‘what Haitians do’. By renouncing vodou, Haitian artists from lower socioeconomic strata are not necessarily renouncing a religious worldview but the work of a network of white curators who produce a narrow, reified ‘ethnic slot’ that can easily function as a form of ‘benevolent imperialism’ that limits the

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scope of artistic self-determination by simultaneously expanding opportunities for performances of white progressiveness.

2.3 BLACK HYPER-MASCULINITY A similar argument can be made about the representation of phallic masculinity in the artworks of Atis Rezistans. Atis Rezistans is a very gendered, maledominated group. With the exception of artists Katelyne Alexis and Mabelle Williams, women are barely producing rekiperasyon art on a regular basis.6 The masculinity of these art spaces is not only defined by a large percentage of cisgendered male bodies occupying these spaces throughout the day, but it is also inscribed in many sculptures exhibited in the neighborhood. Many artworks have large wooden erect penises integrated into their compositions, which draw a lot of attention from visitors. Some of them are affixed on elastic springs and— much to the amusement of visitors—are bouncing kinetically up and down. Cultural anthropologist Katherine Smith relates these sculptural depictions of phallic masculinity to “Gede’s overwhelming phallocentrism” (2012: 125) and to the Kreyòl gendered concept vagabondaj. The term vagabondaj can be loosely trans-

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Several Gran Ri artists assured me on several occasions that they actively try to teach young women to become artists but with little success so far. Many feminist visitors often articulate their disappointment that there are barely any female voices from the community coming through. Every two years during the Ghetto Biennale, there is a handful of women of the community claiming to be the only female artists of Atis Rezistans but most of these artists do not produce sculptures and their identity as artists seems to emerge temporarily during the art event. Women in the neighborhood have less time on their hands than many men. They are often burdened by multiple obligations: They are doing reproductive work like taking care of children and are often in better positions to find work as daily laborers selling small goods at markets or street corners. The social and economic fabric of the neighborhood simply does not allow them to participate in the workshops of the Gran Ri artists. Due to a gendered division of labor in Haiti, there are definite sets of women’s work and men’s work. The traditional tourist craft is an illustrative example: While men are taking care of heavy machinery to reduce tree trunks to smaller pieces and other physically demanding activities like wood carving, women are the ones who paint and polish the artisanal final products. The studios of the Gran Ri artists are very ‘masculine’ cis-gendered spaces. Especially Eugène’s musée d’art is always crowded with young men listening to football radio podcasts, drinking beer, or using Eugène’s Internet connection. Hence, participating as women in these masculine art spaces seems to be challenging.

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lated as misbehaving or more literally as vagrancy. “The images of Gede presented by Eugene in Bawon and other works may be shocking, but they are culturally intelligible. The sculpture employs a lexicon of symbols that most Haitians would recognize as referencing Gede. […] Gede is commonly represented by the phallus, the skull, and the cross.” (ibid.) She goes on to explain that the role of young men in Haiti has always been one of contradictions because they are at the same time socially marginalized and yet symbolically central. “Gede embodies this symbolic prominence as the spirit who is not only ubiquitous, but also perpetually young and unabashedly male.” (ibid.: 137) Similar to McAlister’s analysis of the gede spirits, Smith highlights how gede as vagabon deconstructs social norms and questions authority through non-conforming behaviors as a politics of deviance. She writes that the term was repeatedly defined by her interlocutors with the Kreyòl phrase: “Li pa respekte prensip la” (He has no respect for etiquette, or he doesn’t respect the principle) (ibid.: 131). The concept vagabondaj is multi-layered and can be defined by positive, anti-authoritarian but also negative, destructive components: “It is clear that there is a deep uncertainty in the term [vagabondaj]. Its usage can be playful and sexual, but also menacing and derogatory. The vagabond is celebrated for flaunting authority in a country saddled with a long history of authoritarianism, yet the same disregard for social norms makes the vagabond an object of fear. The vagabon’s transgressions may be humorous and liberating, or they may be violent and destructive.” (ibid.: 131)

This ambiguous nature of the term vagabondaj explains why many artists in the neighborhood seemed to feel uncomfortable when I brought their artworks in direct association with the term during conversations or interviews. Some artists even responded with anger when I discussed Smith’s analysis with them. Artists explained to me that the term vagabondaj also refers to unfaithfulness, slothfulness, lack of productivity, and even rape. It is therefore easily understandable why they do not want to be associated with these negative and often destructive connotations which can also evoke racist sentiments. One of my interlocutors stated: “According to me, this term does not have any positive meaning at all. Sometimes we use it ironically, just to joke. But I don’t think there is a positive meaning to this word. Vagabondaj means doing something bad: You have three or four girlfriends at the same time; you are doing nothing with your life except enjoying yourself every day.”

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Smith is aware of the danger that comes along with the term when she adroitly writes: “Yet, to a significant extent, the label ‘vagabon’ has served to disenfranchise urban young men, blaming their lack of productivity on character and lifestyle rather than a class system built on their exclusion and exploitation.” (Smith 2012: 135) Although I find Smith’s analysis convincing, I doubt that we can read artistic depictions of phallic masculinity solely as culturally intelligible within the local gede/vagabondaj narrative; rather, I propose a wider framework of transnational and intersectional social encounters, which are constantly taking place within the Gran Ri neighborhood as a touristic, transnational site of hierarchical inter-klas dialogues. Wekker reminds us that the white gaze often operates according to a nineteenth-century racist logic: “In the anxious white mind, which is operating according to the nineteenth-century racist logic that black people are closer to the body/sexuality on a scale ranging from body/sexuality to mind/rationality, and on the basis of projection, one of the sure ways to accomplish white superiority is to keep the chain of associations between lowerclass status, blackness, and sexuality, which for women comes together in the figure of the prostitute and for men, [...] in being overendowed, in place.” (Wekker 2016: 47)

Frantz Fanon also describes how racist imaginations of the racialized male body have fixated Black men on a genital biological level: “For the majority of Whites the black man represents the (uneducated) sexual instinct. He embodies genital power out of reach of morals and taboos. As for white women, reasoning by induction, they invariably see the black man at the intangible gate leading to the realm of mystic rites and orgies, bacchanals and hallucinating sexual sensations.” (Fanon 2008: 154) Again, the artworks by Atis Rezistans are not produced in a cultural vacuum of social isolation but must be read in relation to hierarchical, transnational, and inter-klas negotiations of Blackness. bell hooks makes a similar point when she discusses misogyny in U.S. American rap music. She argues, “gangsta rap does not appear in a cultural vacuum, that is not a product created in isolation within a segregated black world but is rather expressive of the cultural crossing, mixings, and engagement of black youth culture with values, attitudes, and concerns of the white majority” (hooks 1994: 115116). Thus, she explains that it is important to analyze rap music in relation to wider societal implications because it relates to values created and sustained by white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

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“One cannot answer them honestly without placing accountability on larger structures of domination (sexism, racism, class elitism) and the individuals – often white, usually male, but not always – who are hierarchically placed to maintain and perpetuate the values that uphold these exploitative and oppressive systems. That means taking a critical look at the politics of hedonistic consumerism, the values of the men and women who produce gangsta rap. It would mean considering the seduction of young black males who find that they can make more money producing lyrics that promote violence, sexism, misogyny than with any other content. How many disenfranchised black males would not surrender to expressing virulent forms of sexism if they knew the rewards would be unprecedented material power and fame?” (ibid.: 116)

bell hooks describes misogynistic rap music as part of a rewarding system for Black urban youth. She goes on to point out the danger of understanding violence against women in critical discourses as a particular “Black male thing” encouraged by rap music. Violence against women is a central aspect of patriarchal structures of oppression fostered by white powerful elites (ibid.: 116). Thus, a central starting point for the analysis of rap music must reveal the wider societal context which frames these musical productions: Who is marketing these musicians for which demographic audiences? Black queer and feminist rap artists exist, but they do not receive the same mainstream attention and white structural support as heteronormative forms of aggressive, Black masculinity. I argue that there is a similar rewarding system at play when it comes to the artworks of Atis Rezistans, which relates to an insistence on cultural differences by the ‘Western’ art market. These objects are produced in hierarchical inter-klas systems of distribution and respond to foreign fascinations of male Blackness and sexuality. Smith’s article is a good example for how Eugène’s phallocentric sculptures successfully produce scholarly attention because he does not disappoint the racist structure of inter-klas anticipation. The artists are aware of the topics on which particular researchers are working on in the neighborhood and they respond to and negotiate these research agendas through artworks. Several members of the group reminded me during my interviews that Smith does not like the phallic sculptures produced in the neighborhood. Smith’s scholarly interest, possibly at times articulated as a feminist critique during her fieldwork, increases the attention on phallic sculptures and thus helps to produce an inflationary production as a response. It is important to understand that the neighborhood, like every other neighborhood, discusses a multitude of different masculinities but this diversity is not becoming visible because it is silenced through curatorial and scholarly selection processes; these selection processes, in turn,

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indirectly and directly encourage Haitian artists to reproduce artworks which represent Black masculinities through phallic representations. Depictions of phallic maleness surely relate in Smith’s sense to the gede spirits in a local Haitian context but they also relate to racist imaginations of sexualized male Blackness and, as a consequence, feed into a ‘Euro-U.S. American’ rewarding system eager to confirm the racist fascination of well-endowed male Blackness. The male Haitian artists are not free from racist imaginations of being perceived as sexual sensations. I describe in chapter three how they encounter these racist stereotypes in their social interactions with visiting foreigners, who participate in the Ghetto Biennale and bring with them the sexualization of Black bodies on a very interpersonal level. I doubt that a discursive counter-maneuver, which explains these artworks through the gede narratives in exhibition catalogues, is sufficient to convincingly overcome long-standing racist imaginations from the cultural archive, especially because other, alternative masculinities within the neighborhood are silenced or remain unnoticed as they do not fit this particular Black phallocentrism. When I look in retrospect at my own initial interview questions prepared for the members of Atis Rezistans, it is telling that I chronologically discussed the following topics: (1) vodou, (2) poverty/recycling, (3) morbidity/human remains, and (4) phallocentric masculinity. Fig. 18: Tablo with motif zozo (penis) by Reginald Sènatus; Fig. 19: Vodou deity Bawon Kriminel by Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a Papa Da, deceased person unknown (skull)

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These first interviews also directly helped to reproduce common expectations about what blan researchers are excited about and interested in when it comes to the artistic oeuvres of Atis Rezistans. In brief, it seems that white scholars are more interested in investigating—critically or not—why we find so many carved erect penises in the neighborhood than discussing all those sculptures which refuse to get inscribed into this particular discourse of phallic Black maleness. Celeur explained to me that he believes that he was the first Gran Ri artist who has produced a sculptural composition with an erect penis as a direct strategy to shock his audience and produce new attention for his art. He carved a naked figure of the Christian mythological figure Jesus and attached a big erect penis to the composition. According to Celeur, the attention this Jesus sculpture received through provocation quickly sparked an inflationary artistic trend among his colleagues and students because ‘big penises’ was allegedly what blan (foreigners) were looking for the most in art productions. Another of my interlocutor, Getho J. Baptiste, confirms a similar observation: “The first person that created a big zozo (penis) was Celeur actually. The other people only imitate Celeur’s art. Celeur is the person who created it the first time. When he created it, he knew why he did it. The others started to copy him when they saw that visitors became attracted by this type of art, and they also created it in order to attract foreigners.” (Getho 2015) Again, for every sculpture depicting an erect phallus there are several other sculptures, which do not. I asked one of my interlocutors, Ronald Bazile a.k.a. Cheby, during an interview why I could not find carved penises in his artistic oeuvre? Cheby, obviously irritated by my question, brushed aside my comment with a gesture pointing to my crotch area: “David, can I see your penis at the moment? No. Can you see my penis at the moment? No. Why is that so? Because we are both wearing pants.” Similar to the topics of vodou and poverty we can describe Black hyper-masculinity as an inflationary artistic production responding to white racist anticipations and exotic fascination.

2.4 TOWARDS SITUATED CURATIONS Curatorial and scholarly selection processes of artworks, which are informed by hierarchical relationships between curators and artists, are never discussed directly in any exhibition catalogue I have analyzed. Cosentino explicitly discards the idea that members of Atis Rezistans respond to any expectations of ‘outsiders’ with their art pieces:

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“Wilentz criticized the use of skulls by the Grand Rue artists, referring to them as ‘grave desecrations’, and more generally dismissed their sculptures as tourist art made for the jaded tastes of white art collectors. To such arguments I would reply that human skulls (and other bodily remains) have a long history on altars for Gede […]. As for pandering to the tastes of foreign visitors (as if a tourist trade still existed in Haiti), the jumble of unsold, rusting sculptures in the ateliers on the Grand Rue speak to a rage for creating art quite unconnected to any reasonable expectation of its sale.” (Cosentino 2012: 170)

It is telling that Cosentino does not bring himself into the discussion or situates his work with the artists but only talks in general terms. It is true that there is no mass tourism in Haiti comparable to other Caribbean islands but we will see in chapter three how the entire neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat has nonetheless become a spectacular sightseeing attraction which has generated an artistic poverty tourism since the early 2000s and brings visitors into the informal neighborhood on a regular basis. NGO-workers, volunteer tourists, journalists, photographers, art historians, artists, cultural anthropologists, embassy employees, and curators are visiting the area throughout the year. The productions of small portable souvenirs for tourists and commercial boutiques are as much part of Atis Rezistans’ artistic practice as monumental, heavy metal compositions for art museums and galleries. Haitian designer Pascale Théard, for example, regularly works with Eugène to get objects manufactured for her boutiques in Pétion-Ville and Miami. I want to emphasize that I do not intend to disregard Atis Rezistans’ artistic practice as merely touristic; to the contrary, I seek to chart the wide scope of Atis Rezistans’ clientele, which ranges from ‘Western’ and Haitian curators, boutique owners, ethnographic art collections, to tourists visiting the area. The necessity for Caribbean artists to cater to foreign expectations has been recently stated by writer and Booker Prize winner Marlon James with reference to the publishing world (Cain: 2015). If an academically trained, US-based Jamaican writer from a middle-class background feels pressured to respond to white expectations of editors, can we really ignore or rule out that Haitian artists from weak socioeconomic strata feel pressured to do the same? I asked Atis Rezistans artists Getho J. Baptiste why he chose to create two distinct aesthetics for his artistic oeuvre, which he presents in his exhibition space Royaumes de Ordures Vivantes. He answered quite frankly that he has to keep in mind the wishes of his two main curatorial clients: one of those clients is Gordon who stores a small private collection of Atis Rezistans’ sculptures in her apartment in London and therefore prefers his sculptures to be very clean looking with smooth surfaces. He named Cosentino as his second client who, according to Getho prefers excep-

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tionally ugly and morbid looking sculptures for museum displays. This is one of the reasons why Getho often tries to experiment with the destruction of different plastic materials to make sure that the surfaces of his sculptures look exceptionally ugly (Getho 2014). In Cosentino’s writing, however, ugliness is described as a ‘morbid symptom’ of post-apocalyptic art in Haiti. This morbidity becomes an ontological symptom of a socio-economic position that culturalizes artistic productions: “The extremity of visions in the art of the Grand Rue, and of the times and conditions that have induced them, recall the words of Antonio Gramsci, as he observed the malign follies and hideous aesthetic of Italian Fascism from his prison cell: ‘The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ [...]. Morbid symptoms are certainly an accurate diagnosis for much of the art being produced by the children of Gede on the Grand Rue.” (Cosentino 2012: 58)

Similarly, Eric Grimes sees Atis Rezistans’ grotesque artworks as an expression of a metaphysical closeness to death, which places the viewer of these artworks in direct confrontation with death. This closeness to death, according to Grimes, comes ‘naturally’ for communities living in poverty: “The more prosperity a community has, the more it tends to shield itself from death. [...] The poor, on the other hand, simply cannot afford the luxury to ignore the ugly or uncomfortable parts of life; they must make do with whatever they have available. The sculptors of the Grand Rue make this abundantly clear by using human skulls from local cemeteries in their sculptures. There has been a correlation between poverty and death – the physical and metaphysical closeness to the dead. It naturally follows that art originating from poor communities look more fearlessly into the eyes of death.” (Grimes 2008)

By highlighting the aspect of morbidity in their artworks, the members of Atis Rezistans seem to mirror what audiences expect a Haitian inhabitant of an informal neighborhood in crisis to produce, and thus they become the perfect illustrative fragment for Cosentino’s narrative of post-apocalyptic art from Haiti which is supposed to manifest in extremities, vulgarities, and morbidities. Karen Richman describes a similar process for the historical development of the ‘naïve painting’ tradition in Haiti, which has been produced within an interklas commercial network of foreign interests since the foundation of Centre d’Art in 1944 by Dewitt Peters. Richman (2008) provocatively asks the question if unknown popular artists in the 1940s mainly mimicked the style Peters pre-

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ferred? Thus, she asks if the tradition of ‘Naïve Painting’ ought to be understood as a mirror reflection of exotic desire of a foreign gaze and as a commodification for foreign consumption? “The celebrated ‘naïve primitive’ canvases and sculptures were commodities produced along with American tourism in Haiti, yet they have been promoted as unique objects of authentic Haitian essence, to attract tourism to the magical island.” (ibid.: 211) In an analogous way, Atis Rezistans’ artworks have been produced with the emergence of poverty tourism and volunteer tourism in Haiti, and they seem to have become the dark, cynical reflections of the colorful painting tradition. Catastrophe as a new genre for Haitian art, described by Asquith (2013), surely also helped to spark new interest in the artworks of Atis Rezistans. Erin B. Taylor responds to Richman’s theory by arguing: “This does not mean that naïf art is inauthentic […] What is inaccurate here are the ideas that authenticity excludes interculturality, and that commodification somehow destroys agency.” (2014: 186) Leftist intellectuals also seem to harbor a desire for discovering art forms in the ‘Global South’ which resist to be swallowed up entirely by the insatiable capitalist art market. In a commodified society whose dominant attitude towards art is one of benevolent inclusion, one could say that Cosentino’s take on morbidity expresses a desire for art that is intolerable, no longer consumable, and that cannot be absorbed easily by the insatiably pluralistic art world. I agree with Cosentino that many of these morbid artistic compositions are indeed unsellable, but this aspect makes them at the same time particularly desirable for museum curators and scholars who prefer non-commercial art productions that are not produced for any particular foreign gaze or market demand. Sianne Ngai points out that “artists and philosophers have demonstrated that desire and disgust are dialectically conjoined. As William Miller notes, ‘the disgusting itself has the power to allure,’ particularly as an object created by social taboos and prohibitions. The allure is not even solely a matter of repression, for ‘fascination with the disgusting is something we are often quite conscious of even as we turn away’” (2005: 332-333). Morbidity and ugliness, quite like vodou, can thus become a mechanism to authenticate artworks and distances them from potential outsider and commercial interests. The juxtaposition of “artistic aesthetic” vs. “commercial aesthetic” is a common practice in the production of value in the artistic milieu where “the aesthetic value of art is always seen as separate from, or rather above, its economic value” (Steiner 1994: 158). Cosentino’s argument is thus a good example of how cultural capital in the art system can be maximized if economic value is disavowed (cf. Steiner 1994: 160). The situation for the artists between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat becomes quite cynical in this narrative: while

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they are constantly and explicitly framed as artist from a poor ‘slum’ neighborhood in the ‘Global South’ and as victims of the aggressive capitalist world order, they have to prove at the same time to their supporting network of curators that they do not produce art for any commercial reason or that they feel the need to cater directly to foreign anticipations—and economic rewards they can potentially generate. Being perceived continuously as exceptionally grotesque, strange, and freakish also mirrors a wider discourse of common knowledge about Haiti. This perspective has been called into question by Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot: “When we are being told over and over again that Haiti is unique, bizarre, unnatural, odd, queer, freakish, or grotesque, we are also being told in varying degrees that it is unnatural, erratic, and therefore unexplainable. We are being told that Haiti is so special that modes of investigation applicable to other societies are not relevant.” (1990: 4) Sometimes, art objects directly change their meanings when they leave the local ateliers and travel to art institutions in the United States and Europe. Getho described the iconography of one of his sculptures during our interview in 2011 with the following narrative: “My two-headed sculpture refers to the hypocrisy of Christian societies. The left side embodies the public presentation of people who pretend to follow the Christian moral code while the right side is their true, sinful human nature.” One year later, in the catalogue to the exhibition In Extremis, we find a radically changed description of the piece: “Jean Baptiste Gétho has wrought a parallel transformation on the marasa, human twins venerated by Vodouists as avatars of divinity. In his sculpture [...] Gétho reimagines the marasa as half-live, half-dead abiku, the Nago (Yoruba) term for babies who die and return and die again, uncertain whether they want to stick around in bad circumstances. Gétho balances his liminal abiku on busted food blenders, an apt metaphor for a generation of Haitian artists probing for signs of new life in the busted technologies of their twenty-first century.” (Cosentino 2012: 59)

The sculpture loses its socio-critical component and produces instead a general narrative link to African and Afro-Caribbean Yoruba culture. When I discussed this new curatorial interpretation in a later interview with Getho, he was disappointed and assured me that he did not adjust the meaning of his sculpture for the exhibition catalogue in the United States.

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Fig. 20: Assemblage Ipokrit (Hypocrite) by Getho J. Baptiste, 2011

Speaking about Atis Rezistans as starving artists has a quite literal meaning. If you don’t sell, you will not be able to eat in the evening. Art in the neighborhood has become a mechanism for a large group of people to survive daily insecurities. The members of Atis Rezistans compete in close proximity with each other about limited resources. What many curators and researchers seem to ignore is that visitors are the main resources these artists are fighting about. The artworks represent a diverse cross-cultural field of different intersectional interests and dialogues. What makes the area difficult to work with for curators and scholars is ironically the easiness, openness, and approachability the neighborhood has developed for visitors in the last sixteen years. The area’s most seductive but also troublesome feature is this availability to foreigners who are welcomed with great hospitality and enthusiasm. Researchers can always be able to find an in-

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habitant who willingly mirrors his or her particular research agenda and oblige to play the culture game. Against this backdrop, I also have to ask how the Gran Ri artists navigate the script I have brought with my research into the neighborhood. This script could be summed up by a central interest in inter-klas conflict. Chapter four will discuss my own position in the neighborhood in more detail and analyze how artist Guyodo, for example, has built a career alongside such a demand for conflict, dissenting voices, and “post-ethnic” paradigms for postcolonial art (cf. Belting 2009: 57; Araeen 2000: 62; Oguibe 2004: xii ). Curator Okwui Enwezor (2012) asked in the introduction to the compendium Intense Proximity how we could distinguish practices of curatorial fieldwork from those of ethnography? He explains that “like the ethnographer, the contemporary curator is a creature of wanderlust, except in the present instant, the path begins from a series of detours, disorientations, and disarticulations of cultural geographies that are being remapped in the face of rapid global reconfigurations” (ibid.: 21). One crucial difference is that many curatorial practices I analyzed do not describe how their positionality in hierarchical artistic networks influences the artworks and the artistic field they are moving in. Curators assume a hierarchical position similar to cultural anthropologists during fieldwork but unfortunately without applying anthropological or sociological methods that would allow them to reflect on their practice as an embodied and situated practice and to make their power in relationships traceable and their whiteness visible. Instead, curators tend to present curatorially selected ‘end-products’ and often write themselves out of object histories. The use of vodou, for example, is mainly read as culturally intelligible but without approaching it as an active inter-klas negotiation of a transcultural space of contact. The possibility that it is also or potentially an ‘auto-orientalistic’ inter-klas reactions to dominant curatorial frameworks or a commercial strategy to sell is seldom considered. This power structure is often so internalized that it does not produce direct tension between both sides of the inter-klas conversation: curators and scholars calmly follow their scripts and local artist kindly play along. Postcolonial scholars and artists would hardly deny that cultural differences exist. But the struggle that contemporary artists from Haiti seem to face on a global stage is not ‘Western’ resistance to difference but, in Oguibe’s words, the persisting insistence on difference: “It is not that any one [sic] would want to disavow difference, for we are all different one way or another, after all. The point is that this fact of being ought not to constitute the crippling predicament that it does for all who have no definite ancestry in Europe.” (Oguibe 2004: xivxv) Kobena Mercer similarly argues that

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“[...] there is the risk of falling into a biographical reductionism whereby black artists are conscripted into an ethnonational grid in which it is discursively predetermined that their art can only ever be about identity. As I and many others have argued, such pitfalls are mirrored in a converse tendency toward contextual reductionism by which works of art are interpreted as if they were merely documentary ‘reflections’ of the social conditions of their production. Both tendencies work to minimize the aesthetic intelligence of the black art object as the primary focus of critical attention in its own right.” (2011: 10)

The artworks by Atis Rezistans are often part of geographically-defined survey exhibitions for Haitian art. Oguibe describes the mechanism of these survey exhibitions for ‘non-Western’ artists as a “popular device for institutions to fulfill statutory diversity requirements for funding” (Oguibe 2004: xiii). Survey exhibitions for ‘non-Western’ art are gestures of institutional tolerance that allow art institutions to return afterwards to their regular programming, satisfied that they have paid their dues and proved their cross-cultural sensitivity. The institutional staff often remains dominantly white while the artists on display become ostensibly diversified for a brief moment in time. Farquharson describes the exhibition Kafou tellingly as “something of an intervention in our artistic program” (Farquharson 2012: 9). Cynically speaking, after the ‘ghettoized’ presentation of ‘popular Black self-taught vodou artists from Haiti’ curators can return relieved to their standard programing, knowing that they fulfilled their due to participate in the decentralization of the global art word and killed two birds with one stone by bringing not only the category ‘race’ but also ‘class’ into the exhibition space. The cultural and socio-economic alterity of ‘popular artists’ needs to get persistently highlighted in such curatorial frameworks because institutions are using the marginality of Haitian artists to produce their own declarative narrative of cross-cultural tolerance and diversity work. White curators who are dealing with artists from weak socio-economic strata are not only repeatedly re-authenticating Haitian artists but, by doing so, they also ‘authenticate’ and legitimize their own curatorial work. While a persisting insistence on ‘ethnic otherness’ increases the symbolic capital of white curators and institutions as generous ‘door-openers’, art sociologist Larissa Buchholz (2008) argues that the label of ‘ethnic otherness’ comes in turn with negative repercussions for the artists who are presented as culturally different in these frameworks; it leads not only to ‘ghettoized’ art exhibitions but also to broad financial discrimination in the art market. The ascription of ‘ethnic’ fundamentally hinders continuous forms of attention from powerful art actors in the artistic field, which are indispensable for transnational artistic careers (ibid.: 225). According to Buchholz, the main problem with an emphasis on cultural al-

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terity is that it simultaneously reproduces the universalization of ‘Western’ art traditions. The indirect effect of this universalization plays a part in stabilizing aesthetic norms and fosters the value of already acquired symbolic capital in the center. Therefore, it helps to reinforce the cultural monopoly of the ‘North West’ (ibid.: 226). Declarative gestures of tolerant inclusions in relation to narratives of ‘class friction’ often re-center white curators in a position of power and as discursive authorities on Haitian art. We will see in chapter five that Atis Rezistans are barely asked to cocurate exhibitions alongside white curators despite the fact that they have reclaimed the term museum successfully for their own use and have become curators of their own art spaces. Drawing on cultural theorist Nelly Richards, I argue that it is not enough to occasionally present objects from marginalized communities in exhibition displays but to go further by asking “[...] to what degree has [the] heterologous recuperation of the marginal (of the decentred) become anything more than a simple declarative position, or contributed effectively to modifying the institutional-discourse pact, endorsed by the official chain of powers and functions of the centre? It is a question – strictly speaking – of ascertaining whether or not the alleged fragmentation and dispersal of the centre modifies the categorization of power that established imbalances with regard to exchanges of value and meaning.” (Richard 1994: 263)

The social relationships that travelling objects encounter on their journeys remain embroiled in hierarchical interactions. The strong emphasis on cultural and socio-economic alterity in curatorial presentations allows curators to racialize artworks by imbuing them with sufficient visible Blackness so as to stand out in a “sea of whiteness” (Ahmed 2007: 157) and claim in return symbolic capital for their generous hospitality. The mechanisms of power tend to stay intact and are not dispersed by merely transferring art objects from marginalized groups into centralized institutions. Paulo Freire similarly explains that “[t]he truth is, however, that the oppressed are not ‘marginals’, are not men living ‘outside’ society. They have always been ‘inside’ – inside the structure which made them ‘beings for others’. The solution it not to ‘integrate’ them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become ‘beings for themselves’” (1972: 61). I suggest that it is important to seriously consider whether sculptures from communities from lower socio-economic strata are challenging the power structure of art institutions or whether they are rather reconfirming it? Ahmed (2012: 168) points out that, within the logic of conditional hospitality, those who are

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welcomed in institutions of whiteness must be grateful and loving in return. In a similar vein, Prézeau Stephenson mentioned in one of our interviews that she encountered in her artistic career a recurring expectation of gratefulness for being accepted to participate in European art exhibitions as a Haitian artist. “When I critiqued [certain aspects] of a Haitian survey exhibition in Europe I was part in, befriended artists and curators from Paris have been quick to remind me that I should be thankful to be even considered to be part in an exhibition in such a prestigious art museum.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2014) Institutional diversity becomes a gift and is often used as a “lip-service model” or as “polite speech” (Ahmed 2012: 55) but without any repercussions for institutional realities. Ahmed identifies expectations of gratefulness as experienced by Prézeau Stephenson above all as a mechanism of progressive racism. She describes: “Progressive racism allows the increase of the power or force of whiteness. It allows a white subject to remain in the position of the one who is active/heroic/giving to the others. If the others do not receive this gift happily, they become ungrateful or mean. Progressive racism helps us to understand how white subjectivity is crafted as heroic in the first place.” (Ahmed 2016)

Within the logic of conditional hospitality and through narratives of benevolent anti-Eurocentric inclusion of Blackness, curatorial power does not reveal itself as power but becomes instead generosity and hospitality. Thus, this benevolent position of inclusion reveals a progressive form of racism, which recenters the white subject as a form of political heroism that can expect thankfulness in return. Ahmed also describes in her qualitative study about diversity and equality work within universities that having an institutional aim to make diversity a goal can even be a sign that diversity is not an institutional goal: “Organizations can use equality and diversity as credentials: as if to say, how can we be racist when we are committed to equality and diversity?” (Ahmed 2012: 23) The diversity discourse around vodou-inspired art from Haiti is constructed in such a way that as soon as somebody tries to problematize the over-emphasis on vodou in exhibitions about Haitian art, that person can be rejected as being culturally insensitive or standing in the way of a generous politics of inclusions vis-à-vis cultural or socio-economic Otherness. Politics of inclusion are embedded into a discourse of legitimization that recenters the white institution in the position of power to define, classify, valorize and legitimize what is worth to be seen and what is not. Curator and critic Nato Thompson understands legitimization as a crucial function of gatekeeping in the artistic field, as the transition to

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an art museum means a shift in scale and effect for artists. Thompson (2015: 69) states that it is museums that write artists into existence through new visibility. Although the artists between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat have become some of the most frequently discussed contemporary artists from the Caribbean region and have been presented in very prestigious institutions, they still live in an informal neighborhood and are widely ignored by commercial galleries around the world.7 Art historian Krista Thompson, following Peggy Phelan, pointed out that we need to start interrogating the implicit assumptions about the connection between representational visibility and political power and the “limited effectiveness of strategies of visibility” (Thompson 2015: 39); even in a state of hypervisibility, social groups remain in a situation of social and economic marginality. The members of Atis Rezistans are a concrete example for this unfortunate process. They are hyper-visible in the discourse of contemporary Haitian art and seemingly ‘inside’ but they remain at the same time ‘outside’ the established art system. I argue that, ironically, it is the repetitive narrative of generous inclusion by white curators which fixes Haitian artists in a constant state of re-institutionalization and re-discovery; this fixation is a circular motion which fails to lay bare structures of progressive racism that underlie the conditional hospitality of art institutions. It is a way of performing white progressiveness rather than developing new substantial tools of un-doing structural mechanism of racialized inequality. There is often a critical discourse missing in ‘Western’ museums about who is legitimizing whom and why in inter-racial relationships. My reading in this chapter looks at the topics ‘morbidity’, ‘phallic masculinity’, and ‘vodou’ in the context of the wider social fabric of hierarchical inter-klas negotiations. I do not claim that this reading should be the sole defining interpretation for the artworks. But my analysis shows that there are prejudicial dysfunctions in place that lead white curators and audiences to miss out on knowledge on Haitian art when those particular topics are evoked. The Gran Ri artists often find attention for their art only when they successfully commodify their ethnic background and socio-economic alterity in order to become ‘illustrative fragments’ and ‘ideal subalterns’.

7

Atis Rezistans’ artworks have been shown at some occasions at Ateliers Jerome and Galerie Nader in Port-au-Prince, at Riflemaker in London, and at gallery KraupaTuskany Zeidler in Berlin, among others. The latter seemed to have shown the artists mainly in a context of self-marketing for the gallery-brand because there is less interested in integrating the artists into the gallery’s standard programing.

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This process also entails the necessity of hiding commercial interests. No artist—irrespective of their class position—works outside of structures of commodification under capitalism. The Gran Ri artists are highly aware of their relationship to power. There are multiple strategies in place for Haitian artists to navigate their marginal position in a globalized art world. We will see in chapters three and four that artists are debating controversially and from often conflicting standpoints about which strategies to use and what ethical requirements come with them. In the following chapter, I analyze the politics of emotions of the sociallyengaged art festival called Ghetto Biennale which intends to reverse the institutional logic of conditional hospitality by reshaping the terms for intersectional sociality. Since 2009, the members of Atis Rezistans have become hosts for their own art event. Every other year, they invite visiting artists from abroad to be guests in a short-time residency project. The question that animates the next chapter is whether or to which extent the Ghetto Biennale can escape the recentering logic of progressive racism of racially-exclusive white art institutions.

3

Gestures of Generosity: Politics of Emotions at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince

Curator Okwui Enwezor describes that our time is emblematized yet also traumatized by a collapse of distance, and this collapse makes cultural differences visible.1 According to Enwezor, “[w]e enter the zone of intense proximity, a form of disturbing nearness that unsettles as much as it exhilarates, and transforms as much as it disquiets the coordinates of national cultural vectors” (2012: 22). This collapse of distance and the disturbing and exhilarating nearness has led to an anthropological turn in the contemporary art world. By the mid-1990s, art historian Hal Foster recognized this new turn in the leftist artistic milieu and suggested that a new paradigm—structurally similar to Walter Benjamin’s model of the “author as producer”—had emerged: “the artist as ethnographer” (Foster 2012: 343). In both paradigms, the object of conflict remains in large part identical: the “bourgeois-capitalist” institution of art (the museum, the academy, the market, and the media) and its exclusionary definitions. Foster argued, however, that the subject of identification and association had changed. This subject is now externalized from the own geographical and cultural setting of the artist. It is the cultural and ethnic Other, the oppressed postcolonial, the subaltern, or the subcultural, in whose name the committed artist struggles (ibid.). Mirroring this observation, curators for contemporary art responded to this anthropological turn by looking to other cultures for their own research foci. In the case of the Ghetto Biennale, this subject of identification and curation are the inhabitants of an informal neighborhood in the center of downtown Port-au-Prince and mainly the 1

Parts of this chapter were previously published as: Frohnapfel, David. 2019. “Notes on How to Irritate a Group of Committed Artists: Politics of Emotions at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince”. Space and Culture 23 (1): 61–76.

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artist group Atis Rezistans. Leah Gordon founded the Ghetto Biennale in 2009 in collaboration with Jean Herald Celeur and André Eugène. She structured her experimental art event loosely after Bob & Roberta Smith’s art festival in southeast London, Deptford X, and the publication Hijack Reality Deptford X: A ‘How to’ Guide to Organize A Really Top Notch Art Festival (Smith 2008). The artist and writer Bob & Roberta Smith understands the art festival Deptford X as a “social mobility interchange”, “a meeting place where the British obsession with class is diluted” and he highlights art’s capacity “to be an interface between people from different backgrounds” (ibid.: 68). Bob & Roberta Smith sees the art world as a gated community and tries to overcome these spaces of distinction through social engagement and mobility. “Many of the art world’s initiatives represent a kind of ‘Class War’, but unlike the ‘Class War’ of the 1970s and 1980s, it is not a war against the rich but rather against the poor. Art has always been the expression of extreme wealth but there was a brief period from about 1947 until the YBA phenomenon in the mid-to-late 1990s, when social engagement and social mobility were taken seriously both by artists and by galleries.” (ibid.: 46)

The Ghetto Biennale is rooted in similar considerations around contemporary art as a place of class privilege and social exclusion, and Gordon took on the complicated task to bring together artists from extremely different socio-economic strata in Haiti. Every two years, she invites artists to come to Port-au-Prince for a short-time residency to realize projects within the neighborhood where the members of Atis Rezistans live and work. She shares a similar ideological fundament with Bob and Roberta Smith’s art festival that is maybe best summed up in Gordon’s often quoted strapline that sets the conceptual framework for the art event: “What happens when first world art rubs up against third world art2? Does it bleed?” (Gordon 2012c) Gordon draws here on a quote by Chicana theorist Gloria E. Anzaldúa from Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta [an open wound] where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the life-

2

Gorden’s usage of the contested term ‘third world’ is derived from the usage of the term at the Bandung Conference of 1955. She explains: “The newly independent African and Asian countries created an independent power bloc with a new ‘third world’ perspective on political, economic and cultural global priorities. Then the ‘third world’ was a powerful radical alternative to capitalism and the soviet bloc.” (Gordon 2012c)

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blood of two worlds merging to form a third country-a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them.” (1987: 3)

At a theoretical level, Gordon conceptualizes the art event appropriately as an open wound and as a space of conflict and exchange between people of different socio-economic strata. The conflicts of the Ghetto Biennale revolve around the discursive fields of class, race, gender, and sexual orientation. The many contradictions of this art event have often occurred between two clashing expectations for contemporary art: (1) a leftist romanticism idealizing Haitian working-class culture as a form of ‘subaltern’ resistance and as a medium of socio-political empowerment and (2) an often very pragmatic and sales-oriented understanding of art as a survival mechanism that seeks to transform art into a capitalist commodity for visiting artists from higher socio-economic strata. Gordon analyzes this tension as follows: “Many of the visiting artists attracted to the Ghetto Biennale have quite anarchistic, antiauthorial, non-material practices. This is what led to the challenging paradox at the heart of the 1st Ghetto Biennale. There was a very wide gap between the projections of the visiting artists and the expectations of the Haitian artists. [...] So whilst many of the visiting artists were exploring non-commercial, indistinctly authored, dematerialised works, the Haitian artists were making art objects that they, unfashionably, wanted to sell.” (2013a)

A second point of departure for Gordon’s art event is the ongoing pressure of academic professionalization and intellectualization of visual artists in Europe and the United States (cf. Balzer 2014: 101-102). With her art event she indirectly asked the question if there is still a place for ‘self-taught’ artistic practices from weak socio-economic strata in a globalized art world where a Master of Fine Arts has become increasingly imperative for artists since the 1990s. Gordon’s goal for the Ghetto Biennale is to start a dialogue about a “third space in the art world, neither bending to commercial nor institutional interests” (2013a). The Ghetto Biennale also wants to abolish the problematic barrier between ‘high art’ and ‘outsider art’ and intends to become a creative platform, which can bring a new level of visibility to ‘self-taught’ artists from Haiti. In recent years, The Ghetto Biennale itself, however, has become an institution. The event is masterminded by Gordon’s hand and critical eye as its festival director, curator, and marketing coordinator who presents and promotes the art event at several academic and curatorial conferences throughout the year to attract new interest. Gordon described to me that the term biennale was used in the

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beginning as a Trojan horse—a strategy for attracting the attention of a wider global audience for Atis Rezistans and thus a means to disseminate their artworks around the world. The polemic and contested title juxtaposes the social marginalization and social immobility of artists living in an area that has been classified as a “red zone” (Savage 2010: 491-492) by the United Nations with the enthusiastic celebration of contemporary art as a globalized and mobile phenomenon. Gordon describes the formation of the Ghetto Biennale also as a response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s notion of the homo viator, which defines art today as a “journey-form, made of lines drawn both in space and time, materializing trajectories rather than destinations” (Bourriaud 2009). The artist today, as seen by Bourriaud, has become the prototype of the contemporary traveler. This concept can seem quite offensive for a group of artists—and a large part of the world’s population—who live in poverty. How mobile can you be when you do not have the financial means to possess a passport or when you belong to a nationality or social group that faces severe visa restrictions? In Port-au-Prince, many people do not have the financial and political liberty to freely “wander in geography”. With increasing success, the three founding members of Atis Rezistans have become themselves homo viators, and they indeed travel around the world to participate in exhibitions and conferences. This produced an interesting performative contradiction to the mission statement of the Ghetto Biennale on the basis of the personal biographies of these artists which indirectly re-affirms Bourriaud’s notion.3 Because of the success of the Ghetto Biennale and an emerging international interest in the art event, Gordon has started to promote her own Trojan horse as a ‘proper’ art biennale since the 2nd installment. Instead of promoting sculptural productions from Haitian artists, the biennale itself has become the central focus of international attention. Gordon functions as the unofficial manager of Atis Rezistans and has cocurated several of their exhibitions abroad. She can be described as the sculptors’ main ‘umbilical cord’ into international art networks of Europe and the United States. She often selects which artist and which art piece will be able to travel alongside her to the art centers in Europe and the United States and helps to mediate these artistic productions. It is not surprising that the artists who are able to position themselves closest to her are the ones with the biggest career ad-

3

It is important to point out that although the three founding members of Atis Rezistans are able to travel frequently, the mobility and travel opportunities for many other artists in the neighborhood remain extremely difficult and visa application are still declined—even though it became easier for the group since Prézeau Stephenson organized their first visas in 2003.

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vantages. Many of my interlocutors in Haiti criticize this situation, which mirrors Hall Foster’s warning that institutions can quickly monopolize cultural capital; “the institution may overshadow the work that it otherwise highlights: it becomes the spectacle, it collects the cultural capital, and the director-curator becomes the star.” (1996: 198) We will see in chapter four that because of this unbalanced dynamic of power, the original group constellation of Atis Rezistans has broken apart over the last seven years since the Ghetto Biennale was founded. Curator and art critic Nato Thompson pointed out that socially-engaged art projects are always cultural “experiments in power” (Thompson 2015: 105), and the Ghetto Biennale as an experiment in power has strongly influenced the local infrastructure of power within the neighborhood. Founder of Atis Rezistans, Celeur, left the group in 2014 and Guyodo had left around 2009 because both saw a radical shift in power, which positioned Gordon and her partner, Eugène, on top of the hierarchical ladder. In a personal conversation, Gordon called herself humorously “Yoko Ono of Grande Rue,” but this humorous expression camouflages the real tension that exists between a female white curator from Britain and an almost exclusively male Black artist group living in an informal neighborhood in Haiti. This situation of conflict reveals a persisting dynamic of power that constitutes the main question of this chapter: Is the Ghetto Biennale opening anew a bleeding wound every two years or does it create a space where decolonial healing—or at least scarring—can occur? Curator of the first Ghetto Biennale, Myron M. Beasley, evokes in his description of the art event a characteristically affirmative optimism: “Our role as curators [at the Ghetto Biennale] extended to cultural diplomats, translators, and mediators. By ‘performance of possibility’, I mean events that evoke feelings of hope – a belief in the promise of what could be, even given an undercurrent of evident despair. The concept is derived from a critical stance for cross-cultural dialogue that is reflexive, sincere, pedagogical and aesthetic, particularly in areas marked by national disaster or fragile political systems. Such performances proclaim more than idyllic sentimentalism, and instead embody practical components of the here and now that informs and envisions a promise of what can or will come.” (Beasley 2012: 70-71)

He goes on to describe that “[t]he Ghetto Biennale signaled a moment of looking forward, a moment of endless possibilities, a moment when anything could happen in the lives of those in the Grand Rue” (ibid.: 78). Although Gordon tends to describe her art event in curatorial self-descriptions critically as an open wound, we will see in this chapter that Haitian artists are indirectly and directly forced to strive performatively for harmony with visiting artists from abroad. I argue in

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this chapter that the artists who are best equipped to engage and mingle with the visiting artistic milieu and to establish non-conflictual social relationships in a seemingly harmonious atmosphere will be the most successful ones. This situation reveals strong inter-klas dependencies, which rely on persisting power structures that hardly emancipate Haitian artists in the process. Local artists who remind visiting artists of their privileged position in society and whose anger keeps scratching the wound of this art event have tended to leave the group Atis Rezistans. There is a strong tendency for individual artistic productions to fade into the background and become insignificant to the local artist’s career. Empowerment seems to be conditional on Haitian artists’ ability to attach themselves successfully to a visiting artistic network and to cater to their interest and emotions by helping to produce performances of affirmation. We will see in this chapter that this situation is often accompanied by choreographed art performances which encourage the participating Haitian artists to performatively give proof of a harmonious encounter without conflict between both milieus. Negative affects like unease, irritation, discomfort, or frustration, which are legitimate effects of art and predictable affects in inter-klas encounters, are significantly absent from art projects taking place at the Ghetto Biennale.4 I propose to conceive the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat as an “affective space”, a concept coined by Andreas Reckwitz (2012) in order to draw attention to how spaces interconnect with our emotions and influence our behavior. Drawing on the theoretical work on emotions by Sara Ahmed my analysis will describe politics of emotions within this affective space and retrace how the art event often triggers affective responses like euphoria, excitement, and heroic entitlement and, at the same time, shame and guilt in visiting artists from abroad. I argue that emotions like euphoria, optimism, and excitement help to preserves an image of the Ghetto Biennale as a “happy institution” (Ahmed 2012: 72). We will see in chapter four that preserving the idea of the institution as happy involves an active turning away from those who might compromise the aims of the art event, namely ‘getting along’ and bridging klas barriers between two different social milieus. Harmonious “feel-good-politics” (Ahmed 2010: 72) often conceal socio-economic tensions and unequal dynamics of power without offering an alternative space to lay bare these tensions and to openly and directly discuss the conflicts produced by the Ghetto Biennale. Renunciation of systems of domination like whiteness or/and klas privilege on a rhetorical level—as a

4

This observation was also guided by Claire Bishop’s (2012) theoretical work on socially-engaged art.

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speech act, declarative gesture, art performance, or book chapter—are a comparatively easy thing to do, but my analysis of the social relationships during the Ghetto Biennale will show that it becomes a lot more challenging to implement them in concrete practices and personal interactions. Since the foundation of the Ghetto Biennale in 2009, a new generation of artists has emerged which has very quickly learned to respond to the philanthropic ‘feel good’ attitude expected by many visiting artists. This new generation barely produces art objects and instead vigorously concentrates on ‘networking activities’ with the visiting artists from abroad. These artists have translated the Ghetto Biennale into their own grammar of popular resistance and they use inter-klas dependency for their own benefits. Gordon realized the same shift of focus when she asked in the call for the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013: “Are we an exit strategy from the ghetto?” (2013b) And she analyzed elsewhere: “[Since the 2nd Ghetto Biennale] people in the Grand Rue were better prepared and aware of the potential life changing effect it could have for them. From some of the local teenagers there was a lot of posturing, bluffing, bog standard hustling and many sexual advances (from the charming and appropriate to the charmless, inappropriate and irritating) as some of the local people felt that they had only this one window of opportunity to change their lives [...]. There were some clashes between female visiting artists and the Haitian male youth, the space felt more gendered than it had before, the glut of carved penises felt a little more oppressive than they used to.” (2012c)

The Ghetto Biennale is indeed a small temporal window of opportunity for many Haitian artists, and it puts them under a lot of emotional pressure to use this short timeframe efficiently to improve their living situation. The most successful type of relationships that can generate a “life changing effect” for Haitian artists, as Gordon puts it, are in fact amorous ones. So far, only amorous relationships between local and visiting artists have been able to sustainably elevate social actors from this weak socio-economic milieu into a klas piwo a and to help them exit the informal neighborhood on a long-term basis. Hence, it is not surprising that many local inhabitants have started making advances to visiting female artists and have tried to use these relationships as an opportunity for social uplift. Gordon does not mention in the text quoted above that this situation has not only led to conflicts between female visiting artists and men from the neighborhood, which triggered a lukewarm discussion about sexual harassment at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale, but has also led frequently to both short sexual encounters and long-term relationships. This situation does not only apply to youths but to all age groups participating in this art event. When I mentioned to Gordon my soci-

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ological interest in these sexual encounters, she responded defensively that she did not see any problem with these relationships because, in the end, both sides were getting what they were looking for: the visitors looking for sexual pleasure and the locals searching for financial support. So why should we discuss these mutual sexual encounters by using “prude protestant ethics”? There is a danger, however, that a solely affirmative reading of these sexual encounters whitewashes the persisting and often brutal dynamics of power between both social groups. Gloria Wekker describes sexualization as a central cornerstone of everyday racism besides inferiorization and criminalization: “Images of black—in the sense of African-Diasporic—bodies, male and female, are daily, automatically, and immediately aligned with sexuality.” (2016: 45) Cultural anthropologist Elizabeth McAlister (2002: 60) similarly reminds us that the exoticization of colonized people was achieved by the eroticization of their lives. I am therefore less interested in “prude protestant ethics” and more in the manner in which a disadvantaged position in society leads to sexuality becoming a strategic survival mechanism for securing loyalties with members of a klas piwo a and a parallel racist fetishization and sexualization of racialized bodies by a white gaze. The question arises if the Gran Ri artists offer visiting women from a klas piwo a an appealing hetero-normative masculinity without the risk of forfeiting a gendered, classed and racialized position of white female power? The sexual politics during the Ghetto Biennale add another layer to my discussion in the preceding chapter on how the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat developed strategies to make itself available for visiting foreigners and becomes an erotic, exotic, and adventurous friction in the realm of the Other. This situation also reveals strong persisting inter-klas dependencies and hierarchies between both milieus. Dependencies have led inhabitants of the neighborhood to cater to visiting artists on manifold levels. Many visiting artists enthusiastically celebrate the Ghetto Biennale as a form of ‘subaltern’ empowerment but do not pay attention to processes of hierarchical relationships produced by the art event itself. Brazilian educator Paolo Freire reminds us in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1972) of the necessity to override persisting dependencies and paternalistic behaviors in hierarchical inter-klas relationships: “Discovering himself to be an oppressor may cause considerable anguish, but it does not necessarily lead to solidarity with the oppressed. Rationalizing his guilt through paternalistic treatment of the oppressed, all the while holding them fast in a position of dependence, will not do. [...] The oppressor is solidary with the oppressed only when he stops regarding the oppressed as an abstract category and sees them as persons who have been unjustly dealt with, deprived of their voice, cheated in the sale of their labor – when he stops

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making pious, sentimental, and individualistic gestures and risks an act of love. True solidarity is found only in the plenitude of this act of love, in its existentiality, in its praxis. To affirm that we are persons and as persons should be free and yet to do nothing tangible to make this affirmation a reality, is a farce.” (Freire 1972: 34-35, emphasis added)

Although I will analyze the Ghetto Biennale from a rather critical stance, I do not doubt that the visiting artists and curators have good intentions and sincerely want to help and improve the living situations of the local community. It is important to recognize that the Ghetto Biennale, as an experiment in power, is an ongoing, open-ended project that develops and changes from edition to edition. My research for this chapter was mainly conducted at the 2nd and 3rd Ghetto Biennale. I conducted informal conversations with all groups of participants and also undertook participatory observation that included working as assistant curator at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in 2011 and co-curator of the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013. Although I will speak in this chapter often in general terms of the encounter of two different milieus at the Ghetto Biennale, the group of visiting artists from abroad is in fact complex and composed of people with different backgrounds and varied biographies. The Ghetto Biennale produces a nexus of different identity conflicts where all imaginable identity politics seem to clash with one another at one point. But what most visiting artists have in common is that they are academically trained artists predominantly based in Europe and the United States.5 More importantly though, my usage reflects the usage of my Haitian interlocutors who emically describe all foreign visitors as blan (foreigners), irrespective of their skin color and social status in their home countries. From their marginalized position in Haitian society all of these visiting foreigners represent a considerably higher klas and are often understood as a binary other to their own position in society. One of my interlocutors explains: “To tell you the truth, what we have in mind when we see blan [foreigners], we think that they have money. […] People who are living in poverty in general think like that. For-

5

Most of the relationships facilitated by the Ghetto Biennale are vertical and barely horizontal in a pan-Caribbean or pan-African sense. Unfortunately, Gordon cannot mobilize a lot of funding for her art event and all invited artists need to find their own funding opportunities to participate in the event. It is not surprising to me that this lack of funding has led to a strong ‘Euro-U.S. American’ composition of artists participating and hence invited artists are mainly based in countries with strong funding traditions for the visual arts like Europe and the United States.

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eigners may live in a similar situation like we do when they are back in their home countries, but since they are able to come here to our neighborhood, we think they have money—and maybe can do something to help us.”

Being considered Black or white in the United States and Europe, because of a certain ‘perceived phenotype’, does not equal a similar understanding of the categories noir and blanc in Haiti, which relates to wider sociocultural attributes. Michel-Rolph Trouillot describes that discussions about race and racism in Haiti cannot solely be reduced to a ‘Western’-dominated hierarchy of races, colors, religions, and cultures as a “toned-down version of Western racism” (1990: 112). “More importantly, color categories [in Haiti] embrace characteristics that go far beyond the perceived phenotype into the field of social relations. These can include income, social origin, level of formal education, customary behavior, ties of kinship or marriage, and other characteristics. And different combinations of these social traits can move a person from one category to a more or less proximate one. Thus terms such as mulâtre and noir do not simply mean – and sometimes do not mean at all – ‘mulatto’ or ‘black’ in the American sense. The kind of social discrimination that operates in Haiti is not exclusively based on physical features, even when phenotype plays a role in the application and description of this discrimination. For example, up until recently some people were discouraged from frequenting certain clubs because they were ‘too noir,’ although others, visibly darker, could enter. In short, Haitian color categories refer not only to skin color and other somatic features, but to a large range of sociocultural attributes that do not have a somatic referent.” (ibid.: 113)

Scholarship on race is often dominated by a U.S.-centric understanding of race relations without situating this understanding within a specific regional history. Afro-American perspectives are often seen as a default position for Blackness. Knowledge on race that has not been produced in the university system of the United States and is not written in English is often neglected. Julia Roth argues therefore for more transnational awareness and an epistemic sensibility for intellectual traditions on inequality that have originated outside the United States and Europe in order to decentralize unequal distributions of knowledge on intersectionality, race, and power (2019). For the Haitian context, Jana Evans Braziel argues: “[U]nlike the French nègre […], the Kreyòl nèg and the French nègre (in Haiti) not only does not pejoratively connotate blackness (as in ‘Negro’) or less negatively (as in ‘black man’), but moreover does not specifically reference race at all, except as a universal. In

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Haiti nèg (in Kreyòl) and nègre (in French) have both denoted ‘man’ or ‘human’ ever since Jean-Jacques Dessalines […] tore the white stripe from the French national flag to form Haiti’s blue-and-red-striped flag and proclaimed all citizens of the island-country nwa (noir), and all foreigners blanc (blanc), regardless of race. […] All Polish soldiers, for example, who initially fought under Napoleon Bonaparte to subdue the Haitian slave revolutionaries but later defected and fought alongside the Haitians for the country’s independence, were granted citizenship by Dessalines and became nwa (in Kreyòl), or noir (in French). And to the surprise of many traveling African Americans visiting the country (and even some Haitian diasporics returning home after a long absence), they are blanc.” (2008: 5)

We will see in chapter four that not only visitors from abroad have complex backgrounds but so have the different members of Atis Rezistans who are embedded in their own local complex infrastructure of power.

3.1 FATIGUED BY SAMENESS: THE GHETTO BIENNALE AS A CURATED SOCIAL SITUATION I conceptualize the Ghetto Biennale not so much as an art exhibition as such but mainly as an experimental set-up that creates a specific curated social situation. Every two years, Gordon and her team construct a curated social situation where foreign visitors and local inhabitants find themselves literally embodying structural positions of marginality and centrality, as they become personally involved in reconfiguring difference, sameness, and inequality in their individual interactions with one another. Therefore, the Ghetto Biennale is very much embedded in what art historian and art critic Claire Bishop has termed the “social turn of contemporary art” (2006) or, more recently, as the “return to the social”6. Bishop describes: “The work of art as finite, portable, commodifiable product is reconceived as an ongoing or long-term project with an unclear beginning and end; while the audience, previously conceived as a ‘viewer’ or ‘beholder’, is now repositioned as a co-producer or participant.” (2012: 2-3) Art is seen as a medium to re-humanize a society through participation and collaboration, which is considered to be rendered “numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production […]. [Therefore] artistic practice can no longer revolve

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Bishop explains the historical trajectory of socially-engaged art in Europe through three historical steps: (1) historical avant-garde in Europe circa 1917, (2) the so-called ‘neo-avant-garde’ up to 1968, and (3) the resurgence of participatory art after the fall of communism in 1989 (Bishop 2012: 3).

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around the construction of objects to be consumed by a passive bystander. Instead, there must be an art of action, interfacing with reality, taking steps [...] to repair the social bond.” (11) In the Haitian context, art as a socially-engaged participatory practice aims to bridge klas barriers by escaping boujwa institutional frameworks for art presentation. In this social turn, the artist is no longer understood as an individual producer of material art objects but as a producer of situations. I will use Bishop’s (2012) critical consideration on socially-engaged art in her study Artificial Hells as a theoretical backdrop for my analysis and combine her study with my own fieldwork data gathered through anthropological methods like participatory observation, interviews, and informal conversations. I agree with Bishop’s argument that it is necessary that “[a]ny art engaging with society and the people in it demands a methodological reading that is, at least in part, sociological. By this I mean that an analysis of this art must necessarily engage with concepts that have traditionally had more currency within the social sciences than in the humanities: community, society, empowerment, agency.” (2012: 7) In her own euphoric, celebratory description of the 1st Ghetto Biennale, Gordon describes art’s potential to be a revolutionary energy of creation that revitalizes its political capabilities: “The Ghetto Biennale surpassed all my expectations—truly it did—this was the creative act in extreme [...]. The creative act is an energy, a revolutionary energy and the products at the end, the art objects, are merely a part of that revolutionary energy—some parts of society are afraid of that energy—very afraid—but enthralled too—so they gather up the material objects of that energy and worship that—they put it in so-called sacred spaces, the clean, white galleries—but these are not sacred spaces really—but containment spaces or decontamination chambers—spaces where they can separate the art object from the revolutionary energy of creation—what happened in Haiti in these last three weeks was truly a happening in the situationist sense and also a chance to see real deep community action—when I left London I really believed that the concept of political arts was hollow lip service to perhaps an empty ideology—but now I really have witnessed that the creative act can intensely connect people from diverse genders, sexualities, classes, races and nationalities.” (2010, emphasis added)

It is significant that the social turn’s critical departure from art institutions has led committed artists into a geographical region like the Caribbean, which is often presented as having weak institutional support structures for the visual arts. In line with Gordon’s argumentation, Haiti seems to be the perfect country where the “revolutionary energy of creativity” can circulate unhindered and

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freely—in sharp contrast to Europe and the United States where a tight network of institutions are supposed to have rendered art an empty ideological shell without any socio-political impact. Sianne Ngai discusses art’s suspended sociopolitical relevancy in processes concerning foreign cultural tolerance and political agency through her concept of “ugly feelings” (2005: 11). Ngai describes ugly feelings as dysphoric, non-cathartic, negative feelings, which are produced in situations of suspended agency and states of inaction. They are feelings which offer neither satisfaction nor any therapeutic release. “Like rage and fear, ugly feelings such as envy can be described as dysphoric or experientially negative, in the sense that they evoke pain or displeasure. They can also be described as ‘semantically’ negative, in the sense that they are saturated with socially stigmatized meanings and values (such as the ‘pettiness’ one traditionally associates with envy); and as ‘syntactically’ negative, in the sense that they are organized by trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction, by phobic strivings ‘away from’ rather than philic striving ‘towards’.” (Ngai 2005: 11)

For my discussion it is important that Ngai understands ugly feelings also allegorically for autonomous or ‘bourgeois’ art’s pessimistic understanding of its own relationship to political action: “At the core of Ugly Feelings, then, is a very old predicament—the question of relevance—that has often haunted the discipline of literary and cultural criticism.” (ibid.: 3) Thus, ugly feelings’ unique role as a concept is not only to interpret blocked or suspended agency in literature; Ngai sees these feelings as a more general metaphor of art’s suspended sociopolitical agency and relevancy in commodified societies (ibid.: 345-346). Following Herbert Marcuse, she provocatively argues that “[…] there are two aspects of [Marcuse’s] argument that I wish to draw out in particular. The first is that the object of tolerance in any affluent, market-centered democracy is perceived to be harmless or relatively unthreatening. Its ability to be tolerated is this sociopolitical context thus becomes an index of its sociopolitical ineffectuality – in particular, its ineffectuality as a mechanism for dissent and change. From the vantage point of this market society, the best example for such a feckless thing – a thing taken as so ineffectual, harmless, and ‘safely disattendable’ that it can be absently or even benevolently tolerated – is art. Which is why even in a critique expressly restricted to the domain of politics proper, art becomes the privileged illustration of what Marcuse perceives as one of the most antiprogressive consequences of indiscriminate tolerance or pluralism: its conversion of multiplicity into commensurability. […] Nowhere is this conjoining of aesthetic and political pluralism more visible than in postmodern culture as a whole.” (ibid.: 341–342)

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Like Gordon, many supporters of Atis Rezistans come from a similar, pessimistic stance towards art’s political agency or lack thereof. Their attempt to overcome the ugly feelings, which are produced by ‘Western’ art institutions’ benevolent processes of inclusion (cf. chapter two), by trying to re-vitalize art’s political agency through the direct interaction and collaboration with a group of Black artists living in ‘authentic’ poverty in the ‘Global South’. In the terminology of Victor Li (2006: 15), this perspective can be described as “neo-primitivism”, where the ‘primitive’ is seen as a corrective to the malaise of ‘Western’ modernity. Hence, the established art infrastructures of Port-au-Prince, like Fondation AfricAmericA or the commercial galleries in Pétion-Ville, are for the most part ignored by the organizers and participants of the Ghetto Biennale. Gordon explains that in Haiti there is “uncommon cultural outpouring from the lower artistic classes, a phenomenon that in Europe, for example, has been increasingly silenced through a restrictive wage system, consumerism and an increasingly hegemonic control of culture” (Gordon 2012d: 20). She describes her own photographic work about Haiti with the following words: “the reason why I am doing this is to say to people in Europe what have you lost?...who is actually creating our culture for us? [...] Are we letting massive corporations and media corporations create culture for us? I am actually trying to ask the question what is lost?” (2014) Haitian culture is here read as a redemptive and nostalgic experience of an anti-capitalist alternative that intends to remind Europe of what ‘we’ lost. Artist, scholar, and Ghetto Biennale participant Kwynn Johnson also narrates her experience in Haiti through nostalgia and the production of an asymmetrical temporal opposition with her home country Trinidad: “When I am in Haiti, I imagine this is what Trinidad was like a hundred years ago.” (Johnson in Ganase 2013) In such narratives, the Ghetto Biennale in Haiti becomes an adventure within a nostalgic leftist fantasy of social and artistic Otherness remote from the all-embracing mechanisms of capitalist commodification. However, one central dilemma in this perspective is that the members of Atis Rezistans do not always want to counter the mechanisms of the ‘bourgeois’ art establishment in the same ways as visiting curators and artists do; they are mainly eager to be included into the commercial system of contemporary art and seek to professionalize their own institutional structures. By analyzing the politics of emotions which reflect the infrastructures of power of the Ghetto Biennale, we will see that not only physically manifested art institutions embody a place of privilege and power but also the traveling bodies and attitudes of visiting artists. What seems to be a well-working agreement between both social groups at first sight turns out to be a dynamics of hierarchical power which produces unbal-

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anced dependencies that prove again that the art world is indeed a place of klas privilege. You can take the artists out of the institution, but can you take the institution out of the artist? The experience produced by the Ghetto Biennale is also a racialized one. bell hooks (1992) describes contemporary encounters with ethnic Otherness in the cultural marketplace as being marked as more exciting, more intense, and more threatening. “In the cultural marketplace the Other is coded as having the capacity to be more alive, as holding the secret that will allow those who venture and dare to break with the cultural anhedonia [...] and experience sensual and spiritual renewal. [...] It is precisely that longing for the pleasure that has led the white west to sustain a romantic fantasy of the ‘primitive’ and the concrete search for a real primitive paradise, whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or dark flesh, perceived as the perfect embodiment of that possibility. Within this fantasy of Otherness, the longing for pleasure is projected as a force that can disrupt and subvert the will to dominate.” (ibid.: 26-27)

The Ghetto Biennale is also produced as a more exciting and more intense exhibition experience in the ‘Global South’. I finished one of my early written reviews about the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013 with the following words, which also illustrate my own neo-primitivist, romanticized longing for the Other produced by an attempted escape from ugly feelings: “The collapse of distance described by Okwui Enwezor could be felt painfully, disturbingly but also exhilaratingly in the interaction between artists from extremely different socioeconomic milieus during the time of the Ghetto Biennale. I have never experienced such a comparable nearness while visiting an art exhibition or pavilion in the institutionalised global network of biennials in Venice, Havana, São Paulo or Kassel.” (Frohnapfel 2014: 82)

Museums and galleries in Europe and the United States seem to be experienced in a psychological sense as a form of cultural anhedonia by socially-engaged artists and curators. In contrast to institutional “decontamination chambers,” the Grande Rue neighborhood promises new exciting cultural and socio-economic Otherness in the visual arts, which is not subdued by white museum walls. This cultural anhedonia relates to the development of the biennalization of contemporary art, which often comes along with the parallel global emergence of the modernist white cube as its most common exhibition modality.

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“No one seems to want to speak about it, but no matter how fervently biennials and largescale exhibitions insists on their radical distinction from the idea of the museum, they overwhelmingly show artworks in specially constructed settings that replicate the rigid geometries, white partitions, and windowless spaces of its classical exhibitions, that is, when biennials are not simply bringing artworks into existing museums without altering their white cubes.” (Filipovic 2010: 328)

The Ghetto Biennale can be seen as a strategic antidote to the experience of cultural anhedonia which seems to indicate a nostalgia for the postmodern pluralism of exhibition modalities from the late 1980s and early 1990s in Europe and the United States. In an interview with Edward Moore, Gordon puts an affirmative spin on the seductiveness produced by socio-economic and ethnic Otherness experienced by many traveling artists coming to the Ghetto Biennale, which mirrors her evaluation of sexual inter-klas relationships we encountered earlier: “Of course people take a part in [the Ghetto Biennale] because they are, in a way, seduced by abject poverty. But I would question whether or not seduction is always a negative thing. And whether or not experiencing and finding out about it. A lot of people, myself too, worry about the power imbalance between the visiting artists and the Haitian artists there. While you can never disappear it, I think you can also surprise yourself at the fact that relationships can also cross those barriers.” (2015b)

bell hooks, by contrast, describes such feelings of longing for the Other as a mechanism that can deflect structures of domination: “The desire to make contact with those bodies deemed Other, with no apparent will to dominate, assuages the guilt of the past, even takes the form of a defiant gesture where one denies accountability and historical connection. Most importantly, it establishes a contemporary narrative where the suffering imposed by structures of domination on those designed Other is deflected by an emphasis on seduction and longing where the desire is not to make the Other over in one’s image but to become the Other.” (hooks 1992: 25)

An affirmative reading of the touristic experience of ethnic Otherness as a seductive, transformative, and alleviative experience for visiting foreigners anchors the informal neighborhood in a position of an objectified and redemptive Other in the service of the West’s own identity crisis (Li 2006). Graham Huggan (2001) also reminds us in his book The Post-Colonial Exotic that exotism is bound up not only in the perception of cultural difference but in the sympathetic identification with marginal groups. “The exoticist rhetoric of fetishized other-

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ness and sympathetic identification masks the inequality of the power relations without which the discourse could not function.” (ibid.: 14) At the Ghetto Biennale, two important diametrical counter-positions are at play: while one side of the participants tries to escape art institutions by traveling to the allegedly ‘authentic’ margins of the contemporary art world, the other side tries to find a way to participate in these institutional networks, which continue to be centralized in Europe and the United States. One of the most challenging aspects of Gordon’s curatorial work is to mediate these two, often conflicting positions. The situation becomes all the more challenging for the local artists, because Gordon’s own curatorial perspective seems to be informed by the neoprimitivist perspective described in the preceding paragraphs.

3.2 ARTISTIC POVERTY TOURISM Eugène and Celeur started the process of transforming the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat in the late 1990s, when they opened their studios and yards as musée d’art and invited art enthusiasts to witness and buy their assemblages, sculptures, and paintings. They re-appropriated successfully a supposedly boujwa art institution—the museum—to make the neighborhood available for touristic consumption and established a communitybased form of artistic poverty tourism (cf. Dürr and Jaffe 2012; Dovey and King 2012; Rolfes 2010; Meschank 2013; and Frenzel and Koens 2012), which attracted many visitors to see the art pieces and art installations within the informal neighborhood. Eveline Dürr and Rivke Jaffe understand poverty tourism “as a tourist experience that involves visiting urban areas characterized by poverty, squalor and violence” (2012: 114) and they describe it in the context of a recent trend of responsible tourism: “[t]hese forms of tourism promise a meaningful and transformative experience that is rewarding for both tourists and local communities. They also cater to tourists’ desire to experience the ‘authentic’ rather than the staged—something that is not primarily ‘created’ for them” (ibid.). They go on to explain that “slum tourism will often reproduce clichéd images of the urban poor, but it may also provide openings for more nuanced, alternative or unusual representations” (ibid.: 119). Dürr and Jaffe also highlight that research on poverty tourism is seldom informed by a critical dialogue with members of these communities and that these groups are actively using tourism to improve their negative reputations. Art historical research about socially-engaged artists similarly shows little interest in either affirmative or critical opinions articulated by members of communities participating in socially-engaged art projects.

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The neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat offers a supposedly ‘authentic’ and meaningful experience of art produced by the urban poor, which is often sharply juxtaposed in narratives by visitors in binary opposition to ‘inauthentic’ boujwa art galleries in Pétion-Ville. Pétion-Ville is a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince that is symbolically associated with the Haitian klas privilejye (elite). In casual conversations, Pétion-Ville is regularly used as a direct opposite to downtown Port-au-Prince where the pèp-la (common people) of Haiti live and work. Most of the commercial established galleries like Galerie Nader, Galerie Monnin or Les Ateliers Jerome among others are located in this district. Traditionally, the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat was a place where artisanal craftwork for the tourist trade at the Marché en Fer (Iron Market) was created. Today the neighborhood still produces craftwork for wider Caribbean tourist economies in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica or Puerto Rico. Many carpenters, welders, and metal workers have their workshops in this area. Between these workshops and small warehouses many families settled and began to rent small houses built from corrugated metal. Most of the members of Atis Rezistans grew up in this area. In the last sixteen years, the inhabitants reinvented the area as a destination for ‘adventurous’ art tourists and adapted to these new visitors with an affinity for contemporary art. This development occurred parallel to the interest of Haitian curators in the assemblages and sculptures of the group. We saw in chapter one that the central starting point for this development was Prézeau Stephenson’s interest in Celeur’s and Eugène’s artworks. Prézeau Stephenson also established first guided tours through the neighborhood in collaboration with Eugene and Celeur to give visiting art professionals the chance to witness the urban contexts of art produced by Haitian artists. Haitian video artists Maksaens Denis was also part of this early network and organized first video screenings in the neighborhood in the early 2000s. In the following years, Prézeau Stephenson kept on with the practice of showing the neighborhood mainly to Caribbean, African and European art professionals who visited Portau-Prince on occasion of the pan-Caribbean Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain. Prézeau Stephenson’s cousin, Mario Benjamin, followed her lead and made the neighborhood one of his principal destinations in private tours he offers to visiting curators, artists, and art historians. Prézeau Stephenson’s and Benjamin’s short tours through the neighborhood addressed a specific milieu of art professionals. Haitian gallerist and curator Mireille Pérodin Jérome (Les Ateliers Jerome) remembered in a conversation with me how she was only slowly convinced by Benjamin that she could enter the bidonvil without endangering her own life.

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“For the Grande Rue I took my time because in the past the Grande Rue was impracticable, it was the red zone of Port-au-Prince. Mario repeatedly told me, ‘why are you so afraid of the Grande Rue? Those guys [Eugène and Celeur] can give you the appropriate security.’ And I let myself getting slowly convinced by him. I went to visit them and was very surprised. People I take there are usually also surprised, not only by the capacity of work but also by the fusional connection those artists have with their own artworks. While the artists at Riviere Froide or Croix-des-Bouquets work in their workplace, at Grande Rue, the works are in their bedrooms, in their yards, everywhere.” (Jérôme Pérodin 2014)

Prézeau Stephenson’s and Benjamin’s first tours opened the area to a new milieu and slowly helped to diminish the stigma of the neighborhood as too dangerous and impracticable. It also produced a new fruitful inter-klas network for Eugène and Celeur that resulted in several national and international exhibitions and also drew Gordon’s attention to the artists. Many expatriates but also locals are visiting the neighborhood today in casual tours on their own initiative. One of my interlocutors explains this new change of reputation: “In the past, for example Taxi drivers would not drive anybody to Rue du Magasin de L’Etat. Because it was considered dangerous. But nowadays more people are coming to our area because of the artistic work. This artistic activity protects the area and brings more people. It helps us to have a better reputation. Now when you say the name Atis Rezistans, they have a completely different idea about our neighborhood. You can tell that this activity is very good for our neighborhood.” (Getho 2013)

Today most art professionals working in Haiti consider the neighborhood one of the most spectacular touristic attractions in Port-au-Prince. Cultural institutes like FOKAL, Institut Français or Le Centre d’Art are inviting their guests to see Atis Rezistans’ ateliers. Haitian tourist guide and founder of the tour company Tour Haiti Jean Cyril Pressoir integrated Atis Rezistans’ ateliers as a sightseeing destination into his group tours. Maude Malengrez, a journalist and employee at FOKAL, pointed out to me that she encountered a transformative process as soon as she started bringing clients to see the Gran Ri area: these visitors, according to Malengrez, suddenly started considering themselves specialists for an ‘authentic’ Haitian life experience to the extent that all other experiences of people living in Haiti become insignificant in their eyes. Malengrez’s own expat experience living in Haiti for several years becomes irrelevant in comparison to the experience which these tourists are able to make during a quick tour through the Gran Ri neighborhood. Malengrez’s observation resonates with Graham Huggan’s concept of the anti-tourist tourist. Huggan describes the anti-tourist tourist as “[a]

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sensitive, sometimes tortured soul whose felt contempt for the vulgarities of package tourism and romantic belief in the myth of an unsullied Native culture—a culture that s/he feels duty-bound to protect from the ravages of consumer society—merely reinforce his/her own conspicuously privileged tourist status” (2001: 198). The anti-tourist tourist seeks a new privileged access to the real and is able to make this desired experience of ‘authenticity’ while visiting Eugène’s museum. This new access to the real produces in return an expert status on Haitian culture because the anti-tourist tourist escapes Haitian boujwa social spaces, which are understood as decadent, selfish, and irrelevant when directly juxtaposed with a milieu of artists living in poverty. By diving into this particular milieu, anti-tourist tourists are able to authenticate their stay in Haiti and become new legitimate insiders through their transformative experience with abject poverty and empowering ‘subaltern’ artworks. I understand the Ghetto Biennale as part of this prolonged process of poverty tourism and conceptualize the art event as a particular curated nuance of poverty tourism in the artistic field. Gordon, in collaboration with the members of Atis Rezistans, has built upon this desire of an anti-touristic tourism experience and actively helps to produce this ‘authentic’ experience of poverty. Gordon expanded the number of visitors into more popular realms and made sure, for example, that Atis Rezistans has been included into the Haiti/Dominican Republic edition of the travel guide Lonely Planet as a touristic destination. Instead of doing short guided tours through the neighborhood, Gordon decided to make the neighborhood a fixed destination for a short-time residency program that brings about forty to fifty visiting artists into the neighborhood to realize art projects in a timespan ranging between a few days and three weeks. Most visiting artists at the Ghetto Biennale are lodged at Hotel Oloffson during the duration of the biennale, and they go every day for excursions to the neighborhood in order to work ‘on site’ on their art projects. The expression ‘to go on site’ recalls a traditional understanding of site-based cultural anthropology where the research topic is spatially defined as an isolated community in the “field.”7 We have already seen in chapter one that this idea of social isolation is questionable because the artists do in fact move constantly between different socio-economic ‘fields’ in Port-au-Prince. The particular understanding of art as a mechanism to revitalize “art’s revolutionary potential” or to create “real deep community actions” brought into the

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I am thankful for Elizabeth McAlister’s inspiring observation on this issue. She mentioned this idea to me during a personal conversation in Port-au-Prince at the Ghetto Biennale in December 2013.

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neighborhood by socially-engaged artists shifted the attention away from the first founding fathers of the group and their material artistic production towards the larger body of inhabitants living in the area. While the group Atis Rezistans consisted of Celeur, Eugène, Guyodo, Ronald Bazile a.k.a. Cheby and a small network of assistants in the early 2000s, sixteen years later nearly all inhabitants of this neighborhood have begun to label themselves as atis kontanporen (contemporary artists) or at least as atistik (artistic). Many inhabitants of the neighborhood today have two or three small art pieces prepared in their households, which they can sell on occasion to visitors. This development also relates to the tutoring of the inhabitants by Celeur and Eugène. As a response to socially-engaged art projects, inter-klas relationships have become a new strongly desired option for many inhabitants in the neighborhood to improve their marginalized socio-economic position. One of the Gran Ri artists explains: “In 2009 people were still genuine to do art as a way to express themselves. After the second biennale, people saw mainly that there are a lot of opportunities coming from art. They started to think that doing art is an opportunity to escape the ghetto.” On many occasions during my interviews and conversations with the new generation of artists, they stated frankly that one of the main reasons why they decided to choose the new profession of atis (artist) was that it offered the possibility to reach a predominantly blan milieu from higher socio-economic strata from abroad. One of my interlocutors described: “I try to give visitors who are coming into my neighborhood the best time of their life here in Haiti, and I hope some of them will return the favor and pay for my travels to the United States and will support me in the same generous way. […] You have to be smart to survive in this neighborhood.” And another artist stated: “Let me explain to you: to be successful in our group [Atis Rezistans] you have to use your own mind. Nobody will help you, nobody will guide you to be successful. You have to use your mind to create your own world of contacts and friends. Only with foreigners you get opportunities to do something and you will be able to travel or participate in exhibitions […]. Sometimes we have here very frustrated artists in our group because the leader of our group will not give you these opportunities. You have to create opportunities for yourself.”

Visiting foreigners from around the world bring with them the promise of possible socio-economic benefits, but at the same time they also bring new exciting social exchange. One of my interlocutors described this situation of exchange as a learning process:

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“It is like a university for me, but I don't mean university in the literal sense of the term. When visitors are coming here, especially when foreigners are coming, we are able to exchange our culture. They explain what they are doing in their home countries. And they are also trying to learn something from us too. We are learning from them and they are learning from us.”

Art can be understood as a pragmatic survival strategy that offers the inhabitants a product to sell. Many inhabitants transform the Ghetto Biennale and its revolutionary rhetoric of community empowerment into their own more pragmatic grammar of popular resistance, which is reminiscent of a logic of jineterismo. The term jineterismo is taken from Cuban Spanish and describes social actors who establish relations with tourists strategically in order to use them for socioeconomic benefits (Palmiè 2002: 282). This term does not reduce social actors to a marginalized socio-economic position but leaves room for their own agency. Jineterismo is derived from the word jinete and indicates how a rider literally whips money out of his or her client. Stephan Palmiè describes: “It is, thus, the tourist’s personhood that is reduced to an objectified source of hard cash, imported clothing, household goods, electronic appliances, high-quality foods, and, last—but by no means least—entertainment in bars, restaurants, or cabarets inaccessible to Cubans without an adequate supply of foreign currency and, increasingly so, without visibly foreign company.” (2002: 282) I understand the term as a concept for a form of agency that specifically describes touristic encounters within hierarchical social constellations. Although developed in the particular situation of communist Cuba, I see a similar logic in tourist encounters and social behaviors taking place during the Ghetto Biennale. Artistic poverty tourism creates conditions for these inhabitants where they are now able, in contrast to other ‘ghettoized’ areas in Port-auPrince, to connect themselves actively to traveling actors from around the world. This enables the Gran Ri artists to improve their social position and helps them, at least sporadically, to cross over into localities like hotels, restaurants, and bars in Port-au-Prince from which they would otherwise be excluded if they did not have the economic and social support of visitors. Since 2001, the first generation of artists accumulated immense social and symbolic capital through their artistic practice, their extensive travelling, and their networks with art professionals living in Europe and the United States. In our conversations and interviews, the founding members narrated that at the beginning of their careers the other inhabitants living in the neighborhood, including their own families, had considered them to have lost their minds for collecting detritus and reshaping it into art pieces. But, ironically, this perspective has

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shifted and by now a majority of inhabitants actively tries to participate in the sculptors’ established art networks by adopting the term atis kontanporen selfdescriptively. Eugène describes the situation as follows: “Today [my neighbors] want to be as crazy as I was supposed to be in the past. The same people, who called me crazy, are sending today their children to me to get taught. [...] Almost all my neighbors think that we have money in Atis Rezistans. They try to use their children in order to have something too and they send them to me to learn how to be an artist. They would like to have at least one or two artists in the family. It is not easy to find a visa to travel especially here in this neighborhood. And they have noticed that almost all my artists had the opportunity to travel.” (Eugène 2014)

Becoming an artist is pragmatically desired because there is no other alternative for many unemployed people to earn at least a little bit of money to be able to support their families. But these new inter-klas relationships can also take the form of very direct political action: in 2014, young Atis Rezistans’s artists Pierre Adler was arrested by a group of policemen without reason and the officers humiliated him by cutting off his dreadlocks and shaving his head before releasing him. Wearing long hair as a man is considered to be inappropriate in Haiti and the police officers wanted to discipline the young man for his allegedly impudent behavior. But Pierre Adler could ask for support from his new network and a befriended expat organized an interview with journalist Edrid St. Juste where the artist could speak about his humiliation in an article published by the newspaper Le Nouvelliste a few days later (St. Juste 2014). Although the police officers could not be identified, he reached a wide forum to discuss his humiliation and the violation perpetrated by the state police. In response to this incident, the Human rights organization L’International Dread organized a demonstration on December 3rd, 2014 in Port-au-Prince. In contrast to the neighboring Caribbean islands Jamaica, Cuba, or the Bahamas, Haiti could not establish itself as a destination for mass tourism because of continuing political unrest during years of dictatorships, a notoriously stereotypical and marginalized reputation, and the devastating earthquake of 2010. Port-au-Prince does not have well-developed touristic infrastructures for visitors to move freely and autonomously within the city. Local informal guides (gid) wait in front of many hotels like Hotel Oloffson or Park Hotel to assist visiting foreigners to arrive at desired destinations or to assist with activities of daily living. Cosentino describes these guides as fixer and as cultural brokers: “A fixer is a professional culture broker whose range of activities runs from valet to research associate. In Haiti, where telephones often don’t work, and where every

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transaction entail complicated personal and financial negotiations, fixers are essential to the conduct of any serious business.” (1998: 11-12) For many visitors of the Ghetto Biennale, the members of Atis Rezistans started to occupy positions very similar to these touristic gid. The functions these artists occupy in relationships with visitors go far beyond conventional artistic collaborations and hospitality. Going to a post office, supermarket, or bank can become a tricky situation for inexperienced visitors and a gid offers a helping hand in these situations. At the same time, the members of Atis Rezistans offer visitors, whom they often label as kliyan (clients), a safe and comfortable opportunity to get to know Port-au-Prince ‘from below’. While doing so, the members of Atis Rezistans become interlocutors for Haitian culture and identity and are asked to mediate their living situation to these visitors. Labeling visiting artists as clients stands in significant contrast to the romanticized rhetoric many visiting artists bring into the neighborhood; they describe their new inter-klas relationships with local artists in enthusiastic terms as “enriching friendships” and try to frame their socially-engaged artistic endeavors as a selfless act of social change, which deflects from persisting hierarchies in transactional relationships.

3.3 POLITICS OF PITY AND THE SPIRAL OF MORAL ACCUSATION According to art historian Caitlyn Lennon (2012), the most troubling feature of the Ghetto Biennale occurs after the event closes its door. While visiting artists, scholars, and journalist return to their home countries publicly praising the success of the art event, life will go back to normal in the informal neighborhood. She asked in conclusion: “The disparities between these two drastically different outcomes beg the question who actually benefits from the Ghetto Biennale?” (2012: 63) Thus, a central sentiment that visiting artists at the Ghetto Biennale have to face is rooted in moral concerns: how legitimate is it to participate in an art event that takes place in a bidonvil area where artists from a privileged position expose themselves voluntarily to abject poverty? Is it wrong to produce socially-engaged art out of the misfortune of other people’s socio-economic marginalization? Is it only morally acceptable to engage with a slum community if this contact leads successfully to social upward mobility? U.S American photographer and long-term Ghetto Biennale participant Laura Heyman mentioned to me in a personal conversation that acquiring funding to participate in the Ghetto Biennale and travel to Haiti oddly became a lot easier for her and other visiting artists after the earthquake occurred in January 2010. While the devastating catastrophe increased the misery in Haiti, the fund-

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ing possibilities for ‘Euro-U.S. American’ artists increased proportionally and made their travels to Haiti more comfortable. Structural disparities like these between both groups open the door for moral considerations. Directly witnessing the unfortunate life-circumstances of people living in poverty often produces an affective coping mechanism among visiting artists, which I describe, following French sociologist Luc Boltanski, as a “politics of pity”. In line with Hannah Arendt, Boltanski analyzes in his book Distant Suffering (2004) two emotional responses in spectators who encounter the suffering of another group from a distance. These two affects are (1) indignation and (2) tenderheartedness (99). The distance described by Boltanski should not be understood too literally in a physical or geographical sense but, following sociologist Anna Szorenyi, as “[…] a distance between ‘classes’ of people, defined according to their ‘condition’, specifically according to whether they belong to the group of the ‘lucky’ or that of the ‘unfortunate’” (2009: 99). The first step in politics of pity involves a distinction between those who suffer, the unfortunate, and those who do not, the lucky. To have knowledge of people who are suffering, Boltanksi argues further, points to a moral obligation to give assistance and to act generously; otherwise, the spectators of suffering can be accused of viewing suffering for their personal gain and pleasure. “Someone who observes the suffering of another without indifference but without lifting a finger to relieve it may be accused of being personally motivated or interested in viewing suffering, perhaps because it interests him or even gives him pleasure. The criterion of public speech or conversation is precisely what enables us to distinguish between a way of looking which can be characterized as disinterested or altruistic, one which is orientated outwards and which is motivated by the intention to see the suffering ended, from a selfish way of looking which is wholly taken up with the internal states aroused by the spectacle of suffering: fascination, horror, interest, excitement, pleasure etc.” (Boltanski 2004: 21)

The first emotion described by Boltanski as a reaction to suffering is to become indignant. The spectator feels no longer disarmed and powerless but acquires a weapon in the form of anger and indignation. This anger expresses itself in a speech act that is formulated as an accusation. The spectator shifts the focus from the pitied unfortunate to the persecutor, i.e., those who are deemed responsible for the suffering. Therefore, the accusation needs a direct addressee and a persecutor needs to be identified (ibid.: 64). The second emotional response to suffering on the part of spectators takes the route of sympathizing with the unfortunate’s gratitude inspired by the intervention of a benefactor. The moment pity takes the form of tenderheartedness, it turns away from the search for a persecu-

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tor, and thereby from accusation, and directs its attention to the possibility of an act of charity performed by a benefactor or benefactrize (ibid.: 77). The network of artists who participate in the Ghetto Biennale often seems to move exactly within this emotional field between indignation and tenderheartedness. These two sentiments are also the origin for many conflicts taking place during the Ghetto Biennale. Visiting artists who participate in the biennale seem to be suspiciously examined for potential selfish reasons for their presence at the art event; or they are celebrated as the source of generous acts of kindness. Reciprocal moral accusations are very common among visiting artists who often discuss during the Ghetto Biennale whether other visiting colleagues should be legitimately present in this informal neighborhood. The inhabitants and especially the members of Atis Rezistans have been classified in the category of the ‘unfortunates’ and therefore seem to be constantly in danger of being furthermore marginalized by visitors who belong to the ‘lucky’. As a result, all inhabitants of the neighborhood become enwrapped in a cloud of protective benevolence. In an e-mail interview, Lennon quoted visiting artist Karen Miranda Augustine about her experience at the Ghetto Biennale in 2011: “I wasn’t there to take disaster photos, to do research for a Ph.D., to shoot source material for a film— this wasn’t an anthropological exercise for me. I was there out of a love and respect for Haitian culture, history, art and spiritual expression. At times, I almost felt as if I were one of the few who was there truly out of reverence.” (Lennon 2012: 42) Augustine denounces all potential selfish interests for participating in the art event and highlights instead her genuine reverence for Haitian art, culture, and religion. She points her finger at other, less genuine endeavors. Many artists, who have been attracted by the possibility to work in a bidonvil through participation in the Ghetto Biennale, would of course repudiate the idea that their participation in the art event was based on any selfish touristic experience. This affective discomfort to be labeled a tourist mirrors Barbara Vodopivec and Rivke Jaffe’s observation about volunteer tourism in Guatemala: “Volunteers constructed their difference from tourists in two ways. First, they felt they could enter ‘authentic’ places and meet ‘authentic’ Guatemalans that were inaccessible to tourists. […] Second, volunteers create a social distance between themselves and tourists through work. While tourists come to Guatemala to enjoy their holidays, volunteers come to work and make a change in a country characterized by poverty and inequality. Tourists are not only perceived as being ignorant of these problems, but are also seen as contributing to it. […] The distinction between tourists as problem-causers and volunteers as solution-bringers, enthusiastically promoted by the volunteer marketing industry, is some-

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what problematic as it takes volunteers’ beneficial role for granted.” (Vodopivec and Jaffe 2011: 111)

Visiting artists similarly use their artistic endeavor to make a change in Haiti as an argument to distance their transitory stay in Haiti from touristic sojourns. During the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013, the decision of a group of visiting artists to leave the official biennale hotel Hotel Oloffson to enjoy dinner in a fancy restaurant in Pétion-Ville was enough to immediately spark carping criticism from other artists and curators, who felt that the money spent on dinner could have found a better purpose among the ‘unfortunate’. However, ‘persecutors’ are not only located among the visiting artists but in the specific context of Haiti, they are often identified in Haiti’s ‘selfish’ klas privilejye. A small minority in Haitian society obviously possesses more than a large impoverished majority. Therefore, many ‘Western’ artists participating in the Ghetto Biennale are quick to point the finger towards the established art and gallery scene located in Pétion-Ville, which is often accused in generalizing terms as disapproving of the artists living downtown—even though the history of the group Atis Rezistans shows a strong interconnectedness with this established local art network since the mid-1990s (cf. chapter one). Everyone who is not living in a bidonvil in Haiti and belongs to the sphere of the ‘lucky’ becomes eyed with critical suspicion. Critical accusations that the ‘bourgeois’ Haitian art establishment actively disapproves of the works of Atis Rezistans are very common during the Ghetto Biennale. I see this reaction as a direct manifestation of a politics of pity, which tries to deflect and reroute pity and guilt experienced by a direct encounter with Black marginality towards a concrete group of ‘persecutors’. In these narratives, the artists between Grande Rue and Rue Magasin de L’Etat are specifically framed as an artistic form of social resistance from below. Leftist narratives of heroic “class struggle” need a concrete image of an enemy, which is easily found in the Haitian established art world. Co-curator of the 1st Ghetto Biennale, Myron M. Beasley, for example, writes in retrospect about the Ghetto Biennale: “The ethos of the Ghetto Biennale alerted the world that artists—both known and unknown—can function outside of a system of exclusionary practices to create change. […] The event was open, free and centrally located, making it accessible to many Haitians. A Haitian gallery owner attending the opening described the event as ‘ugly, badly curated, like a street fair’. Such a statement reiterates a class-based perspective that is all too prevalent in the art world.” (2012: 78)

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Through such narratives, visiting ‘Westerners’ are able to stage themselves as committed partners in an artistic class struggle from below. To become heroic themselves, Atis Rezistans must be presented as in need of saving (cf. chapter two). I realized in conversations during my research that bringing up the central involvement of Prézeau Stephenson and Benjamin for the artistic development of the group can sometimes spark discomfort among ‘Western’ supporters of Atis Rezistans, because they lose their legitimization to be heroic supporters. The ontological complicity of this network with its own class position, race privilege or/and nationality is forgotten in these narratives that redirect or deflect guilt, shame, and indignation towards concrete local persecutors. During conversations at the Ghetto Biennale, I frequently encountered such heroic narratives, which can be understood as a mechanism of progressive racism and white saviorism. One visiting white artist, for example, articulated that she sees herself as a new Che Guevara who is producing a revolution in the streets of Port-au-Prince, and she even went on to assume that she would not be surprised if she got assassinated by members of the Haitian art establishment for helping to organize this supposedly revolutionary art event. Ahmed uses the plot of the movie Dances with Wolves to illustrate this aspect of progressive racism that recenters whiteness through articulations of benign heroism: “What is progressive about [the movie]? Well it is an attempt to offer an alternative to the brutal racism of the classical Western. Here the natives are not presented as a homogeneous mass that threatens the white settler subjects – whose lives and happiness depend on their elimination. They are given names and faces. The film represents the unfolding of the frontier as a violent process of destruction. But the hero remains the white subject. We are encouraged to disidentify from the bad whites by identifying with the good white (the singularity of good whiteness matters here). It is his capacity to overcome his own whiteness, to ‘go native’ as a gesture of sympathy, as being with, as being for, that is the progressive racism of the film.” (Ahmed 2016, emphasis added)

In a similar sense, many participants of the Ghetto Biennale become heroic in Haiti by performatively disidentifing with their ‘middle class identity’, ‘by ‘going native’, and by deflecting from their privileges as they shift attention towards ‘corrupt Haitian elites’. While some art professionals in Haiti may indeed disapprove of the artists between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat and feel misrepresented by their numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States, I have shown in the preceding chapter that other actors in the artistic field have

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been crucial for their global recognition, as they initiated important inter-klas dialogues in the artistic field. It is important to understand that the artistic milieu in Port-au-Prince is, of course, not a homogenous entity. There are obviously very brutal mechanisms of power at play, which keep a large majority of Haitians in marginalization and poverty through structural discrimination. But there are also numerous Haitian art professionals who are evidently concerned about this situation of local and global inequality. Haitian curators, artists, and gallerists from higher socio-economic strata are not shy to turn moral indignation back at the participants and organizers of the Ghetto Biennale; and the spiral of moral accusations keeps spinning. Many locals of Port-au-Prince are critical of the biennale, which is often described by them as a “polemic spectacle of poverty” that barely improves the living situation of the inhabitants and mainly benefits the careers of visiting artists and curators from abroad. These reactions imply that it is only morally acceptable to engage with a community living in poverty if this engagement is rooted in generous patronage and leads to acts of humanitarianism. I want to draw attention to the danger that the moral plea to engage with marginalized communities only if it is rooted in philanthropic selfless engagement and leads to socio-political improvement can also be understood as a mechanism that reestablishes social barriers. It can trigger ‘over-correctness’, which problematizes inter-klas relationships to a degree that no communication and interaction between different socio-economic milieus seem possible besides humanitarianism. It may also explain why many socially-engaged artists are eager to use a celebratory and often revolutionary rhetoric to describe their own art projects, because in the spiral of accusations artists have to legitimize their art against moral accusations and their own sentiment of guilt by presenting their artistic practice as good social practice. In contrast to these pessimistic voices, the Ghetto Biennale also brings important economic capital and new possibilities into the neighborhood. It offers the artists closest to Eugène and Gordon business opportunities also beyond the sale of their art objects. Gordon pays a salary for the most helpful members of the ‘inner circle’ of Atis Rezistans during the art event, and some of the Haitian artists are successfully selling self-designed t-shirts and handmade necklaces to visiting artists. Gordon also commissions every two years a vodou ceremony by Atis Rezistans artist and houngan (vodou priest) Alphonse Jean Jr. a.k.a. Papa Da. This ceremony is probably the largest direct financial transaction taking place between curator and artist during the biennale. This commissioned ceremony is also an illustrative example for Huggan’s point about how tourism operators repeatedly destroy their own objectives: “As a global enterprise dependent on international capital and worldwide communications systems, tourism con-

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tributes to the sameness of a world whose differences it needs to make its profits. Tourism thus requires the other that it repeatedly destroys.” (Huggan 2001: 14) Gordon is in a similar situation: The Ghetto Biennale helps to produce an allegedly ‘authentic’ religious experience by asking Papa Da to stage a ceremony for visitors, but Gordon is not attending the event herself because she considers the ceremony to be not ‘authentic’ enough. She actively helps to produce the ‘authentic’ foreign cultural experience of the Other but repeatedly destroys its ‘authenticity’ by commissioning it. The anti-touristic gaze seeks privileged access to the real “but what it finds instead is a counter-commodified version of reality. The anti-touristic gaze is thus fundamentally self-negating—it searches for an authenticity it prevents itself from finding—and for another time and place produced by its own selfjustifying myths.” (Huggan 2001: 196) Papa Da capitalizes directly on the ceremony by selling beer bottles out of his altar room to visitors and therefore makes the production of anti-touristic sentiments difficult for visiting artists and curators to maintain. It is therefore not surprising that in 2013 Gordon was already searching for new ceremony venues in neighboring areas like Bel Air to host future, ‘more authentic’ biennale ceremonies.

3.4 PERFORMANCES OF AFFIRMATION Conversations about hierarchy, privilege, and whiteness are surprisingly difficult to have in the artistic milieu which participates at the Ghetto Biennale; a milieu which is ideologically loaded with an idea of patronage towards the ‘subaltern’ klas and often genuinely intents to help. I realized during my research that one of the strongest taboos in inter-klas relationships during the Ghetto Biennale is to beg directly for money. Many visiting artists are very verbal about their annoyance and frustration when Haitian artists hustle again and again for money or repeatedly and obtrusively try to sell their sculptures to them. Thus, requests for financial support are often camouflaged behind emotional stories of sick family members or have to be introduced with embarrassment if you want to avoid the annoyance of visiting artists and jeopardize your relationship with them. Failing to do so can trigger unpleasant emotional responses from the visiting artists, which further alienates both social groups from each other. The request for financial support leads visiting artists back to the socioeconomic discrepancy they set out to dismantle in the first place by striving for the recreation of social bonds and the establishment of non-hierarchical social collaborations. The request for financial support is a direct reminder that they remain anchored in socio-economic privilege and ontologically complicit with

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systems of domination like whiteness, their klas position, and nationality. They have to realize, bluntly speaking, to be perceived as a source of hard cash. Thus, one of the most frequent conversations taking place during the Ghetto Biennale are triggered by the need of visiting artists to explain to local artists that they are also not financially privileged in their home countries. Something along the lines of: “You have to understand I am an artist/student/scholar and also do not have a lot of financial possibilities. I cannot help you because I also struggle financially in my home country.” These narratives try to lessen the gap between both social groups but are instantly contradicted by the physical presence of the narrators’ travelling bodies, their possibility to stay in an expensive hotel in Port-au-Prince, and their participation in the Ghetto Biennale. Haitian artists need to make sure that visiting ‘Westerners’ feel reaffirmed in their artistic and ethical endeavors and they need to ensure—if they want to bond successfully with visiting artists—that this milieu is able to overcome and forget its own sentiments of guilt and shame, which are instantly produced by the direct encounter of privilege with marginality within a politics of pity. Many art projects at the Ghetto Biennale, therefore, share aversion towards negative affects like unease, disruption, irritation, discomfort, or frustration. This affective aversion to conflict is a self-censorship and a response to politics of pity that often leads to performances harmony rather than analyses of the complex infrastructures of power produced by the art event in its nature as a curated social situation. Visiting artists favor the creation of harmonious situations between both social milieus by realizing art projects like drawing or knitting workshops with children and teenagers, joint dinners, parties, concerts or dance performances. The experience of poverty freezes all social inter-klas relationships into a stiff over-correctness that seems to make any form of conflict and critical dialogue impossible, because everybody seems to be afraid of leaving the position of benefactor/benefactrice and of being possibly perceived as the ‘persecutor’ of the urban poor. Visitors set off to overcome hierarchical klas barriers and therefore consider themselves to be already in a morally upright position by the mere act of crossing over into an informal neighborhood, by articulating moral indignation about the capitalist world order, and by articulating their desire for inter-klas contact without socio-economic tension. The mere existence of the Ghetto Biennale as an institution for inter-klas dialogue is used as evidence that klas barriers are successfully broken down. Ahmed (2012: 101) has pointed out that the tools developed to address a problem can be used as an indicator that a problem has already been addressed. By generously recognizing all inhabitants of the neighborhood to be worth col-

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laborating with, visiting artists have achieved already a first successful goal of their socially-engaged art projects: the supposedly non-hierarchical participation of a community. However, bell hooks argues that “by [simply] expressing the desire for ‘intimate’ contact with black people, white people do not eradicate the politics of racial domination as they are made manifest in personal interaction.” (1992: 28) Projects that produce inter-klas optimism help the Ghetto Biennale to preserve the image of being a form of good practice and inter-klas collaboration, which is central in the mission statement of the biennale. With the term ‘feelgood politics,’ I refer to Ahmed’s work in On Being Included (2012), where she analyzes the work of diversity workers in universities in Britain and Australia. These workers often have to rely on feel-good politics in order to be able to articulate critique. Diversity workers are pushed into a position where they will not endanger the happiness of the institution they are supposed to criticize by triggering defensive reactions in the university’s staff. Ahmed explains that “[d]iversity might be promoted because it allows the university to promote itself, creating a surface or illusion of happiness. We could call this simply the ‘happy diversity’ model, in which ‘diversity talk’ becomes ‘happy talk’ [...] Diversity provides a positive, shiny image of the organization that allows inequalities to be concealed and thus reproduced.” (2012: 72) Similarly, socially-engaged artists often rhetorically favor feel-good-politics or, in our case, ‘happy inter-klas talk’ and respond defensively as soon as their persisting position of privilege and power is brought back into discussion. A characteristic project in this ‘happy talk’ trajectory is Nourish by U.S. American artist Lee Lee who participated in the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013. She decided to collaborate with local grandmothers and staged several joint dinners and lunches where she accompanied the grandmothers in the process of preparing local meals for their families. She described her project as follows: “Food prepared slowly, with love, offers comfort and empowerment to those who are nourished by it. During the Biennale, I envision a series of dinners occurring two or three times a week. I would like to work with local women from getting the ingredients at market and directly from local farmers. As we prepare traditional meals together, I aspire to learn from the women who demonstrate love through nourishment. Through the process, I would create portraits of both the food producers and mothers/grandmothers, as well as record the traditional preparation methods in order to preserve their wisdom.”8

8

From Lee Lee’s proposal describing her project for the 3rd Ghetto Biennale 2013.

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In a conversation with me, she described her project furthermore as a form of feminist empowerment because her art project recognizes and values marginalized grandmothers and their everyday practice. The valorization in this case is achieved through the gaze of a white U.S. American traveler, who helped to stage dinners for everyone to come harmoniously together to eat. Interestingly enough, Lee Lee’s collaborations unintentionally led to a dispute between two grandmothers who started a fight with each other because one of them proposed ownership over Lee Lee and, getting a little rough, asked the other grandmother to leave the project immediately. This minor situation of conflict between two elderly women shows how socially-engaged art projects are already seen as a new and scarce resource, access to which is contested among people in the neighborhood. Two years earlier at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale Lithuanian artist Jurate Jarulyte had already collaborated with Haitian grandmother Rose Marie Paul for her relational aesthetics project Pale avem, kalbék su manimi/talk to me, where Jarulyte and Paul spent several sessions together trying to communicate with each other without sharing a common language. For their last joint session, they also prepared a meal together. In retrospect, Jarulyte wrote: “I am asking myself if the collaboration with Rose Marie Paul could be called ‘a project’ as it evolved as an honest enriching relationship and friendship.” (2011) Bishop pointed out that socially-engaged artists often question the authorship for their own art projects by describing them as a shared social situation. In the case of Jarulyte, it lost the status of being an art project altogether and became an “honest enriching friendship”. The renunciation of authorship or the “humble lack of authorship,” as Bishop (2012: 26) calls it, are very characteristic instruments to stage sociallyengaged art as a selfless benevolent practice of community empowerment. Authorship is equated with authority and therefore needs to be disavowed. Another example for performing inter-klas harmony took place at the 3rd Ghetto Biennale where two different artist collectives organized several street parties and concerts within the neighborhood. The parties have been organized by Vision Forum and XKlub directly at Rue du Magasin de L’Etat. The first concert mixed the sounds of interviews the group carried out in a project called Is Misunderstanding Misunderstood? and the second and third concert have been collaborations with Atis Rezistans’ artists Jean Claude Saintilus and Pierre Adler. Local musical traditions like Hip Hop and vodou drumming were mixed with electronic music and played publicly in the streets. The final concert was a collaboration between Vision Forum with visiting artists Jean-Louis Huhta a.k.a. Dungeon Acid, Joyce Ip and Roberto Peyre (a.k.a XKlub) and became a street party at Rue du Magasin de L’Etat. In the center of the party, Joyce Ip, Roberto

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Peyre and Jean-Louis Huhta build a runway where everybody was encouraged to dance walking up and down in the spotlight: “The intention is to facilitate a platform where the creative impulse is expressed through gesture, appearance and musicality rather than art objects, imagery, workshops or talk. For Ghetto Biennale 2013 we rather walk the walk, where body language and made-up music instruments do the talk.” (2013) The artists are positioning their street party in opposition to other projects of the Ghetto Biennale which are relying on art making, workshops, or conversation. The term ‘art’ is here dissolved into a “creative impulse” where everyone is capable to freely participate without restraint. All potential hierarchies are dissolved into rhythmical movements of drunken and dancing bodies. The artists try to stage a collective, almost ritualistic experience that is supposed to bypass possible asymmetric relationships of power and they are offering instead a fictional harmonious space where everyone is “invited to show off and freak out” (2013). Art historian C.C. McKee reviewed the 4th Ghetto Biennale for artforum international. In his eyes, the strongest art performance was a joint dance performance of Haitian and U.S. American dancers Dasha Chapman, Yone Charles, Jean-Sebastien Duvilaire and Ann Mazzocca. The performance titled Activating Petwo’s Kinesthetic Imagination, similar to the aforementioned street party project, combined vodou dance aesthetics with modern dance and embodied, according to McKee, “the political potential of a relational approach to the Ghetto Biennale.” McKee goes on to explain that “[t]heir performance posited resistance as an assemblage that creates a new whole instead of maintaining divisions, whether national, spiritual, or ontological” (2016). Every Ghetto Biennale also comes with several rara9 group performances which are organized by Gordon and Eugène and lead all visitors dancing in traditional rara fashion through the streets of downtown Port-au-Prince. The biennale can at times appear as a spectacle, which feels very seductive, almost like a sequence of different parties and concert events. These projects help to produce an important surface of inter-klas happiness for the biennale. But performing equality is something else than being equal. I see a danger in these affirmative readings of these harmonious feel-good-

9

Elizabeth McAlister describes rara as a yearly Creole festival that offers the so-called peasant classes and the urban poor a rare option to assemble freely in public spaces and articulate political speeches disguised in coded performances, lyrics and vodou ritual. She describes “[r]ara as a public ritual through which poor Haitians in a range of locations remember history, create publicity, and negotiate power under conditions of insecurity” (McAlister 2002).

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performances which produce celebratory sentiments suggesting that the Ghetto Biennale is already doing enough to overcome klas barriers and hierarchies simply by allowing artists from different socio-economic milieus to inhabit the same space without conflict within a given timeframe. We will see in the following chapter that Haitian artists who are persistently critical about the organization and power structure of the event—and keep reminding committed visiting artists and curators directly and indirectly of these power imbalances—tend to leave the art event and the group Atis Rezistans. Inter-klas optimism produced by these performances stand in sharp contrast to many critical community voices. Harmonious feel-good-performances help visiting artists to be able to feel good again about their own privileged position in the current world order because they have done it: they successfully overcame the malaise of social barriers while dancing, drinking and eating together with a community living in poverty in the ‘Global South’. But harmonious performances of inter-klas togetherness risk silencing and camouflaging angry and frustrated community voices, which actively resist dependencies. The Ghetto Biennale as a spectacle of interklas togetherness conceals inequality and helps to increase the affective alienation of many local artists from the art event. Ahmed, following Marilyn Frye, argues that “[…] oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. [...] To be oppressed require you to show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. [...] If an oppressed person does not smile or show signs of being happy, then he or she is read as being negative: as angry, hostile, unhappy, and so on.” (Ahmed 2010b: 66)

What about the inter-klas conflicts, which do in fact occur? What about the anger and frustration the community wants to articulate? What about the dependencies and hierarchies, which remain intact? During the 4th Ghetto Biennale in 2015, one of those performance events ended tragically when a twenty-year old Haitian man got killed after a heated argument. The quiet contract of harmonious inter-klas togetherness was violently shattered for one night. The curatorial team organized a street concert for the closing party, where the well-known Haitian band RAM was set to play. During this concert, two Haitian men started a fight with each other and one of them, who was extended family to one of the Atis Rezistans’ artists, was deadly injured with a broken beer bottle. British artist and activist John Cussans, who has participated several times at the biennale over the last years, described his personal

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experience during this tragic concert night on his blog, where he comes to the following self-critical conclusion: “There is an unspoken understanding for those who have attended the biennale before, that a certain bloody mindedness about one’s health and overall well-being needs to be embraced if you are going to make the most of your time there. And partly because of that, distinguishing between perceived and actual risks can become a very fuzzy thing. A certain blue-eyed, inter-cultural idealism plays a part in this too. And when such idealism rubs up against a difficult-to-acknowledge sense of dread, that one inevitably feels sometimes, it effects a kind of cognitive dissonance that makes it difficult to trust one’s own instincts. [...] I think that a certain sense of barely acknowledged First World guilt might be at the core of the peculiar moral-economic dissonance some people feel in Haiti, and especially at the Ghetto Biennale where, it is assumed, they are all artists, and as such, despite their undeniable economic and cultural differences, on some transcendent, utopian playing field. A particular existential confusion consequently tends to distort one’s emotional, economic and inter-personal perceptions in ways that effect the way we relate to and communicate with others. For me this is caused most obviously by the visible and tangible consequences of poverty contrasted to one’s own, suddenly undeniable, relative affluence (even if one is on a ‘limited budget’). The disparity between the wealth of the visitors and the needs of many people in the local communit—including many of the artist—can lead one to question whether one’s personal instincts for self-preservation and riskavoidance—like taking a cab—are simply the consequence of some cosetted, First-World privilege, that one should simply ‘get over’.” (Cussans 2016)

Sociologist Sarah Becklake (2019) describes as a principle of NGO volunteer tourism in Guatemala that social spaces have to be produced, marketed, and perceived as simultaneously risky and safe in order to attract the attention of committed volunteer workers. Gordon and the members of Atis Rezistans also produce an art event that subdues the perceived risk of visiting artists to an acceptable minimum but highlights at the same time the adventurous character of the art event. Visiting artists have to be capable of experiencing the Ghetto Biennale as risky but never to a degree that feels life-threatening. ‘Risky but safe’ environments enable the visiting artists (1) to earn symbolic capital through their mere participation in this curated social situation and (2) alleviate their cultural anhedonia through social spaces which are perceived as socio-economically, culturally, and racially different. Thus, hospitality and attentiveness by many members of Atis Rezistans is also required for visiting artists to be able to affectively experience the Ghetto Biennale as a ‘safe but risky’ environment. Gordon’s combination of the term ‘ghetto’ with the term ‘biennale’ in the title of the art event em-

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bodies poignantly Becklake’s ‘risky but safe’ paradigm, and it constantly reproduces a volunteer-touristic desire in participating artists. Experiencing a risky environment can be seen as the ultimate mechanism to affectively legitimize a stay in the Gran Ri neighborhood as being different from a touristic experience. Becklake also describes how white bodies in Guatemala are often helping other white bodies to feel comfortable in a social environment experienced as foreign: “Westerners in Guatemala also become, at least partially, imagined as known and trusted by other Westerners and, thus, the large number of Westerners in Antigua makes it a little more ‘familiar’ and thus seem a little less ‘risky’; […] ‘American body’ acts as ‘living proof’ that Americans can go to Guatemala and survive.” (2019: 6) Thus, the Ghetto Biennale is an important mechanism to increase the art tourism in the area, because the art event proves again and again through gatherings of white bodies in a Black, classed environment that people from a klas piwo a can indeed safely enter the area to engage with the local community without any life-threatening risks. Cussans mentions how the organizers of the Ghetto Biennale quickly assured the participants by email that the episode of violence was indeed only an episode without any direct concern for the biennale’s guests: “It is with regret that we inform you that there was a fatality that occurred during the start of the RAM gig last night. The man that died was called Gerard Masalen aka Jery. He was not a member of Atis Rezistans but I have heard that he was extended family of some people in the neighbourhood. We have heard that this killing was neither a political act or anything that directly concerns the Ghetto Biennale but was an act of jealously that was fueled by drink and the intensity of the moment.” (2016)

The risky but safe paradigm for the art event becomes quickly re-established. This short episode of factual violence will perhaps be integrated into future heroic narratives which may, in turn, help to ‘authenticate’ the art event as an artistic anti-touristic volunteer experience in years to come and help to increase the symbolic capital non-Haitian artists can acquire through their heroic and brave participation.

3.5 DESKILLING AS A RESPONSE TO ANTI-EUROCENTRIC BENEVOLENCE Art projects anchored in feel-good-politics make it sound very easy to work in the neighborhood, but I see these performances of inter-klas harmony also as a direct emotional coping mechanism that confirms that the neighborhood is in-

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deed an emotionally challenging area for many visitors to work in. Many art projects seem to imply that the local people participating in these projects are fragile and naïve creatures, constantly at risk of being exploited, victimized and without any own defense mechanisms. I remember how I was once asked to explain my Ph.D. research to a group of white U.S. American tourists and NGO workers sitting at a restaurant table in the Hotel Oloffson. I quickly described my argument that we should not get swept away by our own romanticized understanding of art as a mechanism to community empowerment, that many Gran Ri artists are using art in a pragmatic sales-oriented way, and that art at Gran Ri can also be seen as an auto-orientalistic response to our collective white neo-primitivizing gaze and desire. I argued that visibility through art unfortunately does not always produce a desired effect of upward mobility. After seven months doing research, I was tired to counter again and again the exactly same pattern of a romanticized, neo-primitivist enthusiasm and I promptly, maybe even rudely and surely cynically, got out of the conversation to enjoy my evening with my friends after I saw the angry and discontent reactions arising in my interlocutors after I finished my pessimistic speech. A day later, I received a hand-written letter by one person at the table who accused me of selfishly using the Gran Ri artists and their art for my own insidious, selfish agenda. The person wrote in the letter, “What set [us] off was not just that you appear to be exploiting Atis Rezistans for your Ph.D., but that you will add to the suffering of those who are already suffering. I understand that the point of art criticism is to point to the critic himself, while an art advocate disappears behind the art he loves. I hope that you will eventually find artworks that you can love and advocate, work that is more precious than any authority you could construct around it. Unfortunately, the white paper on which you will print your thesis may be the most insidious, pale voice to invade the Grande Rue.”

I often experienced dynamics like these during my research and encountered how quickly I could become the ‘persecutor’ of the ‘unfortunate’ urban poor if I did not go down the well-established road of optimistic ‘Atis Rezistans enthusiasm’. We saw above that the experience of abject poverty produces politics of pity as a coping mechanism that freezes all social inter-klas relationships into a stiff over-correctness that makes any form of critical dialogue and engagement between both social milieus nearly impossible, if it does not celebrate the Gran Ri artists and their artworks unapologetically as an exciting form of artistic empowerment from below. Art criticism in this context becomes unthinkable although some of the artworks presented in the area may indeed be mediocre, casually

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produced, or without any intention of being perceived as outstandingly artistic. I am aware how harsh this statement must sound. But, let me explain further: within politics of pity every work of art produced in the Gran Ri neighborhood needs to be described as an exciting medium of revolutionary community empowerment. Thus, it is not surprising that the term quality is highly contested in the ideological field of socially-engaged art, where a collective experience of harmonious inter-klas togetherness is favorably evoked. Bishop argues, that “[quality is] rejected by many politicized artists and curators as serving the interests of the market and powerful elites, ‘quality’ has been further marred by its association with connoisseurial art history. More radical options have tended to advocate a confusion of high/low boundaries or to prioritise other terms.” (2012: 7-8) This non-critical perspective and the renunciation of quality, authorship, and authority makes it necessary to assess all artworks produced at Gran Ri as equally important and without critical judgment, which supposedly represents the insidious voice of the ‘class oppressor’. Artists, amateurs, and beginners are all valued and supported in the same generous way as full-fledged outstanding artists. Many artistic techniques offered by Atis Rezistans are easy and quick to be learned. I saw during my research on many occasions that the arriving visitors have low standards for art pieces produced in the area. Every kind of art object presented to them by locals tends to be perceived as exciting. This non-critical paternalistic attitude, which functions in a declarative logic of anti-Eurocentric benevolence, evokes the handling of children’s paintings which are always celebrated as successful achievements irrespective of their quality (or lack thereof). A common local artistic technique is to cut a figure with a razor blade from car tire and to nail this figure on a wooden board. These art pieces which have flooded the whole area since 2009 have been repeatedly labeled as timoun (children) artworks by visitors during my research, although many of these pieces are created by artists in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Cussans highlights the importance of non-critical engagement with art to overcome ‘bourgeois’ controlled supervisory bodies for the contemporary arts: “It’s not that I don’t recognize that some artists may have a keener aptitude for creating and innovating within certain media than others, that they may be more productive, experienced and consistent. It’s the way the idea reflects and perpetuates a dominant bourgeois model of investment and value in the arts as a measure of artistic exceptionalism, a model which in turn serves the interests of wealthy, cultured collectors. What is at stake here, as it is in other global art worlds, are the gate-keeping roles that those with property and wealth exercise over those without. [...] Bourgeois constructions of excellence within the

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visual arts perpetually make distinctions between those artists with exceptional talent (and the ambition to mobilize it) and those with only moderate ones and lacking in ambition. […] The attitude tends to encourage a culture of competitive contest, which, when imposed from above, can insinuate itself into the communities in which the artists live and work. I accept that there is a playful and communally valuable dimension to creative competition, but my concern is that emphasizing the idea of winners and losers in the long game can amplify latent divisions between individuals in the community and fracture what makes the work of the rue so vital: the fluid, systemic cooperation between individuals in the creation of singular works, that are also parts of a collective community vision. Such divisions have already led to fractures between members of Atis Rezistans in the past.” (2012)

Cussans’ description seems to suggest that Atis Rezistans had lived in collective harmony before a foreign influence created fractures, conflict, and harmful individuality among members of the group. Therefore, the Haitian artists had to be protected and shielded from hierarchical mechanisms of power in the visual arts to be able to remain part of an ‘authentic’ “collective community vision”. Cussan’s expressions “fluid, systematic collabortion” and “collective community vision” ignore local infrastructures of power in the production of art and gloss over that Eugène and Celeur, for example, employ workers for their art productions (cf. chapter four). Thus, discussions about quality are barely of any concern and this generous all-embracing benevolence shifts the focus from the art piece to the sphere of social relationships. The friendliest and most helpful inhabitants of the neighborhood often will achieve the most generous support by the visiting artists regardless of the quality of their art production. The Ghetto Biennale became a large open market of possibilities were every inhabitant is now able to present himself or herself as an artist who can offer help, participation, and an artistic product to the visiting artists. It created a unique space of an extremely democratized understanding of art productions in which everybody is able to participate, evoking Joseph Beuys’ famous Erweiterter Kunstbegriff: ‘everyone is an artist’. But this romantic projection oversees that some artists in the neighborhood take their artistic careers more seriously than others and work on a daily basis to improve their sculptures and assemblages to achieve an artistic career. Many of these artists directly articulate their wish for critical evaluation by visitors and they clearly understand that politics of pity are the reason for this generous, but ultimately dishonest and paternalistic benevolence:

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“The problem is that when you visit our galleries you see the entire community, you see poverty, you see misery and you don’t want to hurt people with your critical opinion about the art pieces. But that's not it, you cannot judge art pieces like this. Art pieces are not poverty. The object is not our poverty. If you buy the art because you have mercy or you feel like helping. This will not create any value for my art. […] Why don't you just give the artist a check instead, ‘I think you need it’. You know, some artists like me would feel a lot prouder if he receives money because someone sincerely likes what we are doing.”

Many Haitian curators and art professionals mentioned in conversations with me that the standard of art objects produced in the neighborhood has decreased noticeably since the foundation of the Ghetto Biennale in 2009.10 Inhabitants living in the neighborhood recognized the same loss in quality. One interlocutor from the neighborhood explained to me: “According to me, the artworks used to be a lot stronger than they are now because now too many people are working here. In the past there was strength in these sculptures that attracted you. When you were passing by you saw the artworks and you were instantly drawn to them. But now, not anymore, maybe because everybody is doing any kind of work. I don't feel a similar kind of attraction to the art any longer.”

The benevolent attitude led to a new de-skilled11 artistic practice that is lowering the emic quality standards for art produced in the neighborhood. Everyone seems to see and discuss this change in artistic quality besides visiting foreigners. More and more ‘amateur’ artists emerge, who only produce occasionally for particular occasions such as the Ghetto Biennales. But these new ‘amateur artists’ or ‘art-

10 It is significant to mention here that the Ghetto Biennale also opened the door for new artistic techniques and media in the artist group. Younger artists have been encouraged to experiment with video art (Tele Geto) and photography by visiting artist participating in the Ghetto Biennale but also by Haitian video artist Maksaens Denis who worked with Atis Rezistans since the early 2000 years. Technical equipment for video art and photography has been donated. It is difficult to keep this artistic practice in the neighborhood alive because technical equipment for these media is expensive. Although the artists are keen to keep on working in new media, laptops and cameras are unfortunately not sustainable and are too expensive to get easily replaced. This makes these new art forms particularly dependent to charity of visiting artists from a klas piwo a. 11 I use the term deskilling here rather loosely and not in its art historical sense related to the deskilling processes in avant-garde art in the early twentieth century.

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ists for occasion’ are not treated differently from artists in the neighborhood who take their profession seriously and work on a daily basis to improve their artistic practices and professionalize their group. Many local interlocutors responded downright with annoyance and frustration, as soon as I mentioned the new situation: “I’m very happy that you have noticed that development too. So I don’t have to tell you about it. Yes, it is true. And it really bothers me. Many of them say they are artist but they are not. It really bothers me when we are gathering as a group and I see that they will be there too. And they always try to say something even before the older generation. Often they have no idea what they are talking about. They are no artists. I don’t have any problems with them personally but it is about professionalism. […] Some of them find the possibility to travel although I work a lot longer as an artist than they do. I’m getting insecure because of it and I ask myself if there is maybe a problem with the art I create?”

The new emerging generation of artists also often does not learn the same carving skills as the first generation did. Eugène, Celeur and others started their careers by working for Caribbean tourist economies and both are fantastically skilled craftsmen who are able to produce ‘anatomically correct’ eskilti klasik (classical sculptures). The overall benevolent and paternalistic attitude that has emerged with the socially-engaged art at the Ghetto Biennale, including rejections of authorship, authority, quality standards etc., opened the door for the development of the logic of jineterismo because it taught the Haitian artists that not the quality of your artistic practice but patronage through a klas piwo a will decide if you are considered an artist worth collaborating with and hence find the sponsorship to travel to the United States and Europe. The first Haitian supporters of Atis Rezistans, alongside Prézeau Stephenson and Benjamin, clearly concentrated on the sculptural productions and the art historical value of the group. Especially Benjamin’s critical evaluation of the art pieces and motivating conversations with him are often quoted as important creative impulses by the artists. Art as a socially-engaged practice during the Ghetto Biennale has artificially lowered the emic standards for art produced in the urban neighborhood since 2009, precisely by ‘democratizing’ art as an all-embracing “creative revolutionary impulse” and an all-inclusive community vision. But who can afford to stay an amateur?

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Fig. 21: Two eskilti klasik by André Eugène created in the early 1990s

Bishop argued that quality judgments are necessary but “not as a means to reinforce elite culture and police the boundaries of art and non-art, but as a way to understand and clarify our shared values at a given historical moment” (2012: 78). I see the tendency towards a generous tolerance celebrating every art object produced in the neighborhood as leading into repression in the sense of Herbert Marcuse’s use of the term, where an ideology of tolerance fosters systems of oppression and ultimately fortifies the discursive authority and connoisseurship of white curators and scholars on Haitian art. Marcuse’s concept of “repressive tolerance” (1969) is a leftist critique against pluralism in industrial societies, which he describes as a manifestation of tolerance serving and fortifying the cause of oppression. Although Marcuse speaks about a wider political context, a similar ideology of tolerance seems to be at play when it comes to relationships produced at the Ghetto Biennale. Marcuse argues that

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“[t]olerance is turned from an active into a passive state, from practice to non-practice: laissez faire the constituted authorities. It is the people who tolerate the government, which in turn tolerates opposition within the framework determined by the constituted authorities. Tolerance toward that which is radically evil now appears as good because it serves the cohesion of the whole on the road to affluence or more affluence.” (1969)

He argues against an “equality of tolerance [which] becomes abstract, spurious” (1969) which can only be justified in harmless debates, conversations, and in academic discussions. Marcuse counters the idea that tolerance is already institutionalized in society. “One might in theory construct a state in which a multitude of different pressures, interests, and authorities balance each other out and result in a truly general and rational interest. However, such a construction badly fits a society in which powers are and remain unequal and even increase their unequal weight when they run their own course.” (1969) The participants at the Ghetto Biennale miss to ask a significant question: What are the categories Haitian artists have developed to valorize and critique their own art productions? Instead of discussing these existing categories for the valorization of art produced in the neighborhood, their non-critical perspective undermines and ignores the hard work of local artists who constantly try to improve and professionalize their own artistic practices to establish careers in the globalized art world. Many members of Atis Rezistans try to stand out from the rest through an improvement of their artistic achievements. Bishop also pointed out that this de-hierarchizing perspective that tries to eliminate all authority in the visual arts runs the risk not only of assuming that low-income participants are already in a position of complete impotence, but also of further reinforcing this arrangement: “This insight can be extended to the argument that high culture, as found in art galleries, is produced for and on behalf of the ruling classes, by contrast, ‘the people’ (the marginalized, the excluded) can only be emancipated by direct inclusion in the production of the work. This argument - which also underlies arts funding agendas influenced by policies of social inclusion – assumes that the poor can only engage physically, while the middle classes have the leisure to think and critically reflect. The effect of this argument is to reinstate the prejudice by which working-class activity is restricted to manual labor. […] To argue, in the manner of funding bodies and the advocates of collaborative art alike, that social participation is particularly suited to the task of social inclusion risks not only assuming that participants are already in a position of impotence, it even reinforces this arrangement.” (2012: 38)

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Only visiting artists at the Ghetto Biennale seem to be considered capable to reflect critically about art productions. I mentioned earlier already that a central term used to describe artworks at the Ghetto Biennale is collaborative. But collaboration at the art event often literally means that the Haitian artists offer helpful assistance for art projects brought from visiting artists and become travel guides for their stay in Port-au-Prince. They are mostly helping to translate and realize the visiting artist’s creative intellectual vision. Independent curator Myriam Vanneschi observed the same friction: “Yet the inequality between local and visiting artists became painfully clear. Haitians sometimes plainly preferred to work for somebody instead of collaborating with another artist.” (2013) Thus, the Ghetto Biennale contradicts Freire’s first principle of dialogical engagement with communities. One of Freire’s central arguments is that an educational program “cannot presents its own program but must search for this program dialogically with the people, it serves to introduce the pedagogy of the oppressed, in the elaboration of which the oppressed must participate” (1972: 118). And he goes on to explain: “Pedagogy which begins with the egoistic interests of the oppressors (an egoism cloaked in the false generosity of paternalism) and makes of the oppressed the objects of its humanitarianism, itself maintains and embodies oppression. It is an instrument of dehumanization. This is why, as we affirmed earlier, the pedagogy of the oppressed cannot be developed or practiced by the oppressors. It would be a contradiction in terms if the oppressors not only defended but actually implemented a liberating education.” (ibid.: 39)

Gordon and her curatorial team centrally monitor applications from visiting artists during the Ghetto Biennale without asking the members of Atis Rezistans for help or insight to select which project could be useful or interesting for the community. The local artists are often physically (or affectively) working for the visiting artists and participate with their bodies in performances, while the visiting artists contribute the intellectual input and conceptual framework of art projects and the biennale in general. Co-curator of the first three installments, Celeur, called himself repeatedly in our conversations komisè zonbi (zombie curator) to describe his status of non-involvement in the organization of the event. Although Gordon appointed him curator for the first three installments, according to him, he never had any direct say in the creative decisions made for the art event and his appointment was in his eyes a hollow lip service to the marketed community aspect of the art event. Gordon, Cussans, and others seem to intend to produce art spaces where the Haitian artists are able to express themselves freely without boujwa or ‘Eurocentric’ restraints but without asking which cate-

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gories from the community could be used to produce decolonial spaces. White mediators remain in the position of power and ironically take on the task to define what anti-boujwa and anti-authoritarian art spaces of de-colonial resistance should look like for Black subjects. We saw already earlier, that in the end, white curators and visiting artists remain in a position to police the artworks through their connoisseurship, quality check, and final object selection as soon as the art objects travel to art institutions in the ‘West’. Many members of Atis Rezistans explained to me that they see as the biggest shortcoming of their group the lack of organizational structures, professionalization, and also proper language skills to communicate with visitors from the United States and Europe. Many Haitian artists repeatedly asked me during my research in Port-au-Prince why the organizers of the Ghetto Biennale do not offer them English classes, which would better equip them to communicate with visitors who are dominantly based in the United States and Europe and who seldom speak Haitian Kreyòl. The 4th Ghetto Biennale in 2015 set out to celebrate Haitian Kreyòl as a form of ‘subaltern’ empowerment: “The language of Kreyòl, which was born in the colonial plantations, began as a basic and rough method of linguistic communication between the culturally and geographically diverse populations of the colony. After the slaves revolt Kreyòl became a language of resistance and retreat from the metropolitan state, which continued to use French as the lingua franca of power and capital in Haiti.” (Gordon 2017)

Although I am very sympathetic to an approach that fosters the importance of Kreyòl in Haitian society, the reality at the Ghetto Biennale showed in the past that speaking English has remained one of the biggest career advantages for local artists. A group of young Atis Rezistans artists felt the need to balance out this disadvantage of not being able to communicate with visiting artists by teaching themselves English and French during the last years. They explained this decision as follows: “No, I tell you why I am not frustrated with the Ghetto Biennale because I am smart enough to understand how the system works and adapt myself to it. […] I hear a lot of frustration within the group. [Two younger artists] found recently a new opportunity to participate in an exhibition abroad. Other people were talking and they said behind their backs, ‘why not me? I work a lot longer as an artist than they have’. These artists have to understand that nobody created that opportunity for them. They were smart enough to do it alone. We are also artists but what we understood is that language is very important and very central for the Western system. This system is Anglophone! So we started to study

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English and French. They have to understand what is really important and take action. They have to be smart and see how the system works.”

This new skill enabled young artists to quickly establish good social networks with visiting artists from abroad and also helped them to improve their hierarchical position within the group. This example shows how artists have to undercut systematically the rhetorical romanticism of the overall event to be able to profit from it in the best possible way. In this sense, English, the language of their ‘persecutors’ as it were, becomes the language of resistance for the young Haitian artists. English-critical, anti-Eurocentric perspectives ironically help to recenter white cultural brokers like curators, artist, and scholars in leading positions as discursive authorities because they are still needed to translate and mediate in intersectional contexts (e.g. museum exhibitions) instead of enabling the artists to speak for themselves.

3.6 COMMUNITY ANTAGONISM Most inhabitants see it as a very positive development that blan increasingly enter the area to visit the artist’s ateliers. One of the first questions I asked during my research was if they are not afraid to become objects of a voyeuristic tourist gaze that is solely fascinated by the experience of poverty? Aren’t they afraid that the foreign visitors invade their sphere of personal privacy for a voyeuristic longing for the racialized Other? Most inhabitants reacted with a lack of understanding for my moral concern and even with suspicion why I repeatedly brought up these discussions about poverty, race, and power. They explained to me that I had to understand that there is anyhow barely any privacy for anybody living in a bidonvil. They do not feel offended when visitors enter the area to walk around and visit the artist’s ateliers and museums, because these visitors only move in public spaces and do not enter unasked into their private houses. To the contrary, many people seem to agree that blan are a very positive sign for a potential socio-economic development of the informal neighborhood. When I asked one of my interlocutors if he had ever had negative experiences with visitors he was leading through the neighborhood, he responded: “Oh yes, I used to be shocked in the beginning when I started my tours with visitors. But not by the reactions of the foreigners visiting our area. But by the people who are living here. Sometimes when we are guiding foreigners through the neighborhood, having contact with foreigners is not something they have very often and they are not used to it. Sometimes they are very surprised to see them and they are standing in a line and staring

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at them. I believe that they often seem to see themselves as less human compared to these white foreigners. This situation makes me extremely sad.”

This description reveals a sad reality about the persisting brutal dynamics of power that exist between visitors and locals in Haiti. Privileged, mostly white bodies from abroad are put on a pedestal, which is constructed through selfnegation, and an internalized colonial imagination of these white bodies tied to wealth, education, and beauty. The celebratory rhetoric of ‘subaltern’ empowerment in art projects disguises this persisting colonial legacy. Other people in the neighborhood explained to me that they consider lighter skinned people to be simply more beautiful: “Have a look at my little brother. He is so ugly because he is so black. My sister on the other hand is more beautiful because the color of her skin is just like yours. My own skin is normally lighter. Don’t forget, I am only tanned at the moment.” Another artist who used to do small guided tours through the neighborhood also told me that his negative experiences came mostly from locals: “The only harsh comment that we used to hear [...] was that people often argued that a lot of white people are coming into our neighborhood but they don't leave any money for the community. People were getting so used to see foreigners walking by that they stopped saying it.” Although they do not have problems with visitors coming to see the neighborhood, I experienced several times during my fieldwork that people actually were getting very upset as soon as blan use their cameras without asking for permission to do so. Many inhabitants do not feel as comfortable with the situation as members of Atis Rezistans seem to imply. One of the artists explained this reaction: “Yes, taking photos in this neighborhood is a big problem. Because sometimes Haitians, most of us, we are thinking when we see foreigners taking pictures, we think that they will earn a lot of money from these photos by selling them abroad. When we have visitors with us and they want to have pictures and the people in this neighborhood are getting upset here. We are poor and they are using our poverty to make money from it. Sometimes this situation is quite difficult for us.”

In contrast to uncritical voices, many long-term members of Atis Rezistanz do no longer share the same optimism and excitement triggered by the appearance of blan within the neighborhood and by harmonious inter-klas performances of socially-engaged art. Articulating criticism openly is of course a very difficult endeavor when you are highly depended on particular art institutions like the biennale. Many artists expressed pessimistic reactions about potential life-changing effects and about the development of the neighborhood through art. The first

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phase of excitement triggered by the seductiveness of new inter-klas encounters during the art event seems to gradually become frail. Some artists can profit from the new situation while others are left behind: “I have been part of Atis Rezistans since 2008 and I still cannot feed my own six children. I don’t understand what use does it have to be an artist if you still cannot support your own families from it? Sak vid pa kanpe! (An empty sack can’t stand up)” or “I work very hard every day with my own two hands to become a great artist like Celeur and to create better sculptures, but I still cannot buy something to eat in the evening.” Many artists have had to painfully realize during the last years that they remain poor and marginalized and that the poverty tourism in the area does not produce the desired upward social mobility and financial advantages. Many artists have accepted their dependency and are catering very directly to visitors for socio-economic benefits. But other members of Atis Rezistans do not want to have to rely on mechanisms of trickery, seduction, and the logic of jineterismo, and they communicated their anger and frustration that, in the end, the ones with the biggest career advantages are not the best artists of the group but those who navigate the feelings of more privileged social groups and help to produce progressive white identities. Although the Ghetto Biennale doubtless brings many fruitful new opportunities and global attention to the neighborhood, the art event became also a mechanism through which a group of Haitian artists living in poverty became capable of examining in close proximity the consequences of whiteness and privilege within the artistic milieu in comparison to their own artistic careers. Many local artists question who is benefitting from this art event that touts to be “the most radical art event in the last decade” (Gordon 2016) in curatorial self-descriptions. This frustration is articulated as anger and directed towards curators of the Ghetto Biennale who are understood as responsible for this situation. It is not surprising that especially Gordon as a white British woman is very visible in the Black urban community and her career is observed carefully and with skepticism by many critical eyes. Because of her committed engagement with the members of Atis Rezistans, Gordon could establish herself as a curator since 2009 and is able to travel around the world to participate in congresses about biennales or curate her own art exhibitions. Her success is very disproportional in comparison to the success of many Haitian artists within the group. Therefore, one member of Atis Rezistans formulated this situation boldly with the following statement: “Gordon’s career as a curator is based on us and the art we are producing here in this neighborhood. When you read her biography, you will realize she was almost nothing before working with us. She needed us more than we needed her. Gordon is only famous because of us.”

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The Ghetto Biennale is promoted as a community project and fruitful inter-klas collaboration, but critical community voices show that artists are challenging the idea of the Ghetto Biennale as successfully collaborative. Arlene Dávila describes in her study on the community museum El Museo del Barrio in New York City how the critical agency for artists who get involved with the museum is limited: “For one thing, the artists and cultural activists who are the most involved with museum activism are also often the most dependent on these spaces for exhibitions, consultancies, and representation, limiting their leeway to criticize them openly.” (2008: 130) Several members of Atis Rezistans started to call the event behind the curators’ backs “Leah-ak-Eugène-byenal” (The Leah and Eugene Biennale), because they question any direct benefits facilitated by the art event for their own careers. They also witnessed how, because of the biennale, Eugène could establish himself successfully as the leader of the group and managed to localize and centralize the formerly more dispersed poverty tourism in the area mainly to his own art museum. One of my interlocutors described the current situation for the artists with the metaphor of a sandwich: “Artists living in this neighborhood are trapped like a sandwich between Gordon and Eugène who represent the two pieces of bread that clamps all other artists tightly together.” The precarious living situation puts relationships under a lot of complicated pressure. The Haitian artists do not shy away to put their supportive network in a clear position of responsibility for their social situation. In 2013, a group of young Atis Rezistans artists destroyed their own exhibition space because they intended to tell their network of white supporters the made-up story that someone else came into the neighborhood and destroyed their art. They uploaded photos of the destruction on social media and planned to ask their supportive network for financial support to rebuild and repair their destroyed exhibition areas. Eugène found out about their scheme, stopped this plan from happening and even asked some of the involved people and their families to move away from the neighborhood. Although this incident is a crass example, it still shows that some members of Atis Rezistans are trying to use and manipulate the benevolent attitude and white saviorism of visiting artists strategically to their advantage. I described in this chapter that there is constant discord taking place in the ambit of the Ghetto Biennale between rhetoric renunciations of systems of domination in a declarative fashion and the actual reality produced at the level of the art event itself. Haitian artists have to learn “how the system works” in order to undermine benevolent anti-Eurocentric ideas and be able to take better advantage from the art event. What hides behind anti-Eurocentric benevolence is often a neo-primitivist desire to keep the Haitian artists in a state of fictional

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non-boujwa ‘authenticity’ and to generously resist processes of aggressive class assimilation. I showed in chapter two that art institutions located in Europe and the United States, which present the artworks of Atis Rezistans, often function within a logic of conditional hospitality. By inviting a group of visiting artists to come and work in an informal neighborhood, the Ghetto Biennale intends to reverse the logic of conditional hospitality by helping Eugène and his Atis Rezistans to become the hosts of their own international art event. But an underlying institutional logic persists and expresses itself in inter-klas relationships produced by the art event. Visiting artists, curators, and scholars from a klas piwo a remain often the hosts of the discourse and legitimize and valorize Haitian art through their generous recognition and attention. The group of visitors are also closely policing the process of ‘subaltern’ decolonial empowerment, and they remain in the position of power to define under which conditions artists from lower socio-economic strata are deemed capable of empowering themselves. I also intended to show in this chapter why the mechanisms of feel-good-politics have become the dominant framework for many art projects taking place at the biennale. Harmonious feel-good-politics are an affective coping mechanism for visiting artists to overcome their own position of guilt and shame produced by politics of pity, which emerge through direct encounters of privilege with social marginality. Audre Lorde sees the sentiment of guilt in inter-racial conflicts as a blanket that deflects sincere debates about inequality and power imbalances and as a defensive mechanism that protects ignorance: “Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness...I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you.” (Lorde 2007: 130)

Ahmed similarly describes guilt as a “form of self-centeredness, which returns the white subject ‘back to’ itself as the one whose feeling matter. Guilt can be a way of performing rather than undoing whiteness. Guilt certainly works as a ‘block’ to hearing the claims of others as it ‘returns’ to the white self” (2012: 169). Thus, the actual gesture of generosity, which gave the title to my chapter, lies in the willingness of local artists to hide inter-klas conflicts, which would remind the visiting artistic milieu of the persisting inter-klas differences and ten-

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sions they set out to overcome. In brief, if local artists do not want to destabilize their new social relationships and inter-klas loyalties, they have to make visiting artists feel accomplished in their committed artistic endeavors and enable their affective position of feeling guilty. Artists who can profit most from this art event are those who avoid turning the celebratory optimism of visiting artists against them by showing their frustration and anger openly; instead, they need to go along with the hierarchical situation of inter-klas dependency. In analyzing the politics of emotions that take shape during the art event, we have seen in this chapter that leaving physical art institutions behind does not change the larger institutional logic, nor the racialized common sense of our hearts and minds as they manifest in concrete social interaction. Haitian artists can profit most from the art event if they learn how to manage visiting artists’ politics of pity for their own benefit through a kind of “emotional labor” (Hochschild 1983). In a sense, they need to help visiting artists in feeling heroic, accomplished, giving, and tender-hearted during their stay in Port-au-Prince. As I have sought to demonstrate, art performances in particular can become a technology of deflection that shifts attention away from social disparities, and power imbalances. By positioning a group of Haitian artists, voluntarily and involuntarily, as available for visiting artists, and by managing their affective economies through emotional labor, this art event reproduces a long-standing colonial history of power that illustrates Wekker’s racialized common sense. This is the progressive racism that underlies the social structure of the biennale. The biennale is often complicit in a process that recreates a social environment mirroring Saidiya Hartman’s description of reproductive work in inter-racial relationships as a means to nurture the “psychic life of whiteness” (2020). She writes, “Not just reproductive labor in the terms of maintaining and aiding white families so that they might survive and thrive, but the reproductive work that nurtures and supports the psychic life of whiteness: that shores up the inviolability, security, happiness and sovereignty of that master subject, of man.” (2020)

Gordon emphasized in many of our conversations that her project should not be confused with an NGO but is mainly an art project. It is contradictory, however, that on the one hand she describes herself at the forefront of a ‘progressive’ social mobility movement and uses a nearly ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric to describe her work with the Haitian artists but, on the other hand, disavows comparisons to projects from the social, humanitarian sphere. She makes sure to immunize herself against a critical evaluation of the Ghetto Biennale as a social project. Bishop (2012) argues that this strategy is common in socially-engaged art projects

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which tend to return to contemporary art as a point of reference, despite the fact that they acquire large part of their social capital by being perceived as ‘nonartistic’ and rooted in a direct vicinity to social activism. Art remains here in a state of utopian potentiality and thus ‘radically useless.’ One of the biggest downfalls for socially-engaged art projects, according to British curator and writer Morgan Quaintance (2015), is that these art projects indeed feel the need to become useful, stop to resist quantifications and therefore lose their utopian, critical approach; for Quaintance, the most radical quality of art in cultures dominated by profit and loss lies in the renunciation of all direct use-value. When the architect collective Assemble won the British Turner Prize in 2015, Quaintance responded in an article: “The fact is [the] ‘useful’ model, and the judges privileging of utility over criticality, is a boon to the current Conservative government. Because at a time in the year when the British public, or at least British mainstream media attention is most focused on contemporary art, the field (that is a critically engaged discipline that challenges normative ideologies and creates contexts for challenges to state power) has effectively stuck two fingers up at itself. In the current national climate where public subsidy for the arts is being ruthlessly cut, where higher education for arts and the humanities is being turned into a business, and where artists and institutions are under pressure to make the economic case for art, it will undoubtedly send damaging ripples through the art world. How difficult will it be to make the case for projects, exhibitions and initiatives that resist quantification, challenge state power and provoke more questions than they do provide answers, now that policy makers will be able to point to the Turner Prize and cite contemporary art’s disenchantment with its own open-ended nature?” (2015)

Quaintance points out the danger that the rhetoric of use value can be deployed to close down the progressive nature of contemporary art by conservative governments altogether. Thompson similarly argues that “[t]he dream of not being utilitarian is a courageous and exciting ambition that should not be squashed” (2015: 40). But this particular utopian anti-capitalist understanding of art can only be maintained as long as the community of interest for socially-engaged art projects is not brought into the debate as an active discussant. Marginalized communities do not have the neoliberal luxury to celebrate performatively utopian idealism as radically useless but sometimes need pragmatic solutions for potentially life-threatening problems, which can occur in constant states of social insecurity. They often ask very directly for financial help and are not looking for a vague utopian dream of harmonious inter-klas togetherness.

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Cuban conceptual artist Tania Bruguera (2012) therefore directly counters utopian understandings of socially-engaged art with her practice-oriented term arte ùtil (useful art). She tries to develop socially-engaged art as a functional form that has to be feasible and practical: “The sense of Arte Ùtil is to imagine, create, develop and implement something that produced in artistic practice, offers the people a clearly beneficial result. [...] Arte Ùtil goes from the state of proposal to that of application in reality. […] For Arte Ùtil, failure is not a possibility. If the project fails, it is not Arte Ùtil.” (2012) In Bruguera’s view, socially-engaged art needs to leave its unclear intermediate position of remaining in a state of proposal and it needs to transforms itself into a feasible social practice that cannot stop short at declarative utopian gestures but must be functional and successfully implemented to profit the community it concerns. If socially-engaged artists intend to produce new communities, then we need to develop tools that produce ‘safer spaces’ for those communities and shift the focus of scholarly attention from socially-engaged artists to communities participating in these projects. We need to enable communities to articulate their critical opinions and to integrate them into evaluation processes of socially-engaged art projects. Thus, I am proposing here community antagonism as a principle for socially-engaged art projects following Bruguera’s approach: it should be in the hands of members of a community to decide what kind of impact—useful, utopian or antagonistic— artistic projects should have on their own communities. The Ghetto Biennale is ultimately a transitory experience as visiting artists and curators will leave again after a short time. This short timeframe was critiqued by many members of Atis Rezistans during my research. I showed in this chapter how the Ghetto Biennale often functions according to a logic of touristic spectacle, which relies on converting poverty and insecurity into pleasure and consumable adventure for artists who want to escape for a week or two the fatigue of an art world experienced as toothless. Many members of Atis Rezistans argue that it should be obligatory for participating artists to stay for a longer time because otherwise the whole endeavor is likely to become a quick ‘slum vacation’ where visiting artists are parachuted in and out. The Ghetto Biennale does not need to function within a transitory, touristic logic. It could, for example, be transformed into a long-term residency that enables a small group of visiting artists to work with local artists to discuss the shared values an intersectional community space could possibly articulate and develop. If community is indeed the objective for the art event, then what constitutes, sustains, and disrupts a community has to be discussed in an open, meaningful and feasible way. The discussion has to take differences and conflicts of the communities’ individual components into account and find better ways to listen to those critical voices who re-

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ject inter-klas dependencies. Many visiting artists and curators fail to listen in a self-critical manner—or, more precisely, only selectively hear what they want to. However, it is precisely by dwelling in moments and feelings of discomfort and irritation that the persistence and complicity of privilege in situations of good intentions and targeted change could be unveiled. I also demonstrated in the chapter that the members of Atis Rezistans art not mute ‘subalterns’ in danger of being constantly further marginalized by powerful artistic actors from a klas piwo a. Many members are capable of actively deploying their own agency by negotiating politics of pity for their own useful ends and by translating the Ghetto Biennale into a form of ‘popular resistance’ that can be described as following a logic of jineterismo. This term should be understood as a clever survival mechanism. But it is also important to keep in mind that many Atis Rezistans artists also refuse this logic, as they are aware of the unbalanced hierarchical situation of power that comes with it and feel frustrated by persisting dynamics of inter-klas dependency. Performances of affirmation are helping to produce a surface of a happy institution of the biennale instead of articulating shortcomings of the art event. We will see in the following chapter that preserving the idea of the institution as happy involves an active turning away from those community voices who might compromise the aim of ‘getting along’ as they remind visiting artists of their ontological complicity with whiteness, klas privilege, and nationality. I am also questioning if this community dialogue really needs to take place exclusively within the physical space of an informal neighborhood because the location tightly links the bodies of Haitian artists to socio-economic insecurity and constantly seems to re-evoke a politics of pity. Longstanding racist and classist power relations cannot be easily diminished by a transitional art event. But the conflicts, contradictions, and shortcomings of the Ghetto Biennale need neither prevent us from communicating with the urban poor, nor from engaging critically, artistically, intellectually, and emotionally with them and their critical opinions. On the contrary, the biggest strength of this biennale project is, in my eyes, indeed the production of a social space where inter-klas tension and conflict become possible.

4

Between Harmony and Anger: Exhibition Spaces by Eugène, Guyodo, Getho, and Papa Da “If I speak with you in anger, at least I have spoken to you.” Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1984

While the visiting artists at the Ghetto Biennale are trying to democratize artistic productions in the neighborhood and aim to establish anti-authoritarian community bonds, the founding members of Atis Rezistans are busy building walls— literally—within the neighborhood as they compete for capital, power, and global recognition. Several times, I witnessed Celeur arguing furiously with Eugène and Gordon about the current state of the group. Celeur’s anger about this situation and power imbalance within the group finally led to him parting ways with Atis Rezistans in 2014. Celeur also refused to speak with me in the first month of my research. He argued that, in the end, I would write whatever I like, and that his opinion would not carry any weight in comparison to mine. So why should we even bother wasting our time speaking to each other? The last sixteen years of his international career including group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and the Caribbean region made Celeur aware of the persisting, often brutal dynamics of power between a white European researcher and a Black artist living in a bidonvil in Haiti. His former student Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo shares a similar anger. He has left Atis Rezistans already in 2009 and discusses his anger boldly, and in unambiguous terms, with visitors entering his exhibition space Atelier Timoun Klere to see his artworks. Following Audre Lorde, I understand angriness and conflict as important mechanisms to counter inequalities and systems of domination (Lorde 1984: 130). Some of my interlocutors among the Gran Ri artists resist dependencies and affirmative readings of the Ghetto Biennale as a successful inter-klas com-

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munity project through their anger. These critical voices are often silenced because the anger they articulate makes them “affect aliens” (Ahmed 2010a: 30) to the happiness, excitement, and heroic entitlement which, as we saw in chapter three, the Ghetto Biennale often produces within its visiting milieu of art professionals. Ahmed coined the term affect alien in order to describe how causes for happiness in society are socially bound. Affects are contagious and produce shared identities. Those who do not identify with these particular means of happiness and reproduce its line are read as the cause of unhappiness (Ahmed 2010a: 30). Thus, the anger of artists like Celeur and Guyodo is frequently not understood as a form of critical resistance against persisting privilege, whiteness, and inter-klas dependencies but instead trivialized and banalized as envy or bitterness about individual failure; this understanding deflects responsibility away from the situation of conflict. It is a challenging endeavor to produce a community project with members of communities who actively resist these efforts. No doubt, the Ghetto Biennale brings many fruitful new opportunities and global attention to the neighborhood. Yet the art event has also become a mechanism through which a group of Haitian artists is capable of examining in close proximity the consequences of privilege and whiteness within the artistic milieu in comparison to their own artistic careers. My own emotional response also revealed the hegemonic underpinnings of my own book project: after Celeur refused to speak to me, I reacted with annoyance and irritation. I had somehow expected him to be grateful for my generous gift of scholarly attention, offering him a platform for articulating his critical opinion. The self-image of my own project collapsed in this moment, as it became clear how I had produced myself as the hero of my own story: coming to the ‘Global South’ to help and to expect gratefulness in return. Again, this expectation of gratefulness is an aspect of what Ahmed has identified as progressive racism. In this moment my annoyance recentered myself as the one whose feelings truly mattered and also revealed my project to be a prolongation of an institutional logic of white legitimization. Thus, Celeur’s critique could not get through to me. It took me a while to ask the question, why this local community should perceive me as trustworthy in the first place? I was not able to see that the whiteness my own body represents could be seen as potentially threatening, powerful, and not as innocent as I believed it to be. Or in bell hooks words: “Socialized to believe the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in

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black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness.” (1997: 169)

Haitian artists are often trapped in the stereotypical position of the “angry black man/women”. Their anger is barely taken seriously, e.g. by being read as envy or bitterness, and thus stripped of critical political potential. Lorde adroitly reminds us that angriness is an appropriate sentiment to counter inequality and racism: “It is not the anger [...] that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, [...] to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. […] No tools where developed to deal with other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt.” (1984: 130)

It is hence necessary to develop tools for listening to anger and frustration instead of avoiding, deflecting, or fleeing from it “under a blanket of guilt” (ibid.) that often expresses itself in feel-good-politics. Sianne Ngai (2005) also recuperates the critical potential of the emotion envy. She describes how envy is commonly treated as an emotion describing a subject that lacks something, rather than the subject’s affective response to a perceived inequality that reveals social injustice. “Unlike anger, another affective support of oppositional consciousness with the capacity to become ‘a legitimate weapon in social reform’ […], envy lacks cultural recognition as a valid mode of publicly recognizing or responding to social disparities, even though it remains the only agonistic emotion defined as having a perceived inequality as its object. […] Hence, once it enters a public domain of signification, a person’s envy will always seem unjustified, frustrated, and effete – regardless of whether the relation it points to its imaginary or not.” (ibid.: 128-129)

She goes on to explain that “moralized and uglified to such an extent that it becomes shameful to the subject who experiences it, envy also becomes stripped of its potential critical agency—as an ability to recognize, and antagonistically respond to, potentially real and institutionalized forms of inequality” (ibid.: 129). Against this background, I argue that harmonious performances of inter-klas togetherness risk silencing and camouflaging angry community voices, which actively resist dependencies through anger and reveal persisting social inequality. Local artists become affectively alienated from the goal of inter-klas solidarity when they resist sharing the same sentiment of enthusiasm and excitement. Sev-

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eral times during my research, I encountered how the causes of community antagonism were simply not getting through to ‘Western’ networks of supporters. I also understand this disconnect between both groups as a form of what Miranda Fricker calls epistemic marginalization. Fricker argues that certain groups are denied the capability to make sense of their own social and emotional experiences in unbalanced relationships of power. “The basic idea is that a speaker suffers a testimonial injustice just if prejudice on the hearer’s part causes him to give the speaker less credibility than he would otherwise have given. […] I introduce the notion of identity prejudice as a label for prejudice against people qua social type, and this allows me to hone in on the central case of testimonial injustice: the injustice that a speaker suffers in receiving deflated credibility from the hearer owing to identity prejudice on the hearer’s part, as in the case where the police don’t believe someone because he is black.” (Fricker 2007: 4)

Although Celeur and Guyodo’s anger is a legitimate response to the experience of social injustice, privilege and whiteness, their opinions are not taken seriously and are often dismissed because these Black artists from weak socio-economic strata lack the same credibility that is routinely conceded to white curators and artists looking for affirmation for their socially-engaged art endeavors in the emotional responses of their Black collaborators. In her work on institutional diversity work, Ahmed analyzes how “[d]escribing the problem of racism can mean being treated as if you have created the problem, as if the very talk about divisions is what is divisive” (2012: 152). Artists like Celeur and Guyodo tend to become the problem for institutions such as the Ghetto Biennale as soon as they resist articulating enthusiasm and affirmation about the art event. They are “affect aliens” and read as divisive because they keep reminding visitors adamantly of persisting conflicts and inequalities between both social groups. Being read as divisive, however, has led to actual division. Nato Thompson (2015) explains that one of the most challenging aspects of the work of socially-engaged artists is to see and understand complex infrastructures of power within local communities. “Power, after all, can be distributed in numerous forms. A neighborhood can often feel alienated and disempowered, but it can nonetheless contain constant battles for limited power that move across racial, patriarchal, and class lines. In order to produce a new community, we must thus not only consider inherent notions of privilege, but also attempt to see power from the position of those whom we are organizing with, and vice versa.” (ibid.: 125)

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Among the artists of the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Eta Eugène could establish himself on top of the group as the most successful inhabitant. This development has occurred along with the establishment of the Ghetto Biennale since 2009. The awareness of power, according to Thompson, becomes even more challenging in complex inter-racial, crosscultural, and inter-klas contexts: “It is already difficult to read the infrastructures that operate behind any gesture within communities we think we understand – it becomes all the more complex across various demographics as the interworking of different communities becomes opaque to us. We simply don’t understand how things work and what things mean across cultural spaces of difference.” (2015: 75)

The biggest shortcoming of the Ghetto Biennale seems to be that its organizers and visiting artists do not pay enough attention to how their own ontological complicity with power has produced a new hierarchical order through their involvement in the neighborhood; an order which positions Gordon and Eugène on top of the hierarchical ladder. Instead of unveiling self-critically these new infrastructures of power in order to counter them, they started to label the group Atis Rezistans emphatically as a collective and a community. This helped to further camouflage hierarchical infrastructures of power behind the facade of an antiauthoritarian environment of ‘subaltern’ empowerment and community collaborations. Arlene Dávila argues that “‘[c]ommunity’ is obviously a contentious word that can be used to mask hierarchies and imply commonalities” (2008: 124). Eugène’s musée d’art took over a large part of the area since 2011. Neighboring areas, which have been considered community or public areas have been absorbed into his large museum and surrounded by solid concrete walls. Eugène works in the neighborhood like a gallerist who employs many assistants. These assistants or workers have rebranded themselves as atis kontanporen (contemporary artists) in recent years and have become the inner circle of Atis Rezistans. The Ghetto Biennale was an important incentive for this second generation of artists. Jean Claude Saintilus, Jean Robert Palanquet, Ronald Bazile, Evel Romain and many others have been introduced as assistants in the early years of the group and had not presented themselves with this vocabulary when Prézeau Stephenson had been involved with the group in the early 2000s (Prézeau Stephenson 2015). In an interview, Prézeau Stephenson described to me the early constellation of the group as embedded in employee-employer-relationships: “In the beginning, [Celeur and Eugène] had already assistants like [Jean Robert] Palan-

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quet. They were workers. They gave them a plate of food to work for them. But they never presented them as artists. They only presented Guyodo and Zaka as the next generation of artists.” (ibid.) Eugène buys up the individual sculptural productions from the small ateliers of many artists to resell them in his own museum. He offers occasional jobs to assist him in decorating his assemblages and sculptures and pays in return small amounts of money or offers a meal to eat. He has become the provider for many people in the neighborhood and sidelined in the process the other two founding members of Atis Rezistans, Celeur and Guyodo. Guyodo explains: “Eugène is controlling the neighborhood in every aspect. He has people around to take visitors to his house when they arrive. He has everything compared to the other artists. Even Celeur became a victim of this situation.” (Guyodo 2014) Celeur seems to have the feeling that his group was taken away from him by a new infrastructure of power established through ‘foreign’ influences. The Ghetto Biennale often functions like a welfare program for the community, which helps individual members to gain more access to resources than the large majority. Freire defines welfare programs as instruments of manipulation, which ultimately serve the end of conquest. He warns that, “[welfare programs] act as an anesthetic, distracting the oppressed from the true causes of their problems. They splinter the oppressed into groups of individuals hoping to get a few more benefits for themselves. This situation contains, however, a positive element: the individuals who receive some aid always want more; those who do not receive aid, seeing the example of those who do, grow envious and also want assistance. Since the dominant elites cannot ‘aid’ everyone, they end by increasing the restiveness of the oppressed.” (Freire 1972: 149)

4.1 ANDRÉ EUGÈNE’S MUSÉE D’ART: ‘BIG MAN-ISM’ AT GRAN RI Eugène’s musée d’art is for neighborhood standards one of the more ‘developed’ areas. It is the most spacious area and many visitors seem to feel more comfortable staying in his area than spending time in the smaller studios farther off the main road. Visitors do short ‘excursions’ into the remaining neighborhood using Eugène’s place as a starting point for these tours; among other things, it offers a new toilet that can be used, chairs to sit on, telephone and Internet connections, and conversations to be held in English. In contrast, the remaining neighborhood is crowded and narrow, and visitors can only sit on car batteries, on stools, or on the floor when they visit other artists’ ateliers. The area is also very noisy be-

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cause craftsmen and carpenters use heavy machinery to chop and carve wood and listen to radio programs and music while they are working. Eugène’s musée d’art offers a quieter space where visitors can contemplate their experiences. I remember that whenever I walked with Gordon through the neighborhood to select walls and areas where we could hang and present artworks produced by visiting artists during the Ghetto Biennales, she commented that one could forgot how poor the area really is while spending time in Eugène’s museum. Even for an experienced visitor like Gordon, who has visted this bidonvil regularly for many years and has close relationships with many residents, the abject poverty in the area is emotionally challenging. The neighborhood becomes a constant reminder of the privilege that our traveling white bodies entail. Although the poverty of the group is constantly evoked in curatorial descriptions, it is rarely discussed how different members of the group might experience this poverty in very different ways. Mark Schuller (2012: 58) pointed out that Haiti is an inegalitarian society. Haitian Kreyòl differentiates in common usage between, klas (class), which is used in very broad stokes, and the more fine-grained kouch sosyal (social strata), which tellingly distinguishes pov (poor) from malere (miserable) (ibid.).

Fig. 22: André Eugène’s musée d’art, installation of artworks by multiple authors

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All people living in this area are surely poor in European standards but some of them are poorer than others. The infrastructures of powers within the area are difficult to understand from an outside perspective, because it needs time to see the hierarchical social fabric and the socio-economic differences between different residents and members of Atis Rezistans. The architecture of houses is a first indication for gauging hierarchical social differences within the Gran Ri community. While some residents live in houses build of stone and concrete, others live in houses made of corrugated metal and wood, while yet others are without shelter. Eugène often uses the expression moun pa’m (my people) or atis pa’m (my artists) when he speaks about the members of Atis Rezistans. With this expression he is rhetorically claiming ownership over the group and can be understood in the context of what McAlister (2002) has described following Karin Barber as “big man-ism” in Haiti. A gwo nèg is a self-made, charismatic man, who is able to make a position for himself by recruiting supporters willing to acknowledge his authority and greatness. Through his everyday style, charisma, personal power, and knowledge a gwo nèg is capable of attracting a group of followers (ibid.: 142-143). Since the foundation of the Ghetto Biennale, Eugène has been able to establish himself as the gwo nèg (big man) within the neighborhood. He has managed to acquire a large group of followers by offering access to resources like money, food, communication technologies, relationships with other moun pa’l and his network of international art professionals; in return, this network of supporters is offering loyalty and their services. There will always be a group of people sitting in front of Eugène’s house, using his laptop and internet connection to communicate with visitors or families abroad, debating the recent football match, or helping him to finish decorating one of his sculptures. Their bodily presence and physical labor foster their alliance with and allegiance to Eugène. McAlister (2002: 143) describes that the power of the gwo nèg operates mainly through such dependents. Eugène explains: “I am like this. I love to help people. I was the second person who had a telephone in my neighborhood. People all around this neighborhood wanted to use my telephone. When they had family abroad they could call them from my house. They came here and used it for free. I love to help people; this is my personality […]. This is the mentality of a gran nèg.” (Eugène 2014b)

Whereas Atis Rezistans is often described in neutral terms as a collective, it is in fact embedded in a hierarchical gwo nég system, and Eugéne, in collaboration

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with his partner Gordon, has become the top of this hierarchical system. Prézeau Stephenson explains Eugène’s success as follows: “Eugene is the only one who has the leadership, sociability, capacity to link people, inside and outside. Eugene is more educated than other people living in the ‘ghetto’. He does not have an equal status compared to the others: He is a legal landowner. Property versus precarious status make a huge difference. And, he is more educated. I’m not sure how long [others] went to school but Eugene has completed his secondary school and went to professional college. In the ghetto he is a sort of ‘bourgeois’. Also, he has just one daughter. His needs are less immediate. Li pa grangou! [He is not in need]. This gave him more opportunity for reflection. I used to have deep conversations with him. I used to travel with him, [...] remember the National Gallery of Barbados has acquired a piece from him. We went to La Reunion in the Indian Ocean, invited by the school of arts. Eugene was appreciated everywhere he goes. His good manners gave him the possibility to cross class and race. He is not a typical ‘ghetto product’. More, as a ‘borderline’ he sometimes had a humoristic sociological view on the others. He is an observer, not really one of them. He is a ‘boss’.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2015)

I have noticed different assistants coming and going in his musée d’art over the years, and many assistants were people from Eugène’s personal past. He had grown up with them and offered them a helping hand in times of severe problems like alcoholism, drug addictions, or poverty. Eugène is in a position of power to decide who is able to stay and who has to leave Atis Rezistans. He has asked people directly to move away from the neighborhood. One member of Atis Rezistans explains his relationship to Eugène as follows: “Eugene is taking care of us when we need help. People quickly work for Eugene here. Because Eugene understands us. He takes care of us. He gives us what we need. If you want food everyday and money you can come to Eugène. You work for him. […] [Eugène] wants your confidence in return. He needs your support. He needs you. So he can feel powerful. Sometimes I asked myself what does he want back for real? If he wants a piece [of art] to get finished, he asked you to finish it. This is what he needs. It is a diplomacy.”

Eugène and his Atis Rezistans produce objects for a complex network of different clients. Eugène’s objects are presented as contemporary art pieces in art museums and Kunsthallen around the world, but he also delegates his workers to manufacture souvenirs and artisan craftwork for casual tourists as well as bigger clients like Haitian designer Pascale Théard and her boutiques in Pétion-Ville

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and Miami. Eugène has business savvy and maintains a strong link to art as commission. He often produces objects on behalf of somebody else. His musée d’art functions as a showroom for art produced in the whole area and inscribes itself into a market aesthetic. The tropical climate, heat, humidity, and especially the rainfalls during hurricane season are very harsh on smaller wooden sculptures and after a period of six to eight months after their production, they need to be replaced because of the fast decay of wooden components. Therefore, sculptures need to be constantly reproduced to fill up Eugène’s showroom. According to Eugène, the artistic productivity of the neighborhood is to a large degree directly related to his purchases and commissions to fill up his exhibition space. Listening to Eugène’s description of the situation, the neighborhood often appears like a factory. Most artists cannot live from the sales of sculptures for visitors and Eugène is offering a small financial stimulation to encourage them to keep working on their art pieces. He explains the situation as follows: “I buy what the artist did here. Just to encourage them. So they keep on working. If they keep on working without selling anything they will stop. So, I buy it to encourage them to keep on working. And sometimes when I re-sell it I will give them money again. I offer them this space to present their works. It is a kind of a resistance not to give up. When I am travelling abroad they are actually suffering because I give them money regularly, I give them food also. Sometimes I prepare food for them to survive.” (Eugène 2014)

Other interlocutors also describe art as an ideal business for people living in an informal neighborhood. Art is a commodity without clear exchange value and thieves cannot easily resell it after stealing it from a private art space. While goods of other small businesses are said to be constantly robbed and resold, it is impossible for thieves to resell the art objects as stolen goods on underground markets. Sculptures and assemblages are goods without defined monetary value and transactions between artists and clients are tied to individual prize negotiations. There are artists working in the neighborhood who refuse to showcase art pieces at Eugène’s musée d’art and to become Eugène’s moun pa’l. They are afraid that their art pieces and their individual authorship will get lost in the extreme accumulation of hundreds of sculptures and assemblages, and they refuse to submit and thus contribute to his hierarchical position through their alliance, bodies, and artworks. The large mass of art objects accumulated within his musée d’art has to be read with regard to this gwo nèg system, namely as a status symbol that represents Eugène’s power within the neighborhood. Multiple artists are working under his wing and for his project by presenting their artworks in his musée d’art. The multi-authored art installation that is his musée d’art also ex-

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presses the dependency of people working for him. In this context, it becomes understandable why some artists refuse to exhibit their works in his yard; by doing so, they reject his status as a gwo nèg. Celeur and Guyodo have left the group and are verbal about their frustration regarding the current power dynamic, which has been established since the foundation of the Ghetto Biennale in 2009. But they are not the only ones to criticize Eugène’s success. Several members of Atis Rezistans perceive this situation as a problem. A female neighbor of Eugène’s, for example, explained to me: “According to me, even when you are a well-known artist, since you lock yourself inside a gate, you hide yourself from people around, you are not an artist anymore but you became a superstar. According to me, an artist is someone who lives with a community and you live close with a public.” In the eyes of many inhabitants, Eugène’s amorous relationship with Gordon also gave him a fruitful push to establish himself in a central position of power and to acquire symbolic capital. Gordon often travels with Eugène to exhibitions in Europe and the United States, and Eugène works closest with her as her right hand and co-curator of the Ghetto Biennale. One member of Atis Rezistans explained that “since Leah started to work with us we have a new hierarchy here. Because of her, almost all foreigners believe that Eugène is the chief of our group.” Eugène’s exhibition space is centrally located at the arterial road Grande Rue. This geographical position marks another important reason for his success. Visitors always arrive from Grande Rue, and Eugène’s musée d’art is the first station they encounter when they come to see the artistic neighborhood. In recent years, however, Eugène has begun to strategically and architecturally ensure and consolidate this coincidental advantage. A monumental metal sculpture of the deity Bawon and a big metal sign bid visitors welcome and lead them directly into his musée d’art. All direct interconnections between Eugène’s exhibition space into the surrounding area have been hermetically sealed off by solid concrete walls in 2011. His musée d’art is surrounded by grey walls and closed off by a red metal gate. Entering the neighborhood to see the other artists’ studios has become a lot more difficult, because visitors are literally walled in his musée d’art. They now have to bypass a large area in order to find an entrance into the remaining neighborhood after they have visited Eugène’s museum and are quickly exhausted after visiting the large multitude of artworks accumulated there. Thus, the remaining ateliers are often experienced as ‘more of the same’. It is ironic that Eugène’s house shares a direct wall with his biggest critic Guyodo and his Atelier Timoun Klere. Both houses are so intimately close to each other that you can hear what one artist is saying inside his house while you visit the other. But since Eugène has restructured his musée d’art, visitors have

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to walk for several minutes to arrive from Eugene’s musée d’art at Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere and the other artists’ ateliers. According to Eugéne, his construction work was necessary because of safety and security reasons to protect his life and the life of visitors. He is living in an informal neighborhood and therefore needs to protect his possessions. Furthermore, he explained that playing children and teenagers had repeatedly damaged the sculptures in his yard. Many artists, however, complained openly to me that this new architectural structure had increasingly influenced the flow of tourists in the area, and that less and less visitors wandered through the entire neighborhood after visiting Eugène’s musée d’art: “No! In the beginning it was not like that. When people came we used to have guided tours. People came and saw all studios, they saw Eugène's place, and Guyodo's place, Cheby's place and my place. But with Leah they tried to make Eugène's museum the central space of the neighborhood. Even a little path through his house to come into the neighborhood was sealed off and Eugène put a concrete wall. They are not really working for all of us.” (Celeur 2015)

Those short, informal guided tours are mostly organized by the younger generation of Atis Rezistans who are able to speak English and French. Racine Polycarpe, Claudel Casseus, Romel Jean Pierre, and Reginald Sénatus often guide visitors through the area and showcase the ateliers of Celeur, Guyodo, Getho Jean Baptiste, Jean Claude Saintilus, Bazile, and Papa Da. But the tensions between the founding members of the group have forced them to choose their loyalties, and they seem to be less motivated to lead visitors through the entire neighborhood when visitors are not directly asking to see other art spaces. The mobile art tourism in the neighborhood has thus become more and more centralized. One of my interlocutors, who left the area around 2012, explained to me that the power dynamic at the moment is clearly defined: “It is very simple: you are either with Eugène or you are with Celeur.” Since the conflict between the founding members reached a new peak with the foundation of the Ghetto Biennale, choosing direct affiliations has become a central necessity for the remaining Gran Ri artists. One of my interlocutors explained: “When you are not choosing a ‘clan’ you have a problem. Celeur's ‘clan’ is obviously not as powerful as Eugène's ‘clan’. But you cannot play a double game; you cannot be a free agent. Celeur gives our art its spirit and Eugene gives us resources and opportunities to be able to take what Celeur teaches you without worrying what your kids will be able to eat at night, or if your house will have electricity and water. You cannot take both. You can-

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not take Celeur's education and Eugene's resources. It is unfortunate. When people see this, they will never let you inside the inner circle of the group. You will get too powerful if you can make the balance [and take] what both have to offer.”

Several other members of Atis Rezistans narrated the same predicament between ‘the clans’ of Eugène and Celeur. They see Eugène as bringing business savvy and financial opportunities into the group whereas Celeur is considered a talented artist and teacher, who provides an important art educational value. Guyodo was able to successfully establish a rich network of supporters on his own, and he works independently from the other two founding artists although he also describes Celeur as his teacher. Celeur describes the moment when Guyodo got involved with him as a new creative impulse for the entire artistic community. “Guyodo, le dernier venu, s'est tout de suite démarqué par son inventivité et sa performance. Avec lui, le mouvement a pris une nouvelle dimension.” (Celeur 2014: 68) Guyodo pushes the creativity in the neighborhood to a new level and, to his chagrin, is often copied by many newcomers within the group. It is significant that curatorial descriptions of the group are highlighting the community character of Atis Rezistans as a collective while the members and several dropouts, by contrast, describe the situation rather in terms of a lone fighter mentality where everybody has to fight for his or her own success and benefit. One of my interlocutors stated: “You have to understand that everyone in this group is on his own. Don’t expect anybody to help you, you have to be smart and help yourself.” Accusations about plagiarism are common in the group whereas foreign curators highlight instead that this is simply part of the apprenticeship system or a “collective community vision” (Cussans 2012). Bishop highlights community, collectivity and revolution as central vocabularies for the self-description of socially-engaged artists: “Individualism, by contrast, is viewed with suspicion, not least because the commercial art system and museum programming continue to revolve around lucrative single figures.” (Bishop 2012: 12) This specific rhetoric of socially-engaged art is also applied to Atis Rezistans, but the members of Atis Rezistans have to compete in immediate vicinity for very limited resources and many of them try to strongly highlight their individuality. Many visitors seem to forget that they are the main resource these local artists are fighting about. Their desire to see Atis Rezistans as a harmonious collective relates to a current trend in contemporary art as well as, I argue, to an old exoticizing sentiment entrenched in the cultural archive, which has been described by Oguibe as a desire for the faceless, anonymous native. Oguibe sees the origin of this desire in

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“[…] colonial ethnography and the colonial desire for the faceless native, the anonym. The faceless native, displaced from individuality and coalesced into a tribe, a pack, demands and justifies representation because she is a lack. In the event authority is appropriated and transferred from her. This authority is subsequently exercised in constructing her for Occidental consumption. Also, defacement consigns the native to the category of the unknown. Displaced to the befuddled corners of obscurity and rudimentary episteme, the native is available for discovery, and this discovery transforms the discoverer into an authority, this supposed privileged knowledge often translating into the right to represent.” (2004: 14)

I asked one of my interlocutors to describe the power dynamic within the group. He explained: “Just don’t be the one who is sent to buy and bring beer for everyone. If you are not the one who does the shitty work you are inside [the inner circle]. It comes normally. They will select you if you show that you don’t care about their money. If you don’t care about all the heat. If you don't care about making money with your art. They will choose you instantly. It is not that you get into the circle. The circle chooses you. […] Everybody from the neighborhood wants to be part of this circle. If someone asked you for ten gourdes you can say, yes I have it. Nobody will say I don’t want to be part of the circle. Because everyone wants to have 25 Gourdes in their pocket and Eugène can offer you this opportunity. […] The moment you will be able to say to Eugene, I offer you a beer today. This is when people will realize that you are successful on your own.”

Power in this group seems to be a tightrope walk. You need to show that you are capable to work independently from Eugène in order to climb the hierarchical ladder within the group and to stop doing the “shitty work”. At the same time, however, you cannot evolve to a degree where you outgrow the necessity of being part of the group and work under the founding members’ wing. My interlocutor continues further: “But as soon as you start to evolve you can become a problem. I can do my own art project without the entire problem that comes along with Atis Rezistans and the dualities of Celeur and Eugène. I can contact whomever I want. I don't have to contact Leah or Eugène to tell them I need help. As soon as you evolve, the community starts seeing you as an outsider. They see you as a winner. They feel they are the losers compared to you. So why do you still want to come to this community? [...] They feel you take the luck away from them.”

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I have never experienced Eugène as confrontational or authoritarian with anybody. Patience, calmness, and hospitality seem to be his most defining character traits. He always had a smile on his face and never verbalized any frustration with visitors or curators directly. But this also makes him a fantastic collaborator for the ‘culture game,’ because he tends to not oppose the ideas, desires, fantasies and, exoticism of his international art clientele openly and thus makes the neighborhood available for white consumption. Signs of happiness expressed in Eugène’s content smile and calmness are an important asset in social situations which are tied to severe hierarchical inter-klas dynamics. While the other two founding members of Atis Rezistans are often read as problematic—as angry, stubborn, difficult, unhappy, jealous, or unavailable—Eugène, to the contrary, always presents himself as a hospitable and content host for all visitors from a klas piwo a. We have already seen in chapter three that social harmony is very important for inter-klas encounters which rely on strong dependencies and often camouflage persisting inequalities. Ahmed reminds us that “[o]ppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself” (2010b: 67). Wekker also mentions availability as a central and necessary trait for racialized bodies that are produced within colonial systems of domination (2016: 3). Eugène’s calmness, hospitality, and availability can be read as an invitation to open the neighborhood to inter-klas consumption. His ‘everything goes’ attitude does not oppose established power structures but instead wittingly makes use of the persisting system to both the community’s and his own advantage.

4.2 FRANTZ JACQUES A.K.A. GUYODO: EVERYBODY LIKES A GOOD OUTSIDER STORY Guyodo, by contrast, often introduces himself to visitors who enter his exhibition space through narratives of conflict. Visitors who come to visit his Atelier Timoun Klere and his impressive artistic oeuvre usually also encounter the story of how he became sidelined by Eugène and Gordon. It is an important concern for him that visitors learn that he is not part of Atis Rezistans, that he does not participate in the Ghetto Biennale, and that his art is in no way inspired by or related to the religious system vodou. He defines his identity as an artist often in explicit contradistinction to Eugène and the other members of Atis Rezistans: “I am in competition with Eugène. Anyone knows that. There is no friendship between us anymore because of Leah [Gordon]. I am not participating in the activities of the Ghetto Biennale. Leah wants to work with me. But I don’t. I don’t consider her professional at all.

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Like all foreigners who are coming here, Leah wants us to work about vodou. But I don’t know anything about vodou. They want me to talk about something I barely know. This is a very bad situation for me. Atis Rezistans are working about vodou. They are making representations of the lwa. But this is not what I am doing. I am an artist. If someone wants to talk with the spirits, they can go and see Papa Da. Foreigners have something in their minds [about us] and they only want to see that. They are talking for us and do not let us speak. Many times I fight with them. If I lie, I could say that my art represents a lwa and so forth, and I would probably make more money, but I don’t. I don’t need anybody to explain my own work. I created it. I know what it is about.” (Guyodo 2014)

Guyodo’s anger expresses his right to disidentify with a particular construction and banalization of Haitian Blackness, which is often produced as the common norm for artistic Haitian empowerment in the visual arts. For Guyodo, the category vodou does not express a self-determined Black decolonial identity, but an invasive foreign gaze materialized in artistic productions, and he resists the construction of a monolithic Black identity. The articulation of conflict need not be understood exclusively as a narrative of real personal conflict, which has existed within the neighborhood for several years, because it is also a performative strategy that helps Guyodo to position himself in opposition to the majority of the other artists. His narrative of conflict is also a means to highlight himself as an individual artistic producer. He thereby resists attempts to produce the group as a collective. Celeur also articulated a desire to be recognized as an individual artist. He often humorously suggested to me that I should better write a book about him instead of the group Atis Rezistans and provides a similar description of an increasingly problematic relationship he has had with Eugène since Gordon got involved with the group. Guyodo’s anger parallels the frustration of many BIPoC art professionals working in Europe and the United States who criticize the white obsession with cultural alterity and the process of commodification of the exotic within the visual arts. But this narrative also opens a door for attracting exactly this particular group of critical postcolonial scholars who are aware of the situation, and who can relate to Guyodo’s critical stance towards exotic representations and commodification of Haitian art through strategies of cultural, temporal and racial Othering. Guyodo adopts a position that could be described as “post-ethnic” (Belting 2009: 57), and which produces the other artists in return as folkloristic ‘vodou artists’. Guyodo capitalizes on an interest in conflict in a very similar way as Eugène capitalizes on a desire for cultural and socio-economic alterity of numerous ‘Western’ curators. Both negotiate the diverse fields of interest of supporters from the visiting art world and position themselves strategically on

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two diametrically opposed ends of a spectrum for the presentation of Haitian art. By doing so, they compete for desirable resources, recognition, and authority. Nato Thompson (2015: 95) describes that neither the arts nor any other field has a clear, unified power structure, which allows one to attack particular forms of power within that field while simultaneously acquiring social capital within it. “With every critical blow [within that field], not only do we tear down someone else’s power, but also buttress our own. As players in various micro-economies of social capital, we use the veil of critique to make our own inroads. [...] Critique is often not much more than a strategy of using someone’s else’s inertia to perpetuate oneself forward.” (ibid.: 101) Being marginalized within a marginalized urban milieu opens up a new space of symbolic capital in the artistic sphere for Guyodo, which can also become a commodified vehicle of symbolic power. The artistic milieu is always looking for dissenting voices and outsider positions. Both positions seem in conflict with each other but are in fact both “variants of totalizing commodification” (Gurr 2010: 6) in a late capitalist global economy where “curators have become experts at presenting exhibitions and biennials that appear radical and oppositional, whether to museum orthodoxy or to regimes, common behaviors and codes, when curators in fact employ such radicalism and opposition precisely to attract audiences and to increase their events’ cultural capital” (Balzer 2014: 11-12). We have already seen in my introduction that ‘de-exoticizing’ exhibition frameworks have become a common mechanism in the postcolonial presentation of contemporary Caribbean and Haitian art since the late 1990s. The survey exhibition Haiti: Deux Siècles de Création Artistique at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014 illustrates this: “Avec en toile de fond le chaos urbain et la prégnance de la culture populaire, il s’agit de dépasser les archétypes de la peinture naïve et primitive et de transcender la vision magico-religieuse et exotique associée de manière restrictive à l’art haïtien”1 Guyodo’s strategy to transform his anger into a commodity has been successful and helped him to establish one of the richest networks of supporters. We saw in chapter one how Atis Rezistans’ curatorial support network similarly acquires social capital through narratives of inter-klas conflict—what I termed narratives of ‘class friction’—within the Haitian art world. Guyodo inscribes himself into the same debate but he turns the criticism around and against the group of ‘Western’ supporters by reminding them of their continuing privilege in inter-klas relationships. Guyodo explains:

1

Exhibition announcement Haiti: Deux Siècles de Création Artistique at the Grand Palais in Paris in 2014.

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“Since [Western curators and artists] are white, what they say is normally thought to be good. But when we want to explain something, nobody will listen to us. That’s racism. Even when you have a project that has very clear and very good ideas. Because you are Haitian and you are Black, they don’t want to understand you. They will not accept your project. A white person with a bad project will get accepted. And even Haitians will be [working] together with this person. As an example, when I would like to organize my own art festival here at Grande Rue, nobody would support my project.” (Guyodo 2014)

The term blan is used here by Guyodo not as the general Kreyòl term for foreigner but relates more specifically to the white privilege of foreign curators and artists. Whiteness is seen by Guyodo as a mechanism to acquire trust easily in the cultural sphere in Haiti, which helps to acquire new funding opportunities. Guyodo directly brings up the question of whether the Ghetto Biennale would have been possible without Gordon’s white body producing an aura of trust and reliance necessary to acquire funding partners in Haiti as, for instance, the cultural institute FOKAL or the Embassy of the United States. During a different conversation he argued: “Because we are Haitians and we are from a very poor country, foreigners think they can do anything they want with us, only because they are from rich countries. They would never treat [U.S.] American artists like they treat us. They always try to minimize us and what we are doing as artists and try to take advantage of us.” (2014) I often encountered a certain fatigue by ‘Western’ supporters about these conflicts taking place between the founding members of the group. Several Atis Rezistans supporters repeatedly expressed their wish that Guyodo and Celeur would stop with their stubbornness, get along with Eugène and Gordon, and just let the conflict go. I argue, however, that both Celeur’s and Guyodo’s anger is an important articulation of community resistance opposing Eugène’s claim to power within the group. Guyodo’s and Celeur’s anger articulates resistance that intends to break loose from persisting mechanisms of dependency and inter-klas obedience vis-à-vis the visiting milieu of generous supporters. But anger stands in the way of these curators and visiting artists to get past their guilt and to feel a sense of accomplishment in their socially-engaged art endeavors. Ahmed describes how negative feelings can often be read as backwardlooking, stubborn, and conservative while good feelings are regarded as forwardlooking and progressive: “Bad feelings are seen as oriented toward the past. As a kind of stubbornness that ‘stops’ the subject from embracing the future. Good feelings are associated here with moving up and getting out. [...] The demand that we be affirmative makes those histories disappear by

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reading them as a form of melancholia (as if you hold onto something that is already gone).” (Ahmed 2010: 50)

She explains further that “I am not saying that feminist, anti-racist, and queer politics do not have anything to say about happiness other than to point to its unhappy effects. I think it is the very exposure of these unhappy effects that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life. If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there. Unhappiness is not our endpoint. If anything, the experience of being alienated from the affective promise of happy objects gets us somewhere. Affect aliens can do things, for sure, by refusing to put bad feelings to one side in the hope that we can ‘just get along’.” (2010: 50)

As affect aliens in inter-klas dialogues, Guyodo and Celeur expose hierarchical infrastructures of power through their critical responses, which are often articulated in anger, and they repeatedly remind visitors about persisting inter-klas conflicts and dependencies. The exhibition spaces by Guyodo, Celeur, and Eugène are spectacular installations, which dramatically alter the aesthetic of the entire neighborhood with their favored “materiality of too-muchness” (Mercer 2011: 4). I will return in more detail to Guyodo and his Atelier Timoun Klere in chapter five. It is difficult for a new generation of Atis Rezistans members to find individual recognition next to these overwhelming artistic statements and narratives of conflict by the founding members of the group. This is why I would like to shift the focus in the second part of this chapter to introduce two artists and their studios, which have so far received less international attention: Getho Jean Baptiste and Alphonse Jean Jr. a.k.a. Papa Da. These two artists can be described as part of a second creative wave emerging in the neighborhood since 2009. Many of these ‘new’ artists have been working as assistants for the first generation of Gran Ri artists but have started to claim the profession of contemporary artists in recent years. The Ghetto Biennale was an important incentive for the emergence of this second artistic wave of contemporary artists. In the following, I want to retrace how the next generation of artists negotiates the artistic field of Port-au-Prince in order to draw attention and resources to them. I am aware that through my decision to make these two artistic voices more visible than others, my work in turn produces new silences.2

2

Haitian cultural anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) conceptualizes silences as the central mechanism of historiography. Every historical narrative, produced

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The small selection of artists discussed in this chapter is intended to represent a cross section of artists working in the neighborhood in order to capture the infrastructure of power within the group while leaving enough space for articualtions of individuality.

4.3 ROYAUME DES ORDURES VIVANTES BY GETHO JEAN BAPTISTE Getho Jean Baptiste was born in 1972 and has lived in the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat his entire life. He is the oldest of five children and lost his mother at a very young age. His mother’s death made it difficult for him and his brothers and sisters to go to school because his father could not earn sufficient money to pay school fees regularly for all children. Getho dropped in and out of school depending on whether he was able to gather the necessary money. He tried to support his younger siblings financially to enable them to get a school education. He worked in small occasional jobs as a day laborer to earn money for finishing his school education but stayed unemployed most of his life. Today he is in his forties and works occasionally as a tutor for children whose parents struggle to send them to school; he also assists his teacher Celeur in finishing large-scale sculptures. Getho’s biography is a typical biography of a person living in the neighborhood and struggling to survive its everyday insecurities. He started to work as an artist around the inauguration of the first Ghetto Biennale in 2009 and also opened his house as an autonomous art space, which he poetically named Royaume Des Ordures Vivantes (The Kingdom of Living Detritus). He explained to me in an interview why he decided to became an artist: “I became an artist because I always had difficulties with money and I never had a real profession. But I wanted to have a profession in order to help my friends, my family and myself. Being an artist is not like being an artisan. You cannot just bring the sculpture to a place to sell them to get your money. That is why it is a little bit difficult to get money from being an artist. But anyway, it is a profession. Being an artist now is one of the few

through uneven power relations in the production of sources, archives, and narratives, is a bundle of silences: “Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments: the moment of fact creation (the making of sources); the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives); the moment of fact retrieval (the making of narratives); and the moment of retrospective significance (the making of history in the final instance).” (ibid.: 26)

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things in my life that make me very proud. Because artists are not ordinary persons. I wanted to become an extraordinary person. Today this field made me another person, because before I always had difficulties to express myself. My words wouldn’t be enough. My voice wouldn't be enough to express myself.” (Getho 2013)

As it so happens, Getho’s small exhibition space is located in between Celeur’s and Eugène’s large, dramatically staged exhibition spaces. He is one of the many artists who try to position themselves between the intra-community conflict of Atis Rezistans’ founding members and to find individual recognition for their artworks. Getho refers to Celeur as his teacher and advisor but keeps his affiliation with Eugène and his Atis Rezistans. He achieved some individual international recognition for his artworks and has been part of the group show The Still Life of Vernacular Agents curated by Nadine Zeidler at Galerie Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler in Berlin in 2012.3 Through Royaume des Ordures Vivantes, Getho claims a space for artistic self-articulation in order to be able to present his artworks autonomously. It is his individual space of critique, resistance, and deviance, where the restricted agency that is available to him can be used to create a safer space, more autonomous from the larger infrastructures of power within the neighborhood. Getho speaks about his artworks in an unobtrusive and more articulate way than many other members of Atis Rezistans. We saw above that exhibiting at Eugène’s musée d’art comes with a very specific infrastructure of power and Eugène’s claim to leadership, which can indirectly discourage artists to take full credit for their own artworks and risks making them appear to visitors as merely ‘more of the same.’ While Eugène’s sculptures and assemblages presented in his own art space are often monumental compositions, which tower over all the other art pieces presented in his musée d’art, artworks by other members of the group are much smaller in size, chaotically grouped, and without clear labels identifying their authors. Some artists are trying to overcome this tendency to be overlooked by signing their artworks very visibly in bright neon colors. Opening up an exhibition space in the area is a possibility to claim one’s own individual authorship, bypass gradually the gwo nèg system in place, and draw visitor’s attention to one’s own art productions. According to the members of Atis Rezistans, the art tourism through the larger neighborhood has more and more come to a halt because Eugene’s central musée d’art makes it difficult for emerging artists to establish their own art spaces and thereby acquire resources and recognition.

3

Getho’s ouevre also inspired Donald Cosentino to the title of the article Baby On a Blender (Cosentino 2011).

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Fig. 23: Interior of Getho J. Baptiste’s Royaume des Ordures Vivantes

Getho lives in a very small, rental house, which is around eight square meters in size. The house is built out of corrugated metal and wood. Getho’s house consists of two narrow, barely furnished rooms and a small courtyard in the front surrounded by walls out of corrugated metal. Royaume des Ordures Vivantes takes up more than half of his living quarters and is covered over and over in assemblages and sculptures. The entrance door has the name of the exhibition space sprayed on it in black letters. The narrow rooms are barely lit and the art objects are covered in thick layers of dust and spider webs and presented standing in an overly crowded manner on shelves, on the ground, and hanging from walls. All assemblages are oriented towards the front door and directly face the entering visitor. A huge amount of collected materials and unfinished assemblages are piled up in the small courtyard area in front of Getho’s house, as if awaiting future artistic reappropriations. Visitors are thereby encouraged by Getho to witness the transformative process of his artistic practice: piled up, discarded materials will be transformed into artistic assemblages. Some of his larger metal and plastic sculptures, which do not fit into his house anymore, are also presented in a public community area across from his house. In this area, female neighbors wash their laundry or cook for their families while craftsmen and -women are polishing and carving artisan-

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al products. As myriad assemblages are hoarded in the narrow space with barley any space left to move around, Getho’s house appears more claustrophobic than comparable neighboring houses. Royaume des Ordures Vivantes evokes a ‘chamber of horrors’ with its large amount of expressionless doll heads and puppet limbs and sporadically integrated human skulls into his otherwise mostly plastic compositions. The dimly lit doll-heads are often dramatically and in a gruesome fashion deformed by burnings, covered in molten plastic, or spiked with charred plastic forks and knives. These deformations increase the effect of morbidity and the overall eerie atmosphere that Getho is capable of producing with his Royaume des Ordures Vivantes. Prézeau Stephenson pointed out to me that she believes that the vodou influence in many artworks by Atis Rezistans is probably more closely related to Hollywood horror cinema than to any ‘local’ religious system. For her, practices of healing are the most central aspects for vodou communities living in Haiti (Prézeau Stephenson 2014). I have not encountered any artworks related to vodou in the neighborhood that explicitly engage with questions on spiritual well-being. Gordon’s and Cosentino’s postapocalyptic framings also mention George Miller’s Mad Max series (1979, 1981, 1985) as a possible point of reference for the artists. All cinemas in Port-au-Prince have closed down during the last twenty years, but I could easily find copies of horror movies with ‘voodoo’ elements like Child’s Play/the Chucky series (1988-1991), The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988), A Chinese Ghost Story (1987), Constantine (2005) or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) among others in the video stalls of street venders at Champ de Mars. These movies are also widely broadcast on national television throughout the year and are well-known by the Gran Ri community. They have been mentioned directly by some members of Atis Rezistans as a source of inspiration. Getho explains: “I often watch movies to search for new images to be inspired for my sculptures. I also take the lessons from these movies. Moral lessons for example. I love especially horror movies and science fiction movies. It is a way to increase the little knowledge I have about art. Sometimes I watch movies to be inspired to create something new. When I was a teenager I did not like horror movies. But when I became an artist and I started to do deformations in many puppets’ faces and I watch horror movies because there I can find similar aesthetic deformations of human faces and bodies.” (Getho 2015)

He also mentions the pop-icon Chucky as a cinematographic source of inspiration for his sculptures. He often integrates plastic dolls and other discarded children’s toys into his compositions. Getho, who identifies as a Protestant, ex-

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plained to me that these fictional horror movies help him to understand Haitian reality better: “I am not a vodou practitioner. A lot of action taking place in these movies relate to vodou, for example in the movies Indiana Jones or Constantine. I remember a scene in Indiana Jones, which shows how a man tries to lay Indiana down on an altar to take his spirit away. A woman takes a puppet and this puppet becomes Indiana’s spirit. The next scenes show a bond between Indiana and the puppet. When Indiana Jones fights another man, the woman controls him through this puppet. When she hurts the puppet with a knife, Indiana responds physically with pain and blood. Scenes like these happen in reality here in Haiti. People harm each other through spirits. Like in these movies someone may have a problem with another person and he or she decides to kill him. I could tell you several examples how people harm each other through this kind of work and how people have died here without any natural causes. Of course, these are fictional movies. But these movies don’t try to make you afraid only. It is also psychological. They try to make you understand how powerful and dangerous the devil really is.” (Getho 2015)

He used the term houngan in our conversation. But what he describes is in fact the work of a bòkò, which can be loosely translated as ‘evil sorcerer’; a sorcerer who “works with both hands” and is paid to cause other people harm through spirit work. Getho probably used the term houngan in our interview because he was aware that I knew the term from previous conversations and seems to have already translated the term for my understanding. I realized during our conversations that Getho also often produced a negative image of the vodou religion through his art. In his atelier he has several assemblages which negotiate malevolent sorcery, zombification, and unnaturally induced death within the Gran Ri community. One of these assemblages is titled zombification and shows a baby doll crucified on a plastic cross sitting on top of a plastic component of a fan for a car engine. A second, pale looking white doll head is hovering ghoulishly above the crucified baby doll’s head like a twisted shadow image of the first face. The different components of the assemblage are crudely tied together by wire and rusty nails. The dolls’ legs are nailed to a wooden base and both legs seem brutally broken. This violent merging of different materials through nails and wires is very common in Getho’s artistic practice; it evokes cruelty and pain. Getho has deformed the body of this crucified figure further through burnings and by running molten plastic over arms, legs, and the doll’s face. This composition represents the process of zombification. McAllister argues that the term zonbi is a loaded word holding different meanings and implications:

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“Technically, a zonbi is a part of the soul that is stolen and made to work. The living-dead zombies that we think of from horror films are rare, and create a national sensation when they surface. Everyday zombies are zonbi astral, a dead person’s spirit that is magically captured and contained. They are used in magical ‘work’ […]. In any case, the implication is that they met a premature death; they were killed magically, and not ‘by the hand of God.’ Now they are working for their owner. A powerful and frightening concept, the zonbi is also a potent metaphor for the slave and the lasting effects of slavery in Haiti.” (McAlister 1995: 314)

Getho explains his depiction of the zonbi with the following narrative: “We find zombification in many, many forms here in Haiti. This is why I make my sculptures about it [which] never look alike. This sculpture here represents a person on a cross. This person does not have his spirit anymore. He is a zonbi. His body is tied to the cross because he cannot move. He is like a prisoner. The little head represents the spirit that was taken away from him. A lot of people you can see in the streets of Port-au-Prince do not have their spirits anymore. Their spirit is gone, somewhere else working in a houngan’s house. Those kinds of people are waiting for their death. And when they finally have a small fever they will die from it. Your body dies but this does not mean that you did not die before. So that means that this person is dead already. It is from my own experience that I talk about it. Some families and friends died like that. It is something really common in Haiti. You don’t live in Haiti, so you probably do not really know about it. Your spirit can be somewhere else but your body is still here with us. […] I had a friend who experienced zombification. She died and her family prepared her funeral. But people knew she was not really dead. During the night they will take the body because they only had her spirit so far. Afterwards people saw her again in the streets.” (2015)

This negative image of vodou communities through the sorcery of a bòkò is not uncommon in Haiti. This marginalization is often articulated by Protestants, who see vodou as devil worship and produce it as the evil religious Other of Protestant Christianity. Cultural anthropologist Karen Richman describes the relationship between vodou and Protestantism in Haiti as follows: “Yet far from making a clean break with local religious powers and practices associated with lwa, wanga, or dyab, Haitian Protestantism discourse makes all these representations hyper-real. They are objectified and reified so that they can be ritually killed. This ritual logic explains why the evangelicals’ rhetoric constantly evokes the Catholic-Vodou ‘other’, all the while collapsing the other’s internal distinctions and dismissing it all as devil worship […].” (Richman 2012: 280)

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The racist cinematographic imagination produced by Hollywood horror cinema circles back to Haiti and finds its expression in Getho’s sculptural production. Richman (2012: 277) explains that conversion to Protestantism offers Haitians a spiritual immunity and is used as a strategic defense mechanism against evil sorcery. Getho argued in one of our conversations that god is simply more trustworthy than every lwa. He pits both religious systems against each other: “The lwa can theoretically protect you when you work for them. But when your life is in real danger they will also quickly leave you. God on the other hand will never leave you. Because he loves you. A spirit will probably leave you at one point. Remember, you kind of working for the devil. And the devil will always eat you in end.” (Getho 2015) He went on to explain that although he was very much aware that vodou had been an important historical mechanism to spark the Haitian Revolution and to help Haiti to become the first independent Black nation in the late 18th century, today, according to Getho, most people use vodou mainly for harmful intentions. None of the art exhibitions in Europe or the United States which I analyzed in chapter two has discussed these inter-religious conflicts although we can find these problematic Protestant understandings of vodou as a form of devil worship reified explicitly as art objects in the artistic productions of Atis Rezistans. The absence of curatorial interest in these matters is not surprising, because many visiting curators understand the rise of evangelical Protestantism in Haiti as an external, and more specifically U.S. American, corruption of the Haitian people. Protestantism in Haiti is seen as the cause of a new rise of bigotry and as simply less ‘authentic’ than the supposedly open and tolerant ‘African’ vodou religion. While vodou is commonly constructed as ‘authentically’ African, Protestantism becomes in these narratives an aggressive U.S. American, hegemonic discourse corrupting the Haitian people. Haitian Gran Ri artists as vodou-critical Protestants do not fit into the particular ‘ethnic slot’ produced for them in ‘EuroU.S. American’ exhibitions and thus these community opinions vanish from the discourse and are being merged into the discourse about ‘vodou artists from Haiti’. Like most artists working in the neighborhood, Getho’s artistic oeuvre is diverse in that he articulates a wide range of (1) socio-critical, (2) political, (3) biographical, (4) historical, and (5) religious topics. These five themes are often interwoven with each other without being mutually exclusive. In contrast to the first wave of artists, who have been trained in artisanal work, Getho has never learned to carve in wood. Thus, most of his figurative assemblages are solely rekiperasyon compositions: merged plastic objects, which are tightly held together by wires to create new figurative shapes: “I can use plastic to create everything.

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Wood needs to be prepared. It is much easier for me to use plastic instead. So when I see plastic, I see new work.” Getho tries to expand his artistic skillset constantly and recently started to experiment also with woodcarving. He works together with artisans to be able to borrow carving tools and learn their techniques. The artisan community and the members of Atis Rezistans are often collaborating and helping each other by exchanging materials, tools, knowledge, and machinery.The dominant use of plastic as a material is a means to give Getho’s ouevre a strong individual aesthetic, but it also relates to his socioeconomic reality. Materials like metal, wood, and tires have to be bought. Plastic objects, by contrast, are freqeuntly discarded materials and can be found and reused without financial cost. Getho often uses his art to speak about social problems that he perceives in Haitian society. He explains his artistic agenda as being rooted in a political desire for social change: “I have a lot of inspiration for social topics. I have vision and inspiration to understand it. This is one of the reasons why I started to be an artist in the first place. It was a way to express myself and to show people what I had in mind. I want to share my ideas with people about these social issues. I think I am more comfortable in this field. More people see me and listen to me when I do art. Hopefully people will think after listening to my explanations about it and will change their way of life and will not continue this way.” (Guyodo 2014)

Getho often uses the Kreyòl term travay (to work) to speak about his art. His usage of the term travay can be seen as a response to racist and classist expectations about poor inhabitants living in a bidonvil, who are often considered to be slothful, lazy, and ineffective. The accumulation of a large amount of art objects presented in his exhibition space also relates to the wish to prove this perspective wrong and to overcome the stigma and devaluation attached to it. Presenting a mass of accumulated, artistically produced objects highlights productivity, working power, and physical labor. Royaume de Ordures Vivantes in fact exhibits all artworks which he has produced since 2009 and could not sell to visitors. The Gran Ri artists are reacting with their overly crowded installation spaces to racist and classist expectations and at the same time also to the new logic of jineterismo, which emerged in the neighborhood since the foundation of the Ghetto Biennale. A new group of artists has emerged which barely produces art objects but instead concentrates on networking activities to find generous support and travel opportunities. Therefore, the presentation of a large amount of art objects is also a mechanism to position oneself against this new generation of ‘network-

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ing artists’ and to show one’s productivity as a laboring artist with a rich, continuous artistic practice. This interpretation also explains why some members of Atis Rezistans were irritated by my attempts to discuss the complex Kreyòl term vagabondaj in relation to their artworks. We have already seen in chapter two that Katherine Smith has introduced the term as a conceptual framework to speak about Atis Rezistans’ artworks. Haitian artists try to overcome classist and racist perceptions of them as lazy and slothful, and the term vagabondaj can evoke precisely these connotations. I would like to discuss three more examples of Getho’s artistic oeuvre which can be seen during a visit in Royaume des Ordures Vivantes. Getho helped me to select them and asked me to present those artworks in my publication. Probably one of Getho’s most spectacular assemblages was created in 2013 before the 3rd Ghetto Biennale. He refers to this exceptionally grotesque assemblage as one of his most beloved works. In 2013, the 1.5-m large assemblage with the title Etazini Tonbe (USA’s Downfall) drew a lot of attention from the visiting artists during the Ghetto Biennale due to the fact that he used a chicken cadaver for the composition, which discusses Haiti’s abusive relationship with the United States. I remember how I physically responded with nausea the moment Getho described his morbid artwork to me and I smelled the mixture of fiberglass and sun-tried chicken cadaver. The composition introduces a new strong olfactory component into his artistic oeuvre. For Etazini Tonbe, Getho displays a chicken cadaver giving birth to a puppet emerging upside down from a slit belly. The sun-tried carcass is incrusted in fiberglass and nailed to a wooden cross with several stakes. These stakes are labeled with the terms Africa, Europe, Asia, America, and Oceania. The open spout of the chicken is attached to a medical infusion. The plastic bag of this infusion is positioned close to a second plastic doll sitting on the ground of the assemblage holding the tube gently in its left hand. Getho explains his piece with the following words: “This piece is made from a revelation I had in a dream. I call the sculpture Etazini Tonbe [USA’s Downfall]. In a dream I saw a competition of several fighters. There were an American, an Asian, a European, and an African fighter. The final fight was between an American and an Asian. In that final fight the Asian was winning and put the American to the ground. There was a lot of international audience and also many Haitians. And the Haitians got up and helped the American who was beaten down and lying on the ground. Everyone else was not paying attention to the American. Haitians love all the nation even though we have problems inside, we always love to help other nations. This doll here on the ground represents Haiti and it holds an infusion for the American after the defeat. My revelation makes me feel that the United States should prepare for a battle. I don’t know

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what, but something is going to happen. Every stake [in my sculpture] represents a different continent. The chicken represents the United States and that stake through the neck of the chicken represents Asia. It was the first time I used a real chicken in my art. It is impossible for me to find an eagle, and the eagle stands for the United States; so I used the closest thing I could find [laughs].” (2014)

He went on to explain: “When you abuse someone, this person you abuse will one day put him- or herself together. We will put ourselves together. When we are put together we are strong and when we are strong we won’t accept any more abuse. And this knowledge is the only thing that keeps us alive.” Haiti as the abused underdog of the global world system is able to reverse the position between caretaker and victim in Getho’s assemblage. The United States is only kept alive by Haiti’s generosity and humanitarianism symbolized by medical drip-feeding. The composition can be seen as a symbolic world-upside-down reversal described by James Scott in the context of the hidden transcripts. Subaltern forms of political resistance produce hidden transcripts which critique power in ways that escape the notice of dominant groups. Such discretions allow the dominated group to resist being symbolically appropriated by powerholders (Scott 1990: 4). Scott explains that world-upside-down traditions represent the counterculture, in a quite literal sense, to a dominant transcript were all normal relations and hierarchies become inverted (ibid.: 172). He argues that instead of delegitimizing these political forms as tricks of a playful imagination without political significance, these cultural world-upside-down reversals produce important imaginative and affective breathing spaces for subordinate groups because they show the arbitrariness of hierarchical social systems and thus help to sustain forms of resistance: “Admittedly, it is impossible to envision a world upside down without beginning with a world right side up of which it is the mirror image. The same is true by definition for any cultural negation […]. Inversions of this kind do, however, play an important imaginative function, even of the accomplish nothing else. They do, at least at the level of thought, create an imaginative breathing space in which the normal categories of order and hierarchy are less than completely inevitable. […] When we manipulate any social classification imaginatively – turning it inside out and upside down – we are forcibly reminded that it is to some degree an arbitrary human creation.” (ibid.: 168)

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Fig. 24: Etazini Tonbe (USA’s Downfall) by Getho J. Baptiste, 2013

In this sense, Getho’s artworks reveal an epistemic inquiry into art’s potential to be an affective coping mechanism to resist everyday social inequality, injustice, and structural violence. His assemblage highlights the arbitrariness of the current global world order, which he thereby reveals to be not set in stone but reversible. Getho also articulates a direct, self-confident warning against the United States: one day Haiti will rise again and overcome the abusive racist relationship currently in place between both nations. But instead of helping the other continents to destroy the United States, Haiti will overcome its own anger and generously help the United States to survive its future downfall. Etazini Tonbe’s sculptural reversal does not reenact the racist imperialist capitalist logic that fundamentally

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shapes the relationship between the United States and Haiti. The artwork offers instead a reparative vision of healing and care. Late decolonial activist and curator Alanna Lockward understood healing as a central aspect for Decolonial Aesthetics and inextricably tied them to liberation and resistance: “A fundamental matter is introduced largely in an innovative way by Decolonial Aesthetics/AestheSis: the question of healing, which is intertwined with the notion of liberation to the point of what, in Haitian creole, is known as Marassa or the ‘twin principle’. Inseparability as a sister/brotherhood category that in Decolonial Aesthetics/AestheSis is juxtaposed to linear narratives and Eurocentric paradigms. We call the resistance to the exploitative capitalist European enterprise, the quest for the healing selfempowerment of liberation, ‘decoloniality’.” (Lockward 2014)

Haiti’s global victimization is a recurring topic in Getho’s artistic production. Inside Royaume de Ordures Vivantes, a metal sculpture with a red human skull instantly draws attention. Getho rarely uses skulls in his artistic oeuvre. When he does, they enable him to create sculptures that are easily recognizable as depicting human beings. One of those figurative sculptures is centrally positioned in his exhibition space on a shelf together with a variety of other artworks. The black metal sculpture is larger than most of the other plastic assemblages nearby, and the sculpture stands out from the other works because of its size and red color. Getho created a simple abstract human figure out of black metal with two legs, two arms, and a skull as its head on top. He painted the skull red, added brown hair to it and a big worn shoe on top of the skull whose sole is painted in white. A bicycle chain ties both metal arms of the figure together. He calls this piece Ayiti (Haiti) and explained to me that the sculpture discusses the need for a mental decolonization in Haiti. According to Getho’s explanation, even after the revolution of 1803, Haitians remain living in an unfortunate state of ‘mental slavery’ today: “In the past we had many chains in our houses and we worked as slaves. But today the situation of slavery is different. I see the current state we are in as a contemporary situation of slavery. After 200 years of independence we are actually still in the similar situation. We can’t eat, we can’t work. [...] As you can see, there are a lot of poor people living in Haiti, but we have a lot of wealth too. You may find someone with ten different cars, and on the other side people have to fight their hunger. We are always longing for food. That is why I say we are still living in modern slavery. We may not have chains anymore, but we don’t have freedom in our minds. That is why I say slavery is modern. You see [the sculpture] has a shoe on his head. That shoe here represents oppression. That oppression

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comes first of all from us and second from the imperialist. We suffer a lot. Haiti is a country that many other nations would like to possess. It is not good for us. Under the shoe I painted the sole white and the other side black. That means that other nations put Haiti down and under pressure. I often have to ask myself: in the current situation, do we Haitians have to follow the same process of 1803 to get rid of modern slavery?” (Getho 2014)

Whiteness is symbolically implied through the white, painted sole of the heavy boot on top of the skull and becomes associated with oppression and slavery. Hence, the sculpture evokes bell hooks’ (1997: 169–179) description of whiteness as terror in the Black imagination, which emerges as a response to the experience of traumatic pain and anguish induced by white racist domination. hooks argues that by critically examining and deconstructing these associations of whiteness with terror, we are able to name racism’s impact and can break its hold: “We decolonize our minds and our imaginations.” (ibid.: 178) Decolonization in Getho’s description is a mental project and his art produces affective responses and breathing spaces against the structural violence he endures on a daily basis. Ayiti evokes what Hartman (2008: 14) calls “the as-yetincomplete project of freedom” for Black citizens in the Americas and how the legacy of slavery and colonialism continue to shape our societies and interpersonal relations in the present. Fig. 25: Detail Ayiti (Haiti) by Getho J. Baptiste, deceased person unknown (skull)

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The use of skulls as a material for artworks adds new semantic layers to human remains,4 but this artistic practice also relates quite literally to the process of zombification and the figure of the zonbi: deceased Haitians have to work for new artistic agendas. The spatial closeness of political themes debating structural inequality in relation to several zonbi depictions in Getho’s exhibition space also resonates with what Jean and John Comaroff have called “occult economy” (Comaroff Comaroff 1999). Cultural anthropologist Tobias Wendl (2006) describes the figure of the zombie as a transatlantic, travelling concept between the Americas and Africa. The historical Haitian experience of slavery as a collective zombification traveled later on to the horror cinema of the United States and has emerged in Nigeria’s Nollywood cinema since the 1980s, where it relates allegorically to economically motivated, personal gain as a response to aggressive global capitalism and mass poverty (ibid.: 284–286). Following Comaroff and Comaroff, Wendl argues further: “Die willenlosen Zombies sind die Alptraumbürger der Moderne. Vom Menschen ausgeschlossen, auf ihre rohe Arbeitskraft reduziert, existieren sie ausschließlich für die Wertschöpfung ihrer Herren, die sie in Benzinfässern oder Werkzeugkisten verwahren: die Zombieproduktionsweise [sic] als Allegorie des reinen Mehrwerts.” (ibid.: 285) Getho’s art socio-critically discusses forms of gendered injustice in Haitian society as well. One of his assemblages presented in Royaume des Ordures Vivantes debates the sexual abuse of female workers by male employers. In this assemblage, Getho positions a cloth doll crouching on the legs of a tall black figure, which is towering threateningly over the doll’s body. The doll is lying in front of the black plastic figure looking directly at the crotch area where a small red penis is exposed. The position of the doll implies oral sex between both figures. The male figure has predator-like claws formed out of wire, which the figure raises threateningly into the air. He explains his assemblage with the following narrative: “This is a woman. She went to university to have a good profession in the future. She sent her CV somewhere to get a job. Although she had the resume and the qualification, the

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The most common narrative I encountered for the use of skulls in artworks in the neighborhood relates to social immobility and visa restrictions for Haitian citizens. Many artists told me the cynical story that their artworks enable anonymous, deceased Haitians new travel opportunities which they would not have had while they were still alive: when the artworks are shipped to art exhibitions abroad, deceased Haitians travel with them. Through the use of human remains, the artists are envisioning a world that allows Haitian citizens to cross national borders freely.

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employer will still say that this is not enough to get hired. In order to give her the job, he will make clear to her that she needs to have a sexual relationship with him. She wants desperately to work. A lot of women will do it because their situation is really hard and miserable. Haiti has a big problem with that. A woman with the right knowledge does not have the possibility to work, but the other one who did the sexual favor will be working. This young woman asks herself: is it important to go to school, or it is better to become a prostitute? If you want money, you know what to do. That is not good. If you have the knowledge and the talent, you don’t need to share your body with the boss. […] It is a lot harder being a woman here in Haiti than being a man. Lots of women have to do this in order to help themselves and their families. They will get pregnant by it and will have even more problems.” (2014) Fig. 26: Zonbi by Getho Jean Baptiste; Fig. 27: Untitled (sexual predator) by Getho Jean Baptiste

4.4 MUSÉE DES ESPRITS E D’ART BY ALPHONSE JEAN JUNIOR A.K.A. PAPA DA Alphonse Jean Jr. a.k.a. Papa Da is part of the ‘inner circle’ of Atis Rezistans. He is probably one of the busiest artists during the Ghetto Biennale. As a houngan and contemporary artist he has a double position both in vodou and in art. This makes him one of the most desired collaborators for art projects taking place during the Ghetto Biennales. Being intimately linked to both worlds entails the

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promise to be more ‘authentically’ different than many other members of Atis Rezistans who consider vodou quite explicitly as a selling strategy for visiting foreigners. Seeing his artworks presented in the peristil of his temple and in close proximity to religious artifacts triggers an exotic fascination, from which I was also unable to extract myself, and which had also played a part in drawing my own research to the Caribbean in the first place. Although Papa Da is a practicing houngan, he, like all other members of Atis Rezistans, clarifies that it is important to keep in mind that vodou is only one aspect among others for his artistic interest: “Not all my works are related to vodou symbols. I know that not everyone likes art related to vodou. We may have foreigners coming to our ateliers who want to buy something talking about politics or social issues. Or they want something related to our relationship with the boujwazi. I work on all these different topics.” (Papa Da 2014) Papa Da describes his work as a houngan as the work of a community healer. This is a clear departure from Getho’s images that often describe vodou in terms of harmful sorcery. Papa Da explains: “When clients come here, I work for them. I heal them if they are sick. This is why they call me Papa Da. It is like I became a father for many people in the neighborhood.” (ibid.) Visiting his exhibition space also means visiting his houmfour (vodou temple), which he has run jointly with his brother since their father’s death. He calls his exhibition space Musée des Esprits e d’Art (Museum of Spirits and Art) and presents artworks in the open area of the temple called peristil. Several tied pwen (charms) and wanga (magical work) are hanging from the ceiling of the peristil around the poto-mitan (centerpost) while his artworks populate the floor and walls and decorate the peristil. These pwen and wanga represent works for clients and embody processes of magical healing. The intimate presentation of both spheres raises the question where his work as an artist starts and his work as a houngan ends. Papa Da considers himself to be the only active vodou practitioner in the group Atis Rezistans. In our interview, he explained that this is what separates him from the other members of the group: “Working as an artist is a profession. People here in our group work as professional artists. They may give a piece of art a name, referring to a spirit and call it Cousin Zaka or Erzulie Freda. But they often don’t really understand what they are saying because they are not practitioners. This is what makes them different from my work and me. I am an artist and I’m a houngan too. When I do a piece of art and tell you this is Damballah, I actually know what I’m talking about. For them it is just business. Sometimes I help them when they made a mistake and created a wrong symbol; then I go and correct it for them. I can make symbols a lot better than the other artists. That makes my work different. I don’t

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know why, but many foreigners prefer my work to the others. After the last biennale, [cultural anthropologist] Elizabeth [McAlister] only wanted to buy my work for example. And many other foreigners also.” (Papa Da 2015) Fig. 28: Doktè Ipokrit (hypocritical doctor) by Papa Da, deceased person unknown (skull)

In contrast to Getho’s Royaume des Ordures Vivantes, Papa Da’s exhibition space is predominately populated by wooden art objects. Metal and plastic components are sparsely coated around carved wooden figures. Like Celeur and Eugène, he was trained in artisanal craftwork. Papa Da describes his own artistic development as follows: “Being an artist is something you are from birth. When I was a child I always wanted to create something. I tried various different things. I tried to be a mechanic. I also tried to be a professional football player. But both did not work out for me. Finally, I worked as an artisan. I grew up in this area surrounded by artisans. I used to watch them working. They did eskilti klasik (classical sculpture). I started to work in this field also. When Celeur, Eugène and Guyudo started with recuperation art, I was there too. They said that I could be helpful for them because I had already a lot of experience. I took part in their activities

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and watched them work. Eugène finally taught me some stuff and I started to work with recuperation art. In the beginning, before we worked together in one place, we had some problems and we started to work in separate places. They did not want us to copy their work. So, I decided to have my own space.” (2014)

I realized in many conversations with the artist that, as far as many Atis Rezistans artists are concerned, the author is not dead in a poststructuralist sense. Roland Barthes (1967) problematizes in his famous essay The Death of the Author the use of biographical data for interpreting literature: “To give an Author to a text is to impose upon that text a stop clause, to furnish it with a final signification, to close the writing. This conception perfectly suits criticism, which can then take as its major task the discovery of the Author […] beneath the work: once the Author is discovered, the text is ‘explained’ […].” (ibid.) In contrast to Barthes, Papa Da highlights precisely how important it is to pay attention to intentions and biographical contexts in order to understand his artworks: “The problem is often not with the artist but with the person who is writing about us. They decide whatever they like. I may work on a piece of art and create a catholic priest and if you come and give it a different name, we have a problem. If you are looking at this image on the wall, I say, for example, it is [the deity] Bosou. But I may use the same image to express something entirely else in a different sculpture. I may say it represents the government killing people here in Haiti. It is my work, so I explain it and not the foreign writer or anybody else. […] They recently did a big exhibition with us in LA and Canada [In Extremis: Death and Life in 21st-Century Haitian Art]. They promised to take us but they did not. We did not benefit from them. Our art travels but we are not. I think the presence of us artists is important in exhibitions where our work is shown.” (2014)

This perspective challenges directly existing structures that define who is commonly considered to be the naming (scholarly and curatorial) authority for artworks and who is able to describe or mediate artworks to audiences.5 Papa Da

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Other artists like Guyodo and Celeur have countered this perspective in my interviews. Guyodo states that a really good piece of art does not need any explanation at all because it is able to speak for itself: “There are many Haitian artists who are not able to speak about their artworks. And they don’t have to because their artworks are so amazing and speak for themselves. American and European artists are very good in explanations, in explaining their works. Even though their work is very weak. The way they explain it, make it very impressive. They are very good in doing this. By explaining their works, they convince everyone that it is a good piece of art although it is

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recenters his own explanations and oral history as the opinion that really matters and pits it against scholarly interpretations. This mirrors Celeur’s criticism: “In the end you will write whatever you like and my opinion will not carry any weight in comparison to yours.” Papa Da has experienced several times that his art objects were able to travel to exhibitions whereas his own body could not due to funding issues and rejected visa applications. This situation has taken its toll on him, but he refuses to give up: “Sometimes my family and friends asked me, why are you still part of the group [Atis Rezistans]. Your work is so good but you never got the chance to travel. Why don’t you give up? The term Atis Rezistans really works in this context for me. We resist giving up. So far, I did not have any opportunities to travel but I keep working and maybe in the future I will.” (Papa Da 2014)

Visiting Papa Da’s exhibition space leads almost inevitably to a visit of his altar room. I witnessed the irritation of other members of Atis Rezistans when I took a visiting friend from Germany to see the Gran Ri artists and she was particularly fascinated by Papa Da’s Musée des Esprits e d’Art. She spent a lot of time inside the altar room, because it was her first contact with the Afro-Caribbean religious system. One of my interlocutors whispered into my ear while we were waiting for her outside: “It is always like that. They stay the longest in Papa Da’s place to speak about vodou. Vodou, vodou, vodou, it is always about vodou.” The intimate proximity of art objects and religious artifacts in Papa Da’s Musée des Esprits e d’Art should not lead to the assumption that both spheres collapse instantly and inextricably into each other. Papa Da explained to me that, to his amusement, some of his Haitian clients also tend to confuse both spheres: “My clients, people around here, they normally know that I am working as a professional artist. So it is nothing special for them. But in December, when I had all my works in my yard, a young man came here to work [for the spirits]. So I gave him a candle and water. He went to a piece of art, in front of a sculpture and threw water because he thought it is related to vodou. And I called him and explained to him that it is not related to vodou. It is a piece of art. I explained to him about it and he understood. Let me tell you the story of

clearly not. The idea and the object have to work together. When you do something and you have a good explanation for it, it is good. But your object must be very good too. I often have translators but I don’t really need to speak. My work speaks for myself.” (Guyodo 2014)

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another woman who also came here. I had a piece with three skulls here in my yard. She came here also to work. She wanted to throw water and light a candle. She went on her knees. She started to say what she had to say and she started to kiss the sculpture. When I saw that I went to her and asked her, ‘What are you doing here?’ She answered, ‘It is Bawon’. And I corrected her. ‘No, it is a piece of art’. There is no relationship between the art objects and the lwa. And I asked her what I can do for you [as a houngan]? And she understood [he laughs].” (ibid.) Fig. 29: Carved sculptures by Papa Da presented in the peristil area of his Musée des Esprits e d’Art

The humorous way in which Papa Da narrates these anecdotes indicates that he draws a clear line between both spheres; but the reactions of his clients also demonstrate how quickly objects can wander from one sphere to the other in the imagination of visitors—Haitian or otherwise. Although none of his art pieces are in fact used in a ritual context in his temple, he clarifies that, theoretically, it would be possible. In the past, he produced artworks for spiritual leaders and used them in ritual contexts: “When they come here and think that everything is related to vodou, they are not completely wrong actually. Because I used to work for houngans too in the past. They came

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here and asked me to create a sculpture for them. Just to put a spirit inside. I used to do this kind of work. When they have them in their house, they asked people to light a candle or to throw alcohol. Spirits can enter any kind of work. But I have to work with the sculpture before. I have to light a candle and throw water every morning. And finally the spirit will come and go inside the object.” (2014)

Jean-Daniel Lafontant, houngan, marketing specialist, and executive director of the Haitian Cultural Foundation, presents contemporary art in the peristil area of the family temple Nah-Ri-Ve in Delmas similarly to Papa Da. He commissioned Guyodo, for example, to create two murals for Nah-Ri-Ve6 and also installs works by Sebastian Jean and Lherrison Dubreus among others in the peristil of the temple. He highlighted in an interview with Richard Arthur Flaming for Clocktower that the peristil space is a social and not a sacred part of a temple: “I sometimes receive a lot [of] criticism. Because they say, […] you are not doing vodou, this is called folklore. But what people often don’t understand, […] is that the yard of the peristil, what they call the peristil itself, it is a social space. It is not a sacred place. There are some sacred elements. What is sacred are the rooms.” (Lafontant 2016)

Prézeau Stephenson gave me a similar explanation: “The peristil is a profane area. It is not sacred. The only sacred part of it is the poto-mitan, but the potomitan needs a ritual for activation and is only temporarily active. You can do everything in this area: cooking, washing or other housework. There are other areas where you cannot enter. The borders are physically very clear[ly] defined. I always understand a peristil as an exhibition space.” (2014) It is important to highlight that Papa Da’s art objects are presented in the peristil and not within the sacred interior of the altar room. The intimate closeness of atelier and peristil also relates to a simple lack of storage facilities and economic resources. Papa Da needs to use the space at hand to present his art. The only carved wooden sculptural work standing on his overcrowded rada altar is a black figure of Bawon Samedi in the catholic iconography as Martin de Porres created by artisan Bòs Papit. The sculpture is decorated with beads, rosary, and cords and stands in the middle of his altar surrounded by a variety of offerings for the lwa like can-

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Guyodo explained to me why he decided to create the La Sirene and Gran Bwa murals for Jean-Daniel Lafontant’s peristil: “In this period I really needed money badly for my son. I had big economic problems. My woman was pregnant and was about to give birth to my son. He is a houngan and he commissioned the artwork. So I did what he wanted to have.” (Guyodo 2014)

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dles, pakét kongo, rum bottles and lithographs depicting Erzulie Freda. Papa Da explained to me that this is a central artwork for the history of the artistic movement since Bòs Papit was the first teacher for the founding generation of the group. He taught Eugène and Celeur as well as Nasson their carving skills, which enabled them to create eskilti klasik for the tourist economy: “This sculpture been here since my father was still alive. It is a gift from my father’s good friend. His name was Bòs Papit. He was the first one who came in this neighborhood working with wood. He taught almost everyone in this neighborhood to work, everyone: Nasson, Celeur, Eugène, they all have been Bòs Papit’s students. He made the sculpture for my father. I am the only one who still has one of his works. Compared to Papit, Nasson is only a child.” (Papa Da 2014)

Bòs Papit’s sculpture is an example for how vodou temples are cultural archives and can be seen as a local museal practice that produces and stores its own art historical knowledge. Papa Da’s altar room is also a significant example for Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s (2015) and Christopher Pinney’s (2004) powerful reminder that history is also produced outside of academia. The wooden sculpture standing on Papa Da’s altar room generates a historical narrative when put in relation to his artworks presented in the public peristil area outside. Papa Da illustrates through his musée d’art the art historical transformation within the art world of Port-au-Prince—and particularly in the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat—from eskilti klasik towards rekiperasyon in the 1990s. Fig. 30: Papa Da’s altar with a figurative sculpture by Bòs Papit; Fig. 31: Close-up of sculpture by Bòs Papit

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Papa Da’s Musée des Esprits e d’Art, Getho’s Royaume des Ordures Vivantes, Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere, and Eugène’s musée d’art are only four examples of a variety of other studios and museums like those by Celeur, Jean Claude Saintilus, Wesner Bazile, Ronald Bazile a.k.a. Cheby, Jerry Reginald Chery, Paterick Elie a.k.a. Kombatan and Katelyne Alexis, among many others. These studios and museums illustrate how the profession of contemporary artist has become a process of “becoming someone” (Stanley Niaah 2010: 49)7 for a disenfranchised Black community in Port-au-Prince. Ordinary spaces are creatively transformed into spectacular spaces of autonomy and self-actualization, in order to wield power in a marginalized social environment. Cultural Studies scholar Sonja Stanley Niaah describes that it is the struggle and insistence on personhood in a world where it is often denied where the “ontological and psychological reality of the innercity dwellers rests: the creative process of making and remaking self and identity in a world that privileges the colour and class of the colonial and metropolitan ideal, compounded by the competition inherent in the urbanscape” (ibid.). Those spectacularly constructed art spaces help the artists to “become someone” in a racist capitalist world that violently denies them personhood and care. Ahmed has conceptualized privilege in her writings as an ‘energy saving device’: Less effort is required to pass through when a world has been already assembled around and for you (2017: 125). I have discussed in this chapter how artists at Gran Ri are assembling new worlds through their laboring imagination, which can accommodate those bodies and needs that are not the somatic and classed norm in many institutionalized art environments in Haiti and abroad. The exhibition spaces by Eugène, Guyodo, Getho, and Papa Da are places for processes of worldmaking where personhood can be reclaimed, identities affirmed, and autonomy over their lives can become augmented with the limited resources at hand. Artists are capable of writing themselves into existence through their musées d’art, which are imaginative and affective breathing spaces where better futures are envisioned, and our collective present is unveiled to be flawed and wrong. I also show in my analysis that these art spaces are not detached from in-

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Sonjah Stanley Niaah describes the process of becoming someone of disenfranchised communities in the context of Dancehall culture in Jamaica with the creole term smadditizin: “A development from the word ‘somebody’, ‘smadditizin’ is an active Jamaicanism explaining the process of becoming somebody. Added to this are the factor class and hierarchy that dominate the process of becoming somebody, especially for those who are at the bottom of the class and race ladders, or not on the ladders at all.” (Stanley Niaah 2010: 49)

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tra-group conflicts because they are embedded in struggles for recognition and social distinction. The artists navigate market demands, social hierarchies, and create at the same time new environments for their creativity, individuality, agency, resilience, and criticism, as a practice of everyday survival and waywardness.

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Disobedient Musealities: The Master’s Tools Revisited ‘cause people got me, got me questioning where’s the love? Black Eyed Peas, 2003

Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere (Atelier of the Bright Children) is one of the most spectacular art installations in the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue Magasin de L’Etat. With three very large, strategically positioned sculptures, he leads his visitors from the main road to his exhibition space, which lies farther off the main road. His studio welcomes its visitors by various large metal sculptures, which are more than two meters in size and grouped against a wall of his house in a narrow alley. The size of the sculptures and the size of the alley are disproportional to each other, and inhabitants as well as audiences have to be careful not to scratch their arms and legs on metal pieces while passing by. The majority of his artworks are installed inside his house, which can be entered through a small door located between these large metal sentinels at the entrance. Guyodo uses the claustrophobic community alley quite unapologetically for his own purposes, while his neighbors are using the little remaining space of the alley in front of his studio to cook for their families or to do laundry while teenagers play video games on a game console attached to a small television screen. The interior of Guyodo’s house, which is quite large for community standards, consists of three rooms connected by a narrow corridor. He presents most of his artistic oeuvre, produced in the last sixteen years, in these three rooms. Thus, every inch of Guyodo’s rooms, including the corridor, are crowded with hundreds of assemblages, paintings, and sculptures. The artworks are everywhere: they are hanging from walls, from the ceiling, and standing on the ground. This overwhelming materiality creates a thick surface overlaying the walls of his entire studio and produces an all-encompassing, walk-in experience of installation art.

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Fig. 32: Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere (entrance and interior)

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Guyodo produces in his Atelier Timoun Klere an aesthetic of material exorbitance, which evokes what Kobena Mercer has termed a “too-muchness” (2011: 4) in Black Atlantic visual culture. Because of the excess of materiality, visitors have to squeeze their bodies past hundreds of sculptures and need to be careful not to bang their heads or scratch their arms. The massive installation is overwhelming and produces a quite claustrophobic atmosphere. Artworks presented in Atelier Timoun Klere are not a fixed installation; objects change and move and are constantly repositioned by the artist. Each time I visited his atelier between 2011 and 2015 his artworks were placed in new positions. Guyodo described to me his artistic oeuvre which is installed in his studio with the following explanation: “I am interested in almost everything. Everything! My art is dedicated to love and politics. And I like to work about people with physical disabilities. I consider myself a person with these kinds of problems. I am not able to have anything in my life that I want, what I deserve. I’m a person with a lot of problems. This is why I consider myself a handicapped person. I still have my arms and legs, but I have barely any opportunities in my life.” (2014)

What instantly hit the visitors’ eyes are Guyodo’s favored use of reflecting materials like sequins and silver foil in many of the art pieces. I have mentioned in chapter one that he also sprays many assemblages and sculptures monochromatically with silver spray paint. Sparkling surface materials produce luminous light effects when dim light falls into Atelier Timoun Klere’s rooms through a single small window. Rays of light hitting artworks create beautiful shimmering reflections on the artworks’ surfaces. In aesthetic terms, the studio is staged as a visual experience of shimmers, which media and gender scholar Eliza Steinbock describes as a modifier for an “aesthetic of transformation” by bringing the concept to bare on her discussion of trans* cinema: “Iterations of the shimmer in the writings of philosopher and of trans and film scholars, including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Susan Stryker, and Steven Shaviro, employ shimmer as a noun akin to sparkle or flash, the verb to shimmer, sometimes translated as scintillate or glimmer, or shimmering as a modifier to describe change in its alluring, twinkling, flickering form.” (2019: 9)

Painted cardboards plastered with different sequin fabrics in figurative shapes are sparkling captivatingly and produce a mirage of wealth and luxury. Guyodo explained to me that visitors started to call his atelier Ali Baba’s Cave and that

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he sees the mass of accumulated objects as a foreshadowing of his future wealth: “Just have a look around at all these hundreds of art pieces in my studio. I am already a millionaire. I have several rooms full of work. I only have to sell them.” (Guyodo 2014) Contemporary artists, like Damien Hirst or Jake and Dino Chapman, are often mentioned as a direct source of inspiration by the artist, because they can be associated with financial success in the growing international art market. Guyodo often equates the wish to become successful as an artist with a desire to become exorbitantly rich: “Why is Damien Hirst a millionaire for using human skulls in his art when we Haitian artists are called vodou artists and remain poor?” (Guyodo 2014) This was a rhetorical question, which Guyodo asked me repeatedly during our interviews. News of increasing art market records for postwar and contemporary art at auction houses find its way to Haiti and produce fascination, desire, and political envy in the Gran Ri artists. Thus, the use of reflecting surface materials as an aesthetic of shimmers evokes what art historian Krista Thompson calls the visual economy of light in African diasporic aesthetics: Fig. 33: Guyodo’s series Kings and Queens presented on the floor of Atelier Timoun Klere

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“What I describe as a visual economy of light is in part a product of everyday aspirational practices of black communities, who make do and more with what they have, creating prestige through the resources at hand. […] These popular expressions make conspicuously hypervisible the economy of late capitalism and how it creates objects of desire through technologies of light. […] Bling and related notions of shine may be understood as part of a black popular cultural and scholarly approach that is attentive to diasporic peoples’ intrinsic place within, estrangement from, or relationship to modern capitalism and Western societies’ definition of citizenship.” (2015: 25)

Following Thompson’s argument, the interest in the visual economy of light in Guyodo’s artworks suggests less a conscious interest in displaying light than an acute awareness of the visual strategies through which power and status are visualized in capitalist societies (ibid.: 103). On the floor of his main room, Guyodo has placed several small wooden sculptures that are opulently dressed in colorful, sparkling sequin fabrics. According to Guyodo, these sculptures depict historical, aristocratic figures of kings and queens and shall help people to remember that Haiti was once the wealthiest colony in the Caribbean region: “As you may know, people who are living in castles, Kings and Queens, have a certain way how they dress themselves. They look very different from other people. Haiti was a kingdom in the past too. I try to capture this. I don’t want to present wealth. I’m a poor man. But I want people to remember that Haiti was called in the past ‘La Perle des Antilles’ (‘The Pearl of the Antilles’). We usually forget the past. But the past was very different from what we see today.” (Guyodo 2014)

Remembering and reimagining Haiti through these aristocratic, wealthy figures as one of the richest colonies in the world produces an important “imaginative [and affective] breathing space” (Scott 1990: 168); similar to Getho’s art, which I discussed in the previous chapter, it lays open the arbitrariness of contemporary hierarchical systems of domination that are revealed to be neither products of a ‘natural’ order nor set in stone but rather historical, human-made constructs— and thus potentially changeable. Remembering Haiti’s revolutionary past, Black self-liberation, and Black monarchs like Henri Christophe, Marie Louise Coidavid, or Jean-Jacques Dessalines through these shimmering artworks is a way to imagine the possibility of a new, prosperous future. Instead of concentrating on singularized art objects, I proposed in chapter one to understand the exhibition modalities developed by artists like Guyodo in an art historical trajectory leading to Benjamin’s installation art of the 1990s. Guyodo’s artistic practice lays a masking facade over the entire architecture of

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his house and restructures certain parts of the neighborhood into an allencompassing art installation. This art practice evokes what Mercer calls postcolonial baroque (Mercer 2011) in the context of the double-sidedness of the mask in Caribbean masking and carnival traditions. While one side of the mask produces a spectacular, seductive surface, it also deflects from the backside of the mask that creates an intimate inner space of melancholy: “When we translate trauerspiel as ‘sorrow songs’, in the vocabulary of W.E.B. Du Bois, we understand not only that black diaspora traditions of masking and masquerade—from the carnival arts of Trinidad or New Orleans to the wigs and gold chains of the bling aesthetic— involve the construction of spectacular surfaces that charm, seduce, and beguile the eye, but also that the artifice of such masking hides and protects the inner world of diaspora subjectivity, acting as a hollow shell that allows the self a contemplative space of melancholy in which to count its losses and hence come to terms with them. Under the conditions of diaspora life, the catastrophe has always already happened for the violent act of separation brought about by forced migration […] means there is a constant reckoning with the constitutive losses out of which self-hood is socially shaped. Whether we call it diaspora baroque or postcolonial baroque, what matters is the double-sidedness of the mask whereby the visuality of the exterior face serves to both solicit and deflect the gaze of others, while also containing and hence enabling the work of mourning that takes place on the side of the black interior.” (ibid.: 4-6)

A postcolonial baroque aesthetics is embedded in a “polyvocal dynamism” which often comes along with a refusal to accept both sides of this dualism: “Its dialogical character, in Bahktin’s terms, has been univocalized so that its colorfulness is accepted but not the violence; its seductiveness is celebrated but not the sickly suggestion of perversion and decay; its attractiveness is acknowledge but anything repellent goes unseen.” (ibid.: 8) With regard to this reading of the double-sidedness of the mask, Guyodo’s exhibition space can be read as spectacular, constructed shells, which deflect from a fragile socio-economic situation and daily experiences of the structural violence of poverty and open up a virtual space for shimmering transformation. The spectacular too-muchness and abundance of materiality form a protective exterior that hides the precariousness and fragility of a social reality that ‘subaltern’ artists experience on a daily basis. Poor living conditions and fragile means of livelihood are transformed into surfaces of spectacular material wealth and opportunities to claim one’s personhood.

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Fig. 34: Interior of Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere

Furthermore, singular art objects become opaque and less easily readable as soon as they are installed within Guyodo’s too-muchness. Opaque refers here to Martiniquan cultural theorist and poet Edouard Glissant’s postcolonial concept of opacity. Glissant (1989) argues in Caribbean Discourse that everyone has a right to be opaque. Opacity in this sense is a postcolonial response and counterdiscourse against imperatives of ‘understanding’ and claims the right to not be understood completely. Opacity, as seen by Glissant (ibid.: 156), is a postcolonial defense mechanism against the hierarchical, objectifying way in which understanding has operated in academic processes and colonial contexts of knowledge production. Understanding appears here as an “act of aggression because it constructs the Other as an object of knowledge” (Britton 1999: 19). Against this background, an aesthetic of shimmers and the visual economy of light increase the effect of opaqueness. In this reading, the exhibition spaces at Gran Ri are a politics of deviance which reject common museal practices of singularized and illuminated ‘masterpieces’ in the globalized art world; they tend to disperse the dissecting white voyeuristic gaze of curators, scholars, and tourists. Spectacular surfaces of an abundance of accumulated materiality attract attention and deflect at the same time the penetrating white gazes of visitors, who constantly try to fixate art productions within legible discourses. The heaviness of

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used materials like metal, wood, and plastic transcends into an immaterial, flickering, and polyvalent realm that rejects and disobeys intellectual fixation. Accumulation as a display aesthetic also links the Gran Ri artists to a wider transatlantic formation of artistic practices of African and African diaspora arts. Arnold Rubin (1993) proposes the concept of accumulation as a crucial paradigm for African sculpture, and Suzanne Blier also addresses the “primacy of assemblage” (1988: 137) in Vodun arts. Saint Lucian poet Derek Walcott (2012) similarly explains Caribbean art with a focus on an accumulative paradigm and uses the metaphor of a broken vase that is glued together to define Caribbean art as a restoration of shattered histories; shattered by the traumatic experience of the middle passage. He explains: “Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole. The glue that fits the pieces is the sealing of its original shape. The glue that fits the pieces is sealing of its original shape. It is such a love that reassembles our African and Asiatic fragments, the cracked heirlooms whose restoration shows its white scars. The gathering of broken pieces is the care and pain of the Antilles, and if the pieces are disparate, ill-fitting, they contain more pain than their original sculpture, those icons and sacred vessels taken for granted in their ancestral places. Antillean art is this restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary, our archipelago becoming a synonym for pieces broken off from the original continent.” (ibid.: 21)

According to Rubin, most African accumulative artistic expressions reveal, “that even those which seem most random and accidental in composition are actually developed in accordance with consistent principles” (1993: 7). He groups materials used in ‘African’ sculpture into two broad categories, namely (1) power and (2) display. For display, materials like beads, fabrics, and mirrors are added to enhance an object visually. For power, materials such as skulls, horns, and sacrificial accumulations are added to concentrate available capabilities (ibid.). Dana Rush (2010; cf. also 2013) refers to the work by Rubin and Blier to develop unfinishedness and ephemerality as two central categories for conceptualizing transatlantic vodou aesthetics. Rush describes: “Vodun logic is one of process, which is decidedly non-Cartesian and does not create value or meaning by producing finished, discrete things.” (2010: 61; 2013) I see a similar unfinishedness expressed in the art spaces at Gran Ri, which are not fixed entities but always

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changing, evolving, and in a constant state of flux and transformation.1 The artists are constantly rearranging the artworks stored in their art spaces. Every visit in the neighborhood will come along with new arrangements of art objects, which produce new opaque relationships. Prézeau Stephenson was the first curator who tried to capture this aspect of accumulative installation art in Guyodo’s artistic practice when she curated his first solo exhibition at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA in 2004. She describes Guyodo’s art as follows, “A pupil of the sculptor Céleur Jean Hérard, Guyodo is a young wildcat in our urban jungle. Optimism, humor, and poetry underpin his polymorphous works. Rabelaisian in its dense, comical outrageousness, reminiscent of Duchamp in its casualness, Guyodo’s work uses techniques from pop art, such as that of the ready-made. The bedroom/workshop in which this post-Dadaist utopia-maker lives is a skillful installation, which can only be made out by candlelight even in broad daylight: masks, sculptures, paintings, and appliqués are piled up so high so as to block out the bare iron of the roof. Plastic, tins, rubber, wire, ventilators, opalescent light bulbs, the vivid garishness of a sunbeam hitting the sky blue wall; the bed can hardly be made out under the pile. How can such work be exhibited?” (Prézeau Stephenson 2008: 103)

In this chapter, I want to discuss Prézeau Stephenson’s question: How can such staggering work be exhibited outside Guyodo’s studio? What is at stake when we define Guyodo’s exhibition modality as a curatorial politics of deviance and try to bring them in dialogue with different spatial settings like museums and Kunsthallen? I will use Prézeau Stephenson’s curation as a central guideline for my discussion and will come back to the question already formulated in the introduction of my study: Can autonomous curations of ‘source communities’ from Port-au-Prince effectively contribute with their politics of deviance to a decolonial modification of the official chain of power in the globalized artistic milieu?

1

Donald Cosentino (1995: 43) describes the Fon aesthetic of assemblage as the ‘purest’ persisting link between the religious arts of Haiti and Africa. I will not go into more detail about the relationship between the sacred arts of Haitian vodou and the artworks and display aesthetic developed by the members of Atis Rezistans. When I left Portau-Prince, I had to promise Guyodo that I would not explain his artworks within a framework of vodou or altar aesthetics (for a more general discussion of his opinion about vodou, see chapter two).

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Dealing with these site-specific exhibition modalities entails a conceptual dilemma for researchers. These exhibition spaces are produced within three interacting and often contradictory fields, which make it impossible to describe them in easy celebratory terms as an autonomous artistic practice of decolonial resistance or as a form of self-determined empowerment. The three interacting and often contradicting factors informing the production of these exhibition spaces are: (1) disguised infrapolitics, (2) a severe lack of resources, and (3) decolonial resistance. Cathy J. Cohen (2004) argues that many acts that are labeled ‘resistance’ by scholars of oppositional politics have not been attempts at resistance at all but, instead, express their authors’ struggle of maintaining or regaining at least a limited form of agency in their lives, as they try to secure human rewards such as pleasure, fun, and autonomy. Do we risk romanticizing poverty if we value the art spaces solely as a form of decolonial resistance and simply transplant them into institutional settings? Do I overestimate the exhibition modalities developed by the Gran Ri artists as a form of decolonial resistance, if they might also be understood as merely a strategy to secure a small amount of autonomy for a group of artists living in poverty? Continuing the quote above, Cohen goes on to explain: “In no way is this statement meant to negate the political potential to be found in such behavior. It does underscore, however, my stance that the work marginal people pursue to find and protect some form of autonomy is not inherently politicized work and the steps leading from autonomy to resistance must be detailed and not assumed. We must begin to delineate the conditions under which transgressive behavior becomes transformative and deviant practice is transformed into publicized resistance.” (ibid.: 38)

This chapter is an attempt to delineate and elaborate the conditions under which the Gran Ri artists become agents of a transformative process in the globalized artistic milieu without being absorbed into the official chain of power. Therefore, my argument leads me from (1) the presentation of singularized art objects of the group, to (2) the presentation of self-determined curations by ‘source communities’, and finally to (3) intersectional community approaches which share authority, values, and resources in order to produce new communities of care. I agree here with Cohen, who argues: “It just might be that after devoting so much of our energy to the unfulfilled promise of access through respectability, a politics of deviance, with a focus on the transformative potential found in deviant practice, might be a more viable strategy for radically improving the lives and possibilities of those most vulnerable in Black communities.” (2004: 30) I propose disobedient musealities as a concept to capture the transformative poten-

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tial of curatorial politics that are deemed deviant and transfer the exhibition modalities developed by the Gran Ri artists into institutional environments as a starting point to share authority, values, resources, and create social spaces to care for each other. According to Richards, “[i]t is a question—strictly speaking—of ascertaining whether or not the alleged fragmentation and dispersal of the centre modifies the categorization of power that established imbalances with regard to exchanges of value and meaning” (1995: 263). I will review the conditions under which politics of deviance are not merely swallowed up and appropriated by neoliberal art museums’ benevolent inclusiveness—especially at a time when, since the 1990s, curation has also become a common medium of artistic practice in art exhibitions.2 Why are the members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans denied the possibility to engage in curatorial practices of their own artworks and thus mediate them autonomously to audiences outside their Haitian neighborhood, all the while ‘Western’ artists are free to do so?

5.1 GUYODO AT LE CENTRE CULTUREL AFRICAMERICA Guyodo’s first solo exhibition, which is called GUYODO was curated by Prézeau Stephenson in Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA in Port-au-Prince in 2004, is of particular interest for my discussion. Surprisingly, it is the only exhibition in the sixteen years-long exhibition history of the group, which tried to transfer the mechanism of art presentation developed by Guyodo to a new environment. Since the beginning, Prézeau Stephenson took the studios as a practice of installation art seriously. What I find significant in her curatorial approach is that she resisted using the exhibition space to legitimize or valorize Guyodo’s art in a ‘high art’ environment; instead, she ‘dissimilated’ Guyodo’s art further by bringing not only his artworks but also his exhibition modality to Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA.3 Prézeau Stephenson virtually transferred Guyodo’s Atelier

2

Paul O’Neill describes in detail how in the 1990s curation became an autonomous medium for artistic practice: “[…] many artists have adopted the practice of curatorship as a medium of production in its own right. In turn, since the 1990s, this has implied the ‘dissolution of categories instead of the exchange of roles’, which has resulted in a convergence of artistic and curatorial practice.” (2012: 87)

3

According to Prézeau Stephenson, Guyodo’s solo exhibition unfortunately was very poorly visited at this time because the audience had security concerns to travel within

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Timoun Klere into a new setting and did not follow normalizing exhibition standards like the modernist white cube. Many exhibitions in Europe and the United States shy away from doing the same. We have already seen in chapter two how the physical space of the gallery or the art museum is used to legitimize the artworks by Atis Rezistans as contemporary art. Farquharson, for example, argues that “[f]or Kafou: Haiti, Art and Vodou, the gallery walls remain white and the art works are evenly spaced and lit—as is customary in exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. By sticking to type we sought to minimize the distance between Kafou and more mainstream contemporary art, hoping to create the conditions for fresh encounters between the two.” (2012: 10) The need for legitimization through customary spatial arrangements reveals a problematic white curatorial entitlement operating on the ideology of conditional hospitality, which defines a clear position for those who are ‘generous hosts’ and those who are ‘grateful guests’ in need of an ‘upward’ valorization. The Gran Ri artists find legitimization and validation in art museums mainly through the implementation of conventional structures of presentation. Art historian and curator Elena Filipovic (2010) poses the significant question why the white cube seems to have become the unquestioned, normed structure to present artworks on a global scale. “If globalization, as is so often maintained, problematizes the binary opposition of the national and the international, defying national borders and unhinging dominant cultural paradigms to allow the entry of histories, temporalities, and conditions of production from beyond the West, then why do so many conventional structures remain at exactly those sites that seek to undermine the epistemological and institutional bases of these structures?” (ibid.: 330)

And she goes on to wonder: “The White Cube is, to cite O’Doherty […] ‘one of modernism’s triumphs’, a Western conceit constructed to uphold some of its most cherished values […]. To question Basualdo’s notion of decentering: can a true decentering of traditional notions of modernity be fully accomplished so long as the Western museum’s frame is exported as the unquestioned context by which to legitimize an apparently expanding canon?” (ibid.)

Port-au-Prince to come and see the exhibition at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA that was located downtown in Pacot.

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Fig. 35; Fig. 36: Exhibition GUYODO at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2004

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This reveals a very interesting resonance between Prézeau Stephenson’s curatorial work and curators from abroad: we saw in chapter one and two how Prézeau Stephenson has a more ‘assimilative’ approach when it comes to artwork iconographies, while she freely dissimilates exhibition modalities. In contrast, many ‘Euro-U.S. American’ curators tend to dissimilate object iconographies of Atis Rezistans by concentrating in their selections predominately on vodou, poverty, morbidity, and hyper-masculinity, while they use standardized, assimilative modalities of exhibition-making, like the white cube for instance, to prove the legitimacy for the artists being presented in those institutions; the Other is evoked but always contained and policed by white walls and white curatorial control. The moment the artworks arrive in ‘Euro-U.S. American’ museums they seem to become—aesthetically, ideologically, and affectively—enwrapped in an all-compassing whiteness. In our interview, Prézeau Stephenson explains the idea of her exhibition as follows: “The idea was to show Eugene, Celeur and Guyodo’s art pieces in their local embeddedness, in their local context. Because, when I move the art works to Barbados, or even when I showed them in the garden of the Le Centre AfricAmericA, I de-contextualize these art pieces, and it was an impoverishment for their creativity in my eyes. I felt it. I was never able to reproduce the feeling that you have when you are there [at Grand Rue]. I should have taken all of Eugene’s and Guyodo’s house. Even when I did Guyodo's exhibition, I tried to re-create an emotion. But I could not achieve a similar strength of his art works that exists in Guyodo’s place.” (Prézeau Stephenson 2014)

Prézeau Stephenson’s description emphasizes that she intended to recreate an emotion with her exhibition. She installed the exhibition in dialogue with the artist and positioned hundreds of his art objects as an art installation that filled the entire exhibition space at Le Centre AfricAmericA. With that exhibition, Prézeau Stephenson introduced Guyodo to a new contemporary art clientele as an individual artistic voice. The light was dimmed and adjusted to the conditions in Guyodo’s atelier, and Prézeau Stephenson even transplanted his old, used mattress onto the exhibition floor in Pacot. The exhibition spaces of the members and dropouts of Atis Rezistans function not only as spaces for art presentation but are, at the same time, the places where they live and sleep in close proximity to their art pieces. It could be argued that Prézeau Stephenson’s exhibition modality relates to a common strategy in ethnographic museums, which tries to show, explain, and even reconstruct in a didactic way the local context of production for decontex-

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tualized art objects. But Prézeau Stephenson does not reconstruct the socioeconomic surrounding of a slum neighborhood in her exhibition, as did, for example, Jamaican artist Dawn Scott for the mixed media installation A Cultural Object (1985) in the National Gallery of Jamaica. Through her installation, Scott virtually brought the physical and cultural environment of the Kingston inner cities into a ‘high culture’ space like the NGJ, as a walk-in art installation that captures the sensory experience of visiting an inner city-community in Kingston (Poupeye 2016b). Only the dirty mattress on the floor and adjusted lighting can be read as subtle references to Guyodo’s marginal living situation. Prézeau Stephenson makes sure to present Guyodo in his solo exhibition as an autonomous artist and curator and not as a cultural, marginal object. She refuses to rip apart Guyodo’s protective shell by transferring countless of Guyodo’s art objects into a new spatial setting rather than presenting singularized art objects for visual contemplation in front of white walls. The art pieces in the exhibition are not reduced to the visual sense and can remain in a rhizomatic interaction with each other: individual objects remain opaque and difficult to read. Guyodo, like most of the artists in the neighborhood, does not theorize his particular form of art installation verbally. But he answered my question of whether I should consider his Atelier Timoun Klere as a curated installation with the following decisive explanation: “Yes, for sure! I’m both. I’m an atis (artist) and a komisè (curator). It is like the work of a designer what I’m doing here in my atelier. I can say that I’m a curator. I’m working as a designer and I curate my art, yes. It is another way to put life into my art. To make my art appear more alive.” (Guyodo 2014) This last sentence shows a clear curatorial intention. Guyodo uses the limited space which is available to him and restructures it in a way that animates his art in order for it to be perceived as “more alive”. Prézeau Stephenson accepted Guyodo with her exhibition as an installation artist and curator who had been presenting his assemblages, sculptures, and paintings in his exhibition space Atelier Timoun Klere for many years. In a conversation, Prézeau Stephenson also told me that during the early 2000s Guyodo had produced mainly small-sized objects which responded to the narrow dimension of his house and were supposed to be seen while squatting on one’s haunches rather than standing upright. His art had not yet taken on the impressive monumentality of many of his current freestanding art pieces. It is not easy to produce attention for art pieces presented within a bidonvil, but (1) monumentality and (2) massive accumulations of objects are two curatorial strategies that make it possible to present art that stands out from the turbulent surrounding of a chaotic neighborhood, which constantly draws attention away from art objects. While Prézeau Stephenson saw strength in this aspect of

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‘museal self-articulation’ developed at Gran Ri, many visitors from abroad, by contrast, express their experience with these exhibition spaces through feelings of discomfort and frustration. They ascribe a lack of knowledge and agency to the artists because of their exhibition modalities. Although visitors are usually impressed with the adventurous experience of visiting these spectacular art studios, many of them have expressed to me their doubts about whether this is really an appropriate way to exhibit artworks. This perspective also obstructs the view on local inter-klas dynamics that have shaped the genre of installation art in Port-au-Prince in dialog with Mario Benjamin since the 1990s (cf. chapter one).

5.2 MONSTROUS ORDERS AND UGLY FEELINGS This chapter proposes an approach to exhibition spaces that rethinks the notion of curation against the background of ‘subaltern’ mechanisms of art presentation, ultimately proposing the term monstrous orders as an alternative that captures the specific dynamics embedded in the form of artistic self-presentation. The mechanisms of art presentation developed between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Eta leave many visitors with an unsettling, alienating feeling of frustration. The exhibition spaces are overcrowded and lack the curatorial control to which consumers of ‘high art’ are accustomed. During my fieldwork in Port-auPrince, I have repeatedly heard foreign and local visitors complain that artists seem to be unable to create an environment where their art objects can be adequately contemplated, appreciated, and thus rightfully validated. Although celebrated for being a spectacular experience for visitors, these exhibition spaces are frequently considered to be an inadequate way of presenting art objects. In a conversation with me, German journalist Katrin Sandmann, for example, described Eugène’s excessively crowded musée d’art as a “creative suffocation” after she had filmed an episode for her documentary series Kulturkrieger (Culture Warriors) for German television in 2012. Another example is photographer Laura Heyman, who wondered if Atis Rezistans are incapable of producing an environment where their artworks can find adequate validation, and in numerous conversations with me Gordon has wished that she could hide some of the hundreds of artworks somewhere in a storage room and clean the area from overcrowding piles of artworks. I also encountered how a female visitor from Haiti, who lives close to the Gran Ri artists in downtown Port-au-Prince, responded with downright disgust when she entered Getho’s Royaume des Ordures Vivantes for the first time. In contrast to many foreign visitors coming to the area, she did not feel obliged to be polite about her opinion on the ateliers or to hide her repulsion. After she had

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entered Royaume des Ordures Vivantes, she looked shocked and disgusted and boldly asked the following questions: “Getho, have you lost your mind? Why are you sitting here in all this filth, dirt, and dust speaking to a blan? Is this a real skull over there? Your house is disgusting.” Getho tried to assuage the woman’s disgust by calmly explaining to her the socio-political meaning of the sculpture Ayiti, where he integrated a human skull into the composition. Triggered by his explanation, a short debate about Haitian politics ensued between artist and visitors. In comparison to other houses in the neighborhood, the artist’s ateliers are filled with an abundance of chaotically stacked artworks covered in dust and spider webs. These exhibition spaces can also be seen as a politics of deviance, for many inhabitants of the same neighborhood cannot understand why those artists choose to live in dusty storage rooms with hundreds of art objects, which negatively effects their quality of life. I have already described earlier that the local community had seen artists working in the neighborhood as ‘crazy’ during the early founding years of the group, before the attention for their artworks attracted visitors from a klas piwo a. Poverty cannot be equated with disarray and dirtiness, and most houses in the neighborhood are carefully arranged and clean. Although garbage disposal is of course a huge problem for the community, most people beautifully decorate interiors of their houses to make the most of what they have. After I got the chance to visit ‘regular’, that is ‘non-artistic,’ family homes in the neighborhood, I was surprised with the striking contrast between the houses which had become artistic ateliers and regular family homes. My affective response of being surprised that houses out of corrugated metal and wood are orderly and clean inside, reveals a classist and racist preconception of how people in poverty are supposed to live. Many neighbors cannot understand why the artists are living like ‘compulsive hoarders’ in houses filled with filth, dust, and detritus. The art spaces are very difficult to keep clean and many insects, spiders, lizards and mice are living in dark corners of the dusty accumulations of objects. The extreme accumulation of hundreds of artistic objects, which are in themselves object-accumulations, makes it difficult for visitors not to be sensorially overwhelmed and stunned by the accumulated mass of collective creativity. Every single assemblage integrated into this installation awaits attention and wants to narrate its own particular story. I propose to describe the unsettling feelings that many visitors experience when visiting Atis Rezistans’ studios with Sianne Ngai’s terminology as an “ugly feeling”. We saw in chapter three that Ngai (2005: 7) describes ugly feelings as dysphoric, non-cathartic, and negative feelings, which are produced in situations

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of suspended agency and states of inaction. “[Ugly feelings] are organized by trajectories of repulsion rather than attraction, by phobic strivings ‘away from’ rather than philic striving ‘towards’.” (ibid.: 11) The ugly feeling that is evoked in many visitors, or the “creative suffocating” described by Sandmann, is a bodily reaction to difference that breaks with the normalized expectations that global art professionals bring to the presentation of art objects. There also lies a disguised infrapolitics in these exhibition spaces. I have seen several times how ugly feelings help produce charity for the artists. By creating art spaces, which are experienced by visitors as a form of suspended and lacking agency, the Gran Ri artists manage to produce a desire in their audience to help develop more ‘appropriate’ promotional tools and adequate exhibition modalities for these artworks. While a large graffiti sprayed on a wall in front of Papa Da’s exhibition space addresses audiences explicitly with a written message in English—reading “Ghetto We Need Help”—I argue that the exhibition spaces produce a similar message on a subtler affective level. Through strategic marginality and dramatized curated poverty, the artists seem to mobilize charity by making use of the affective repulsion foreign visitors experience when they visit the studios’ disarray. Being perceived as lacking agency is thus a calculated, hidden infrapolitics that generates charity through disguised agency. Hiding one’s agency from foreigners is thus a form of enacting agency. We have seen in chapter four that the presentation of massive accumulations of art objects and the central use of the term travay (to work) show that value is, in fact, also produced through the presentation of productivity and diligence. What I describe here as a politics of deviance, and what is often experienced as suspended agency, is also a claim to respectability in the narratives of many artists. In the case of Eugène’s musée d’art, the mass of accumulated art works also expresses his status as a gwo nèg and fosters his hierarchical position as leader of the group. The experience of visiting the area breaks with normative habits of perceiving art and thus irritates a learned habitus in visitors, which produces an unsettling, ugly feeling which I call here ‘monstrosity.’ This term should not be understood pejoratively but indicates metaphorically an affect produced by difference within an audience. It is evoked through (1) the production and presentation of an endless supply of sculptures, (2) the dusty, rotten and decomposed state of many of these artworks, (3) artworks populated by bugs, spiders, lizards, rats, mice, and other animals and, finally, (4) the tendency of many visitors to read the overly crowded installations as an expression of the marginalized socioeconomic living conditions of these artists and, therefore, primarily as obstructed agency. In this context, it is also helpful to look at the way Nirmal Puwar uses

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the figure of the monster to explain how racialized bodies can be perceived in white institutions. She explains: “One thing that monsters do is defy conventional boundaries. They have entered spaces where their bodies are neither historically or conceptually the ‘norm’. For those for whom the whiteness of these spaces provides a comforting familiarity, the arrival of racialized members can represent the monstrous. Why? Because ‘monsters scare the hell out of us and remind us that we don’t know who we are. They bring us to no man’s land and fill us with fear and trembling.’ (Kearney, Strangers, Gods and Monsters, 2003, 117) As the incongruous, they invade the normative location of bodies in space [...] They threaten the status quo.” (Puwar 2004: 48)

The effect of monstrosity and the detection of (supposedly) suspended agency, produces a desire in people to step in and help. Thus, it is not surprising that, as soon as the art objects travel to different art institutions of the global elite, this curatorial self-presentation seems to be completely forgotten. The artworks by the artists are no longer presented as a monstrous order but instead as singularized and aestheticized art objects, which are selected, positioned, cleaned and conceptually framed by art connoisseurs and curators. The art object is assimilated into modernist paradigms of presentation, preservation, and knowledge production. Museums with their mandate to preserve also cannot afford to bring fungus or live animals into their collections. Hence, the art objects need to get cleaned and disinfected.4

5.3 RECONFIGURING HIERARCHIES THROUGH A POLITICS OF DEVIANCE Although Atis Rezistans are clearly breaking with Geraldo Mosquera’s distinction of curated and curating cultures, art professionals from a klas piwo a are for the most part still ignoring those forms of art presentation in their museological discussions of Atis Rezistans’ artworks. These popular artists curate their own exhibition spaces and retain their right to self-determination, but this selfdetermination does not translate into art institutions under white control, because it jars with white cube exhibition modalities as a means of validation and legiti-

4

Prézeau Stephenson told me in an interview how artworks by Dubreus Lherisson, for example, had to be taken out of the exhibition Haïti, deux siècles de creation artistique at the Grand Palais in Paris because curators where afraid that fungus could spread from these artworks to other artworks in the exhibition (Prézeau Stephenson 2014).

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mization. When I was asked by Gordon to help her curate the exhibition Nouvo Rezistans at the Institut Français in Haiti on the occasion of the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in 2011, she was quick to reject my first idea of letting the Haitian artists select their own art pieces for the exhibition. She reestablished curatorial control and authority and unfortunately denied the artists the ability to select adequate art pieces for the exhibition. Although the art pieces by Atis Rezistans are celebrated as a form of ‘subaltern’ resistance from below, the artists are still denied the right to—and in a sense the capacity for—self-determination. The Gran Ri artists are seen incapable to judge the quality of their own artworks. This example shows again how decolonial resistance in the arts is often evoked but only through a process of carefully policing BIPoC artists through a white curatorial support team. After seeing the selection of the artists, I was myself relieved that Gordon and I had not followed my first idea and that we had selected the pieces for the exhibition ourselves. It was fascinating to contemplate that the final exhibition would have looked completely different if the artists themselves had selected the exhibits. Their own ideas of quality differed strikingly from our supposedly curatorial ‘connoisseurship’. My emotional response of relief shows how I experienced the selections proposed by the artists as inadequate—and indeed ‘monstrous’. In retrospect, I see our behavior as symptomatic for inter-klas relationships and for an epistemic marginalization that is produced by an arrogant lack of trust in the members of Atis Rezistans. Such behavior mirrors Paolo Freire’s description of a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think within inter-klas collaborations. “[C]ertain members of the oppressor class join the oppressed in their struggle for liberation, thus moving from one pole of the contraction to the other. [...] It happens, however, that as they cease to be exploiters or indifferent spectators or simply the heirs of exploitation and move to the side of the exploited, they almost always bring with them the marks of their origin: their prejudices and their deformations, which include a lack of confidence in the people’s ability to think, to want, to know...The generosity of the oppressors is nourished by an unjust order, which must be maintained in order to justify that generosity. Our converts, on the other hand, truly desire to transform the unjust order; but because of their background they believe that they must be the executors of the transformation. They talk about the people, but they do not trust them; and trusting the people is the indispensable precondition for revolutionary change.” (Freire 1972: 46)

The extreme abundance of art objects presented in the artistic spaces also evokes a desire in curators to enact their power and expertise by selecting artworks out of an abundance of hundreds of artworks in order to achieve a better contempla-

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tion; this selection clearly favors the visual sense and excludes other modes of perception. When Haitian artists are understood as being incapable of selecting their own artworks and of speaking about quality, curators can step in and claim this position. Curatorial work in this reading does not appear as hierarchical power because it can claim to be generous help. This shows again how a desire to feel active and giving vis-à-vis non-white Others manifests as an aspect of progressive racism in curatorial work. Artists who are producing ugly feelings within their supportive network through a strategically staged lack of agency also evoke what cultural anthropologist Christopher Steiner has described as “calculated disarray” (1994: 12) in storehouses of ‘West African’ art traders. Steiner describes disarray as a mechanism to produce a feeling in collectors that makes them believe they are ‘discovering’ something that was formerly undiscovered: “The sense of disarray in the storehouse is, at least in part, the result of abandon, but it is also a calculated way in which a trader creates the impression that buried inside his storehouse may be a real treasure.” (ibid.: 42) I remember my conversation with Getho about which of his artworks he would like to present in the exhibition Nouvo Rezistans. Getho responded that he would like to present a new sculpture which he had recently created out of metallic wire. It depicted an unexceptional looking mouse. While his complex socio-critical oeuvre formed the literal backdrop to our conversation, he insisted that he really would like to present the ‘wire mouse’ in the exhibition. In the end, Gordon and I chose to go with a different artwork and we presented instead the figurative piece called Komedyen (Comedian) in the exhibition, which convinced us with its beautiful message: The assemblage depicts a comedian and discusses the need to again find humor and ease after the devastating experience of the earthquake in 2010. When I returned to Getho and asked him why he had preferred to show the sculpture depicting a mouse instead of the socio-critical artworks from his oeuvre, which Gordon and I had considered his ‘hidden treasure’, he responded that he wanted to show his craftsmanship and that he was able to skillfully transform a discarded ball of wire into a realistic looking mouse. The aesthetic and technique of the mouse is unique in comparison to other artworks produced from colleagues, and Getho tried to find a way to stand out from the remaining group by claiming his artistic individuality. I had similar conversation with other members of the group. Artist Evel Romain, for example, wanted to present his small-scale paintings in the exhibition instead of his impressive monumental, wooden totemic compositions beautifully decorated with layers of rope. Painting is a less common artistic medium in the

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neighborhood.5 The desire to stand out as individual artistic producers becomes evident here. While artists try to find individual positions of recognition, we have seen earlier how curators and visiting artists, by contrast, persistently tend to emphasize collectivity. Ironically, Gordon and I had a similar concept for the exhibition Nouvo Rezistans, and we wanted to show the differences of individual producers from the new generation of artists emerging in the neighborhood. But the power to classify these particular artistic differences remained with us. The Gran Ri artists seek to be perceived as autonomous, self-determined players in the artistic field, but often they cannot risk spoiling their relationship with gatekeepers of the global art world; as a consequence, they have to make sure that this supportive network feels accomplished in its curatorial endeavors and its desire to discover new ‘subaltern’ talent, to find hidden treasures, and to feel heroic and giving in the process. Under what conditions can an invitation to the members of Atis Rezistans to curate their own exhibitions and to implement their ‘monstrous orders’ in institutional systems lead to a decolonial option and alternative that opens up a new intersectional dialogue which has so far been avoided? Again, to what degree can the heterologous recuperation of the marginal become anything more than a declarative gesture? In the same way as queer studies often try to queer itself by avoiding heteropatriarchal logics and methodologies—as opposed to merely expanding the humanities’ and social sciences’ to include queer topics—I argue for the need to create also a space for the epistemic disobedience (Mignolo 2009) of ‘subaltern’ groups in curatorial practice. My approach here follows Audre Lorde’s oft-cited argument: “It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” (1984: 112)

The history of ‘Western’ museums shows in varied forms how easily objects from ‘foreign’ cultural settings have been appropriated into the institutional framework of art historical and cultural anthropological museums (e.g. Price

5

Since I have finished my research in 2016 a new generation of young artists emerged which also produce outstanding work in the medium of paintings. See for example the paintings by Pierre Louise Herold, Reginald Sénatus, Love Leonce, and Lesly Pierrepaul, among others.

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1992; Errington 1998). The selected objects on display can become more ‘diverse’ but the institutionalized presentation within a museum display will not be readjusted in the process. The power remains in the controlling hands of white curators, art historians, and in the normative gesture of art museums. The exhibition spaces at Gran Ri are also affectively experienced as monstrous because they interrogate the intimate relationship of artworks with museums as spaces that legitimize and validate artwork and imbue objects with ‘high cultural value’. The following colonial logic often prevails: ‘we’ generously intend to include ‘them’. Anja Luebken describes the process of musealization of alien objects as a process of normativity: “Normativity is understood as norm-giving processes that regulate social behavior; it is pre-scriptive rather than de-scriptive.” (2011: 157) Museum practice is one aspect of the cultural practice of knowledge production and a form of world-making. Therefore, museums are producing ontologies and tell us what reality really is. Museums can be understood as powerful agents in the ordering of the world (ibid.: 159). The display of ‘alien’ objects in museums assimilates their way of being perceived by integrating them into the museum’s own classification system favoring mainly the visual sense. “To give something strange a place in one’s own cultural practice, in order to make it familiar and interpretable, is a way of handling otherness.” (ibid.: 161) I understand this normativity of art museums as a particular neutralizing tone, which enwraps all art objects presented in these institutional environments in a declarative gesture of tolerance through normativity and sameness. I relate this normative tone of museums to Marcuse’s notion of repressive tolerance, which neutralizes opposites through benevolent neutrality and helps to turn tolerance from “an active to a passive state” which creates the illusion that ‘Western’ societies are already tolerant and progressive, because they bother to visit art museums. Marcuse argues: “The result is a neutralization of opposites, a neutralization, however, which takes place on the firm grounds of the structural limitation of tolerance and within a preformed mentality. When a magazine prints side by side a negative and a positive report on the FBI, it fulfills honestly the requirements of objectivity: however, the chances are that the positive wins because the image of the institution is deeply engraved in the mind of the people. Or, if a newscaster reports the torture and murder of civil rights workers in the same unemotional tone he uses to describe the stockmarket or the weather, or with the same great emotion with which he says his commercials, then such objectivity is spurious--more, it offends against humanity and truth by being calm where one should be enraged, by refraining from accusation where accusation is in the facts themselves. The tolerance expressed

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in such impartiality serves to minimize or even absolve prevailing intolerance and suppression. If objectivity has anything to do with truth, and if truth is more than a matter of logic and science, then this kind of objectivity is false, and this kind of tolerance inhuman.” (Marcuse 1969)

Following Marcuse, I argue that normalized exhibition standards like the white cube help to increase benevolent neutrality towards artworks and reduce the political agency many artworks entail. I understand the inclusion of monstrous orders by ‘source communities’ as a methodological strategy that can help to produce tonal dissonances within art museums in order to counter and disrupt the institutional, benevolent neutrality of performative tolerance. For Mignolo (2011), it is not sufficient to point out the racist logic of white and privileged philosophers like Immanuel Kant, for example, while remaining in their methodological trajectories and epistemic dwellings. Instead, we have to shift our geography of reason to Afro-Caribbean writers like Quobna Ottobah Cugoana, an enslaved African and a contemporary of Kant who was shipped to the Caribbean and taken by his master to London, where he was liberated in the 18th century. Cugoana published his book Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery in 1786 (Mignolo 2011: 204). Mignolo, in the tradition of AfroCaribbean thinkers, understands knowledge productions as aggressive colonial processes that establish a colonial matrix of epistemic and material power. In Mignolo’s words we have to delink from the logic of these old, persisting trajectories of colonial thinking: “Delinking [...] means to think from the silences and absences produced by imperial modern epistemology and epistemic practices – like Kant’s, for example. It means to read Kant from the silences and the exteriority that he himself has produced.” (2011: 204) How can we articulate such silences in museum studies and overcome imperial epistemologies which are so closely intertwined with the normalizing processes of the imperial sexist, racist, and classist history—and present—of museal systems? Again, it is not enough to change the content of our academic discussions and to integrate alien and marginalized objects. Rather, we have to change the entire logic of our colonial systems of knowledge production. Otherwise, these objects will be merely commodified and assimilated to the particular standards of global art and will remain telling white stories. It is important to integrate disqualified, illegitimate, and subaltern knowledge into the institutional framework of the museum system and to exceed current institutional processes of normativity. Like Mignolo, I do not, of course, argue for the abolition of knowledge as such but more for a sustained attention to and reflection about the who, how, and where of its creation in situated form:

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“Geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with geo-politics of knowing. Who and when, why and where is knowledge generated (rather than produced, like cars or cell phones)? Asking these questions means to shift the attention from the enunciated to the enunciation. And by so doing, turning Descartes’s dictum inside out: rather than assuming that thinking comes before being, one assumes instead that it is a racially marked body in a geo-historical marked space that feels the urge or get the call to speak, to articulate, in whatever semiotic system, the urge that makes of living organisms ‘human’ beings. By setting the scenario in terms of geo- and body-politics I am starting and departing from already familiar notions of ‘situated knowledges’. Sure, all knowledges are situated and every knowledge is constructed. But that is just the beginning. The question is: who, when, why is constructing knowledges?” (Mignolo 2009: 1)

We have to ask which social groups are able, under which circumstances, to participate in curatorial processes of knowledge formation and what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate or illegitimate in curatorial discourses. In Mignolo’s definition, delinking does not mean that it is possible to ‘get out’ of modern epistemology: “Delinking means not to operate under the same assumptions even while acknowledging that modern categories of thought are dominant, if not hegemonic, and in many, if not in all of us.” (Mignolo 2011: 204) One first step in this direction is to understand curatorial processes not as an institutionalized and specialized art practice but, instead, as a general museal principle. Hubert Mohr’s notion of “museality” (2011: 14) can help us to overcome universalized and centralized discourses as well as fixed standards of museum presentations, as it points to a general “museal principle which, like theatrality, permeates both social and individual action, which is not restricted to the European tradition” (ibid.: 14). Hubert Mohr defines museality as “a social practice, a perceptible and productive gesture and habitus centred around the collecting and exhibiting of artifacts” (ibid.). Therefore, museality is not only restricted to the social systems of science and art and exclusively materialized in institutions but is rather a socio-aesthetic gesture that includes informal everyday practices in people’s private lives (ibid.: 15). In Mignolo’s terminology, this approach to museuality can be a mechanism to delink from a centralized and allegedly universal matrix of knowledge production that is frequently presented as a global intellectual norm for art presentation. In conversations with other art historians at academic conferences, I realized that my suggestion to open museums for disobedient musealities through politics of deviance and ‘subaltern’ opinions is often understood skeptically as a neoprimitivism and as a search for more authenticity through a conceptual return to a ‘local’ Caribbean context of exhibition-making. I argue, however, that such

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skepticism is rooted in an epistemic marginalization and intellectual entitlement that makes it impossible for curators from lower socio-economic strata to compete with academically trained art historians and curators on a global scale, because they are not granted sufficient epistemic credibility to curate artworks in an adequate fashion. Curation is here not understood as a social practice but as an intellectual principle. As a starting point for a reevaluation of exhibition spaces, art historians tend to recommend theories formulated by other white art professionals and philosophers while opinions of members of BIPoC communities become epistemically marginalized. This brings my discussion back to Jean Herald Celeur’s articulation of anger in chapter four: The opinions of the Gran Ri artists carry less weight in comparison to written, academic works by white art historians. Art history as a discipline has been produced with colonial, white, and classed epistemologies at its core. Hence, decolonization of the discipline cannot be achieved on a surface level by merely shifting the content of the conversation but it has to dismantle and undo an entire epistemic regime. Art historian Tim Barringer argues, “While the term ‘decolonize’ art history has significant rhetorical power, it is founded upon a misconception. Art history can decolonize itself only to the extent that it acknowledges that Euro-colonial art and our discipline itself are themselves products of empire. Powerful symbols of racial oppression such as the Rhodes statue, or the naming of a Yale residential college after John C. Calhoun, are legitimate targets for contestation and removal. But even if such emblems are erased, the history of art cannot deny its own intellectual inheritance: it has developed as an academic discipline since the eighteenth century with racialized concepts at its core. It is a dissimulation to behave as if art history were a colonized territory fighting for independence and a return to an indigenous condition innocent of ideological corruption. Art history is never innocent. That said, the field is absolutely capable of self-reflexivity: indeed, if art history is not a radical practice, a site of dissent, a provocation, it is worthless.” (2020: 11-12)

Atis Rezistans’ musée d’art are maybe acceptable in their local embeddedness as touristic spectacles for research and adventurous excursions, but they are not considered a legitimate modality for art presentation on an international scale. We saw in previous chapters how the cultural and socio-economic difference of the group is constantly evoked at the level of object iconography, but it is significant that the ‘excitement for difference’ does not translate into curatorial practices and does not lead to dialogical exhibition modalities. I argue, however, that these are exactly the silences to which Mignolo asked us to pay new attention. This approach has to cut into curator’s and art historian’s domain of power as

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gatekeepers of the global art world and will require from ‘us’ to share and give up discursive and material authority.

5.4 AGAINST ZONBI CURATORS: MUSEUMS AS SPACES OF CARE My analysis of politics of emotions at the Ghetto Biennale in chapter three showed how the institutional logic of conditional hospitality is internalized, embodied, and cannot be left behind simply by leaving spatial institutions. Artist Andrea Fraser (2005) proposes in her article From the Critique of Institution to an Institution of Critique that we have to understand art institutions not substantially as specific places, organizations, and individuals but in a sociological sense as a social field. “Every time we speak of the ‘institution as other than ‘us’, we disavow our role in the creation and perpetuation of its conditions. We avoid responsibility for, or action against, the everyday complicities, compromises, and censorship – above all, self-censorship – which are driven by our own interests in the field and the benefits we derive from it. It’s not a question of inside or outside, or the number and scale of various organized sites for the production, presentation, and distribution of art. It’s not a question or being against the institution: We are the institution. It’s a question of what kind of institution we are, what kind of values we institutionalize, what forms of practice we reward, and what kinds of rewards we aspire to. Because the institution of art is internalized, embodied, and performed by individuals […].” (ibid.: 105)

I agree with Fraser’s approach of analyzing art institutions as social entities. Conditional hospitality, for example, is often brought to the Gran Ri neighborhood by visiting artists and curators who intend to escape the spatial confines of art museums by travelling to the ‘margins’; however, the validation and valorization of ‘subaltern’ communities through generous acts of recognition reveals a form of progressive racism underlying these socially-engaged endeavors. I think we need to unpack carefully who is this ‘we’ to which Fraser is repeatedly referring in her argument, as the question remains: Who is really capable to sit at the dinner table with ‘us’ to discuss the next self-critical, inclusive art exhibition, and why do most people at this table remain white, male, cis-gendered, ablebodied, and middle or upper class? I argue in the last part of this chapter that, instead of abandoning institutions altogether, decolonial approaches have to start as projects of mental and material decolonization which intend to dismantle what Wekker (2016) calls racialized common sense. Haitian artists are not seen as

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having sufficient epistemic credibility in order to be part of curatorial processes of selection. They are maybe asked to sit occasionally and temporarily at the same table, but they will not be able to participate directly in any meaningful conversation, and they will have to wait nervously until someone generously pays for their dinner bill. While curators who present objects from ‘subaltern’ communities and install them in institutionalized museum systems often claim to abolish barriers between so-called ‘high art’ and ‘outsider art,’ I argue that it is necessary to go further and leave the field open to specialists of ‘source communities’ to integrate their monstrous orders in institutions in order to dismantle the persisting colonial logic of these museal systems, which often manifests in a rhetoric of generous legitimization. The problem that emerges from my argument proposed in this chapter is quite similar to the problems which many members of ‘source communities’ face when they are invited by curators working in ethnographic museums to participate in dialogical exhibition projects. James Clifford proposed “contact work” (1997: 213) as a new principle for museums. He applies Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone to museums in order to rethink museums as post-colonial spaces of “active collaboration and a sharing of authority” (ibid.: 2010). Since the 1990s, cultural anthropological museums have been eager to consult with so called ‘source communities’ so as to add their opinions and voices to collections and exhibitions as a benevolent strategy to counter the colonial legacy of many collections. Mary Louise Pratt uses the term contact zone “to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (1991: 34). For Clifford, contact work is a means for institutions to loosen their sense of centrality: “This rethinking of collections and displays as unfinished historical processes of travel, of crossing and recrossing, changes one’s conception of patrimony and public. What would be different if major regional and national museums loosened their sense of centrality and saw themselves as specific places of transit, intercultural borders, contexts of struggle and communication between discrepant communities? […] A contact perspective argues for the local/global specificity of struggles and choices concerning inclusion, integrity, dialogue, translation, quality, and control. And it argues for a distribution of resources (media attention, public and private funding) that recognizes diverse audiences and multiple centered histories of encounters.” (1997: 213-214)

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The assumption that community participation in museums would lead immediately or automatically to decolonial methodological practices and dilute asymmetrical structures of power is, strictly speaking, naïve. In his essay, Clifford (1997: 193) warns that contact work is inherently asymmetrical and that power imbalances persist. “Until museums do more than consult (often after the curatorial vision is firmly in place), until they bring a wider range of historical experiences and political agendas into actual planning of exhibits and the control of museum collections, they will be perceived as merely paternalistic by people whose contact history with museums has been on of exclusion and condescension. It may, indeed, be utopian to imagine museums as public spaces of collaboration, shared control, complex translation, and honest disagreement.” (ibid.: 207-208)

Robin Boast describes that new trends of contact work in museums, inspired by Clifford’s work, fail to “expose the dark underbelly of the contact zone and, hence, the anatomy of the museum that seems to be persistently neocolonial” (2011: 57). Boast understands the new inclusiveness of contact work in pessimistic terms as a process of neo-liberal appropriation, which ultimately benefits the center rather than groups coming from the ‘periphery’. Although museum studies calls for a pluralistic approach to interpretation and presentation, Boast argues that intellectual control largely remains in the hand of museums. Museums as dialogic spaces are sites where the Other performs for us and not with us: “[Contact work] invite[s] source community members into the museum to add their voices to the objects. This accumulation was the whole point of significance for the museum, the object, the source community, and the public. However, what these two encounters […] led to was the realization that the contact zone is a clinical collaboration, a consultation that is designed from the outset to appropriate the resources necessary for the academy and to be silent about those that were not necessary.” (ibid.: 66)

He goes on to explain that contact work produces asymmetrical spaces where, in fact, members of ‘source communities’ can win momentarily some minor advantages whereas the center ultimately remains in the position to really gain and appropriate (ibid.). Boast asks the very significant question of what would happen if the neo-colonial competences of museums, for example collecting, educating, and exhibiting, were rejected altogether? He proposes that museums have to let go of controlling their own resources and start to redraft their claim to being gatekeepers of authority and sites of object accumulations (ibid.: 67). Boast also

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mentions that many of the theoretical studies about contact work seem to be embedded in a characteristic optimism towards these new collaborative approaches in museums (ibid.: 59). I described a similar optimism in different moments throughout my dissertation, especially in the rhetoric of socially-engaged art projects. But this optimism stands in sharp contrast to the pessimistic and frustrated opinions which I encountered in conversations with Haitian artists who are questioning the extent to which their projects with white curators are collaborative. I have been repeatedly told in conversations at conferences that I were too pessimistic with my research topic and that I did not pay enough attention to transformative aspects of these new inter-klas collaborations produced through poverty tourism and socially-engaged art. But the pessimism I articulate in my research is very much informed by the opinions I encountered in interviews with Haitian artists, who often do not share a similar affirmative optimism when it comes to contact work and the generous inclusion of their artworks in white art museums. We saw in previous chapters how many artists are affectively alienated from exactly this optimism. Artists and their artworks are embedded in hierarchical infrastructures of powers. These structural inequalities are not dispelled by good intentions and affirmative readings and will go on to produce unhappy emotional effects if they are ignored and thus concealed. Nato Thompson stresses the need to see and analyze infrastructures of power within socially-engaged art projects and proposes anarchist groups as a central point of reference. According to Thompson, these groups have developed fruitful mechanisms to keep in check the hierarchies which exist within their complex group constellations. This perspective can also be a guideline for disobedient musealities in art museums: “In order to produce a new community, we must thus not only consider inherent notions of privilege, but also attempt to see power from the position of those whom we are organizing with, and vice versa. [...] Anarchists have long possessed a critique of hierarchy, and their numerous methods for instilling equality in decision-making can prove extremely useful for socially engaged artists: spokescouncil models for making group decisions, taking stock at discussions so that everyone has a chance to speak, instilling a value in a community that makes being aware of privilege (power) a necessary quality in good collective behavior. While it can seem individually exhausting (and time-consuming!) to install and hone systems that check power, we must bear in mind that not keeping power in check is considerably more devastating.” (Thompson 2015: 125)

He goes on to exhort socially-engaged artists to make sure not to slide into producing the problems they are supposedly trying to solve (ibid.). My analysis in

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chapter three is a good case study to show that these supposedly inclusive, optimistic programs of collaboration fail as soon as inter-klas conflicts emerge and ‘source communities’ refuse to be grateful, available, and performatively affirmative within contact work. Following Celeur’s self-critique, where he understands his own curatorial work at the Ghetto Biennale as the work of a komisè zonbi (zombie curator), I propose the term zonbi curations for these curatorial practices. Zonbi curations are curatorial programs that use participation not to transform but to confirm the status quo and re-center the symbolic capital of established white institutions without dismantling epistemic and material power relations. The anger of Haitian artists I analyzed reveals the progressive racism of these social interactions. I argue, however, that we need to move away from an empathetic insight into the urban poor to a new sympathetic identification with them, which leads to compassionate communion that dilutes flawed binaries like ‘we’ and ‘them’. Empathy and sympathy are often used synonymously, but according to Nils Bubandt and Rane Willersley, there is a crucial difference between them: “[E]mpathy differs from sympathy, although the two are often confused. […[ If sympathy is about communion, about feeling with the other person; then empathy is about understanding the other vicariously without losing one’s own identity, a feeling into the other, as it were. As Lauren Wispé puts it, ‘In empathy, we substitute ourselves for the others. In sympathy, we substitute others for ourselves. [...] Sympathy, one might say, gives purchase on identity to achieve compassionate communion. Empathy, meanwhile, is a form of vicarious insight into the other that insists on one’s own identity. Empathy involves, therefore, a double movement of the imagination: a stepping into and a stepping back from the perspective of the other, at once an identification with another and a determined insistence on the other’s alterity.” (Willerslev Bubandt 2014: 7)

How can we put a compassionate communion and sympathy into practice and arrive at a new intersectional ‘we’ that is able to feel with each other and to transcend the self? I want to shift my closing argument from the reading of exhibition modalities towards politics of care. I suggest that art historians, curators, and artists should aspire to the creation of new sites for a radical reformulation of relationality and intersectional solidarity outside common social contracts in order to open up art discourses to a communal potentiality that will establish new alliances and systems of kinship. In brief, museums need to start taking responsibility not primarily for objects but for human beings. How can we shift art institutions

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closer towards what Jennifer C. Nash6 describes as a Black feminist project of ‘love-politics’: a transformative process that reshapes our understanding of love from a romantic interpersonal longing (e.g. “the claustrophobic confines of the nuclear family”) into a “political call for transcending the self and transforming the public sphere” (2013: 20). Nash (2013) elaborates in her article Practicing Love the long tradition of feminists of color who have been invested in lovepolitics as a theory of justice. Instead of reading love-politics merely as a practice of Black self-valuation and self-actualization, Nash analyzes how Black feminist scholarship on love also has to be understood as an insistence on transcending the self in order to create new political communities as a form of affective politics that is shaped by “post-identitarian” (ibid.: 3) labor. Through her reading of Alice Walker’s, Audre Lorde’s, June Jordon’s, and Jasbir Puar’s writings, Nash argues further for an understanding of love as a practice of self-work that reorients the self towards embracing differences in order to craft new affective political communities constituted by heterogeneity and not by fixity: “If ‘communal affect’ constitutes the ‘ties that bind utopian communities,’ then black feminism’s love-politics creates a public culture based on a collective ‘public feeling’ of love, or what Jordan calls ‘a steady-state deep caring and respect for every other human being, a love that can only derive from a secure and positive self-love’ […]. Love, then, is a practice of self, a labor of the self, that forms the basis of political communities rooted in a radical ethic of care. […] Jordan’s political community is not based on the elisions of identity or a shared (imagined) sameness, but on a conception of the public rooted in affiliation and a shared set of feelings.” (ibid.: 11)

Nash raises a plea for communities to be imagined and built on the basis of a radical ethic of care and a shared utopian vision for change, rather than on an assertion of similar identities and the experience of marginality that demands recognition of a specific “wound” (ibid.: 15). Tamara Kneese and Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart also recently outlined how discussions of care have reentered the Zeitgeist: “Theorized as an affective connective tissue between an inner self and an outer world, care constitutes a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others.” (2020: 2) A way forward would thus be to retrace limitations placed on those efforts of community building within the larger existing power structures, institutional environments, and historical trajectories of power

6

I want to thank art historian Huey Copeland for drawing my attention to Jennifer C. Nash’s work.

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that condition contemporary fields of global art today and shape our understanding of processes of care. It is important to emphasize in this context that care remains a predominantly feminized, racialized, and classed labor which often falls to BIPoC from lower socio-economic strata who receive little financial and social recognition. Care, like other resources, is unequally distributed and a site for power struggle as it remains a highly exploitative labor under colonial racist heteropatriarchal capitalism. Political scientist Joan Tronto (1994) argues that life within capitalist regimes makes it impossible to truly take care of each other. Capitalism is a system designed to exploit and devalue those who become assigned the task to be caregivers to others. Thus, Tronto shifts the understanding of care from a moral virtue to a political practice that can help us to rethink humans as interdependent beings. Care for Tronto serves as a visionary concept to prescribe an ideal for more pluralist and just politics in which power is more evenly distributed. She argues that our understanding of care is fragmented and should be considered in a broader systematic form. She develops a new model of political care that has to be enacted in four consecutive phases: (1) recognition of need (caring about), (2) willingness to respond to (take care of) a need, (3) direct action (care-giving), and (4) reaction to the care process (of the care receiver). In order to become a transformative practice, those four phases in the Trontian sense also have to relate to five moral principles: attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness, and integrity (ibid.: 127). We can learn from the shortcomings of the Ghetto Biennale to see how challenging it is to produce a new community embedded in differences where ethical demands for caring can be met without relying on old infrastructures of colonial power relations. The Ghetto Biennale seems to ask all the right questions, but has so far not been able to develop satisfactory means to implement possible answers for change into concrete practices. Besides asking where does the bleeding and scarring occur, I maybe also have to readjust my own question: maybe art professionals have to invest more of their energy and time in asking, Where is love missing in their work? How can we work on and against ourselves in order to transform art institutions into spaces for the ‘love-politics practitioners’ described by Nash? “[L]ove-politics practitioners dream of a yet unwritten future; they imagine a world ordered by love, by a radical embrace of difference, by a set of subjects who work on/against themselves to work for each other. This dreaming, of course, does not suspend labor; black feminist love-politics practitioners have always been attached to the idea that the radical future requires certain kinds of very hard work, pushing beyond our invest-

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ments in selfhood and sameness, and reaching toward collectivities and possibilities. Nor does this vision neglect the host of ways that power and structures of domination work on and against bodies in quotidian and spectacular ways.” (Nash 2013: 18)

Leaving physical institutions behind does not change the institutional logic in our minds. Disobedient Musealities, as I propose them, cannot start with the evaluation of objects on display or an evaluation of canons but with a systematic decolonization of minds, feelings, and institutionalized realities of those involved in hierarchical museum programs, academic research, and sociallyengaged art projects. Privilege produces ontological denial and to see and dismantle this denial is a complicated and labor-intensive process that requires to “risk an act of love” (Freire 1972: 35). How we can transform love and care into a political practice under racist heterosexist patriarchal capitalism? This seems to be a central paradox of our times and it needs better investment that can endure contradictions and inspire systematic change. It is not enough to articulate that we are living in an unjust racist system but museums and universities also have to mobilize labour and resources to engage with political activism and programs for “reparative justice” for Caribbean countries and BIPoC communities.7 Acceptance and understanding in Marcuse’s and Nash’s sense cannot be achieved passively without the active labor of seeking out ways of dismantling and undoing the status quo. Although the academic logic developed in the first part of the chapter led me to my argument that we need to develop tools for transferring monstrous orders into institutional settings, it should not be surprising anymore that not all Haitian artists will agree with my proposal. Guyodo, for example, explained to me that in retrospect he prefers his solo exhibition Above the Ground at Gallery El-Saieh curated by Tomm El-Saieh in 2014 over Prézeau Stephenson’s GUYODO exhibition ten years earlier. El-Saieh’s exhibition showed nine of Guyodo’s monochromatic, silver assemblages in a white cube setting at Gallery El-Saieh.

7

Fifteen Caribbean governments (CARICOM) announced in 2013 that they would pursue a legal case against European governments for reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. The Caricom Reparations Commission asks for reparative justice by spelling out ten demands: 1. Full formal apology, 2. Repatriation, 3. Indigenous peoples development program, 4. Cultural Institutions, 5. Public Health Crisis, 6. Illiteracy eradication, 7. African knowledge program, 8. Psychological rehabilitation, 9. Technology transfer, 10. Debt cancellation (cf. Caricom Repatriation Commission. 2014. “10-Points Reparation Plan”. https://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms10-point-reparation-plan/.)

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Fig. 37: Guyodo’s solo exhibition Above the Ground at El-Saieh Gallery, Port-au-Prince, curated by Tomm El-Saieh, 2014, © Tomm El-Saieh

El-Saieh created the white cube especially for Guyodo’s exhibition. Elizabeth McAlister, who drew my attention to this exhibition, called the exhibition “art porn” when she recommended that I should go and see the exhibition for my research. The noncritical use of the white cube as a mechanism of ‘class valorization’ appeared to McAlister and to myself as overpowering the artworks— especially in comparison to Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere only a short car ride away from Gallery El-Saieh. Guyodo, by contrast, explained to me that he loved to see how value for his artworks could be created through the modernist exhibition modality that showcases singularized art objects in front of white walls. According to Guyodo, this is how famous, international artists are presented around the world, and he wished to be presented exactly in the same fashion. The seductiveness of decontextualized sameness embedded in modernist exhibition modal-

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ities is for Guyodo a form of respect, as he will be seen and exhibited exactly like everyone else. If Guyodo could get the chance to curate his own artworks today with more resources at hand, he would probably contradict the approach developed in the first part of my chapter and he would perhaps produce a modernist white cube gallery—the anti-thesis of how he presents his artworks in his own exhibition space. I therefore want to specify the argument of this chapter: We need to share resources with artists like Guyodo so he can make self-determined decisions about how he would like to see his art presented. The argument is not only that artists deserve to be exhibited in a white cube if they want to but also that we should offer artists an honest and transparent discussion about the problematic history that is embedded in the modernist European modality of exhibition making (cf. O’Doherty 1996). Such discussions and the possible conflicts or contradictions resulting from them require to share values and give up authority. In contradictions lies, in my eyes, the strength of socially-engaged art projects, which produce new transcultural, inter-klas communities through contact work where tension and conflict can become visible and debatable, rather than denied or preempted. But the organizers of such art events need to develop tools to carefully unpack and not conceal new and old infrastructures of power produced by contact work and good intentions in order to establish a new intersectional ‘we’; a ‘we’ built on better ways of transcending the self, caring for each other, and decentralizing authority over resources and discourses.

Resume: Alleviative Objects, or Translating Black Suffering into White Pedagogy

Let me return to the first question in the introduction: So, what is indeed the function of Atis Rezistans’ artwork—and bodies—in ‘Western’ art museum? The interaction with a group of people living in poverty in the ‘Global South’ often enables a milieu of white art professionals and their audiences to feel comfortable again about their own privileged position in society. They may get past their guilt and shame by generously paying attention to art productions from the urban poor without actively seeking new tools for the decolonization of structures of racist class oppression in the art world. In my reading, the Gran Ri artists are transformed into a means of happiness that in return restabilizes a white identity as good, benign, and progressive—especially in the current moment of heightened anti-racist critique. The project Ghetto Tarot by Belgium photographer and Ghetto Biennale artist Alice Smeets illustrates poignantly the alleviative function performed by Gran Ri artists and their art objects in inter-klas relationships in the globalized artistic milieu. Smeets met the artists on occasion of the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in 2011, and she used the members of Atis Rezistans as models for her successful follow-up photography project called Ghetto Tarot. The project interprets the Rider Waite tarot deck from 1909 anew, staging the images of the cards as photographic interpretations that use the Gran Ri artists as models for these images. Local everyday materials and discarded objects are used to remodel the new motives for her tarot deck. With this technique, Smeets loosely evokes Atis Rezistans’ artistic style, rekiperasyon, and gives her compositions a spontaneous, informal but also nearly infantile and naïve effect. On her homepage she describes her photographs thus:

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“The [Ghetto Tarot] project aims to reach beyond cultural boundaries of prejudice and ignorance to achieve a much-needed transformation of the collective conscious perception of the ghetto whilst discovering the power of our own thoughts [...] We can look at destruction and see either despair or the start of something new. With this awareness comes the power to chance the meaning of every word, action and emotion. It’s all about perception.” (Smeets 2017)

She goes on to explain the function of her new tarot deck as follows: “Inspired by the creativity and strength of the citizens of the ghetto, the Ghetto Tarot will guide you in changing your perception, turning negativity in your life into positivity while discovering the power of your own thoughts.” (Smeets 2017) In Smeet’s narrative, a Black community and their struggle to survive daily insecurities become an inspiring and cathartic mechanism for privileged white visitors on their journey to spiritual self-discovery. Smeets also offers card readings on her webpage, which accompany her Ghetto Tarot series as a spiritual practice, and since 2015 she invites guests on a spiritual tourism tour to Port-au-Prince to see Atis Rezistans’ studios as a central location for a self-discovery program: “Atis Rezistans are turning trash into art; a negative into a positive. Find out how to turn your inner trash into a blessing. You will get to know the artists Atis Rezistans, their studios and their way of life in the Haitian Ghetto. Together, they will make you see the strength, the creativity, solidarity and positivity of Haiti and the Haitian Ghetto.” (ibid.) Smeets intends to counter Haiti’s often degrading status in popular media through a process of idealization, which mainly recenters the foreign visitor through a spiritual practice where their feelings truly matter. I described in the introduction that Colin Dayan reminds us that the dehumanization of people is not only achieved through degradation but also through idealization. The socio-economic marginality of Atis Rezistans, or their particular “way of life”, is empathetically mimicked and appropriated for a short moment to be able to produce a process that shall lead to a spiritual awakening of a group of white travellers. Smeets’ endeavor to ‘go native’ as a gesture of empathy is a form of progressive racism in her project. Smeet’s project is also a good example for what Li has coined neoprimitivism, a primitivism in the service of the West’s own self-criticism. “Neo-primitivism’s defense of the primitive’s absolute alterity results in a similar, perhaps unintended, reversal of generosity into superiority for the Western theorist. […] The antiethnocentric generosity, in turn, allows them to gain a position of knowledge not available to the Other to whom they address their generosity. They are able to decentre their own

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knowledge, critique their culture’s ethnocentrism, and in the process, become aware of their culture’s limitations, an awareness they do not attribute to others.” (Li 2006: 20)

Smeets’ spiritual self-awakening project is rooted in progressive racist thought and a literal crystallization of similar, more subtle processes which occur when Atis Rezistans are presented within ‘Euro-U.S. American’ art institutions as ‘poor ghetto artists inspired by vodou’. Atis Rezistans and their artworks tend to be transformed into Alleviative Objects – objects that are functioning in an analgesic sense to overcome negative affects like guilt and shame, which are produced through the encounters of privilege with marginality. Instead of experiencing Atis Rezistans as a rusty nail in our collective, privileged flesh, reminding us constantly about global injustice and persisting structural violences, audiences seem eager to respond with affects of affirmation and enthusiastic optimism to these artists and their art objects by celebrating the inspiring resilience of Black artists—rather than attending to experiences of ugly feelings, social conflict, or hierarchies of power. My inquiry evokes what Saidiya Hartman calls the process of translating “Black suffering into white pedagogy”; a specific demand that heavily lies on Black people to be ‘useful’ and to continue to do reproductive work for white people’s affective economies: “What we see now is a translation of Black suffering into white pedagogy. In this extreme moment, the casual violence that can result in a loss of life—a police officer literally killing a Black man with the weight of his knees on the other’s neck—becomes a flash point for a certain kind of white liberal conscience, like: ‘Oh my god! We’re living in a racist order! How can I find out more about this?’ That question is a symptom of the structure that produces [George] Floyd’s death. Then there’s the other set of demands: ‘Educate me about the order in which we live.’ And it’s like: ‘Oh, but you’ve been living in this order. Your security, your wealth, your good life, has depended on it.’” (Hartman 2020)

I have discussed how Haitian artists and their artworks often have to follow exactly those colonial demands for Black bodies doing physical, affective, and epistemological work for white people in moments of “disequilibrium in the [white] habitus” (cf. DiAngelo 2011: 58). In order to find recognition in the globalized art world, a racialized common sense has to get reproduced and white innocence affirmed. The process of recognizing Black artists through white institutions (e.g. universities, museums, galleries, etc.) makes white people from higher socio-economic strata feel affirmed in a collective performance of white progressiveness and, hence, deflects from the continuation of whiteness as a ne-

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ocolonial structure of racialized class oppression. At the same time, my analysis has also shown that although they are living incredibly vulnerable and fragile lives, the artists of Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat—highly aware of their relationship to power—have found their own ways of resisting the set of demands by refusal, infra-politics, waywardness, and by using ‘white sentiments’ for their own benefits as a way to sustain their lives. Sometimes what looks like compliance on first sight can be a popular form of resistance rooted in using the emotions of powerholders against themselves. I am afraid that my own scholarly work is also prone to repeating the process of putting the artists to work in order to better understand the social mechanisms of the unacknowledged racism of progressive whites as well as the structures of inequality that continuously shape the globalized art world. We saw in the course of this book that articulations of intersectional harmony often do not what they claim to do beyond a declarative position. Ahmed (2004) explores in her article Declarations of Whiteness how anti-racist scholarship risks turning into positive proud white identity by making white people feel better about themselves as soon as they start to learn articulating their complicities with racist epistemologies in speech acts. She writes, “The white response to the Black critique of shame and guilt has enabled here a ‘turn’ towards pride, which is not then a turn away from the white subject and towards something else, but another way of ‘re-turning’ to the white subject [...]. Antiracism becomes a matter of generating a positive white identity, an identity that makes the white subject feel good about itself. The declaration of such an identity is not in my view an anti-racist action. Indeed, it sustains the narcissism of whiteness and allows whiteness studies to make white subjects feel good about themselves, by feeling good about ‘their’ antiracism. One wonders again what happens to bad feeling in this performance of good, happy whiteness.” (Ahmed 2004)

We also saw in the introduction that Nadège T. Clitantre argues that in media representations of post-earthquake Haiti, the paradigm of “Haitian exceptionalism” (2011: 148) has centrally reemerged. One of the central buzzwords Clitantre recognizes in this new positive language around Haitian exceptionalism is resilience; a resilience that accepts Haiti’s history of resistance and revolution but dangerously fixes Haiti at the same time as an exceptionally poor nation with the extraordinary ability to withstand situations of suffering and marginality (ibid.: 152). In Smeets’ spiritually loaded rhetoric, we are collectively ‘turning our inner trash into a blessing’ when we experience Atis Rezistans’ resilience through the visual contemplation of their artistic re-appropriation of detritus into art. This

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process equals a reification of social marginality into spiritual self-awakening for white people recognizing a racist world order. Projects like the one by Smeets help to reproduce a clear line between ‘them’ and ‘us’ precisely by articulating empathy through a journey into the ‘Global South’. The artworks by Atis Rezistans need to get constantly reevoked as asymmetrical oppositions through the categories of poverty and vodou because this socio-economic and cultural Otherness reveals alleviative, therapeutic effect for a privileged art world and its progressive racist agendas that translates ‘black suffering’ into benign selfimages. My first impulse was to hide Smeets’ project in the footnotes of my work and to refuse to give it any explicit exposure. But I have learned to see Ghetto Tarot as a constant reminder of the functionality of progressive racism, which hides behind masks of good intentions, optimism, charity, heroic entitlement, and empathy, and is intrinsic to so many artistic, inter-klas projects I have encountered while doing research in Haiti. I wish I could have been capable of ending my book with a more optimistic tone. Maybe my research will be read as a stubbornness that refuses to highlight transformative potentials in contemporary art and to embrace a more affirmative future. Many conversations I had with artists and curators working and living in Port-au-Prince, however, do not justify a final optimistic turn of my own scholarly work. These Haitian artists and curators remain affect aliens in inter-klas relationships and struggle to not become an alleviative mechanism for white audiences and collaborators. I would like to end by highlighting again Ahmed’s crucial point about the critical agency that lies in the exposure of unhappy effects and negative feelings: “I think it is the very exposure of these unhappy effects that is affirmative, that gives us an alternative set of imaginings of what might count as a good or better life. If injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there. Unhappiness is not our endpoint.” (2010a: 50)

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List of Illustrations

Fig.1: Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere, entrance area, photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2015, © Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, 18. Fig. 2: Assemblage Anbrase (Embrace) by Getho J. Baptiste, photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Getho J. Baptiste, 43. Fig. 3: Portrait of André Eugène and Jean Herald Celeur in front of Eugène’s sculptures, photo taken by Felipe Jacome in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Felipe Jacome, 69. Fig. 4: Untitled assemblage by André Eugène at the exhibition Baka, Monstres et Chimeres (sculptures urbaines II) at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2001, photographer unknown, © La Fondation AfricAmericA und André Eugène, 80. Fig. 5: Multiple sculptures by Jean Herald Celeur at the exhibition Baka, Monstres et Chimeres (sculptures urbaines II) at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2001, photographer unknown, © La Fondation AfricAmericA und Jean Herald Celeur, 80. Fig. 6: Installation of André Eugène’s artwork Bawon at the exhibition Sculptures Urbaines IV, AICA World Congress, Central Bank, Bridgetown, Barbados, 2003, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, photographer unknown, © La Fondation AfricAmericA and André Eugène, 82. Fig: 7: Installation of Jean Herald Celeur’s artworks at the exhibition Sculptures Urbaines IV, AICA World Congress, Central Bank, Bridgetown, Barbados, 2003, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, photographer unknown, © La Fondation AfricAmericA and André Eugène, 82. Fig. 8: Four assemblages by André Eugène presented in his musée d’art in Portau-Prince, photo taken by author in 2014, © André Eugène, 94

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Fig. 9: Recuperation sculpture of Archangel Michael by Camille Jean Nasson, photos taken by author at church in Furcy in 2014, © Camille Jean Nasson, 95. Fig. 10: Portrait of Mario Benjamin with redesigned furniture, photo taken by David Damoison in Benjamin’s house in 1994 for Revue Noire, © David Damoison, 101. source: Njami, Simon, Jean Loup Pivin, Joel Andrianomearisoa and Pascal Martin Saint (ed.). 2012b. La Chambre de Mario Benjamin/The Room of Mario Benjamin. Paris: Revue Noire Édition [publication without page numbers]. Fig. 11: Assemblage The Shrine (1989) by Mario Benjamin with a carved, wooden head created by Jean Camille Nasson, photo taken by Fred Koenig in Port-au-Prince in 2012, © Fred Koenig and Mario Benjamin, 103. Fig. 12: Assemblage Reggae Musician by Guyodo, photo taken by author at the exhibition Above the Ground at El-Saieh Gallery in 2015 in Port-au-Prince, curated by Tomm El-Saieh, © Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, 103. Fig. 13: Collage, Mario Benjamin’s house. Photo taken by Roberto Stephenson in Port-au-Prince in 2001, © Roberto Stephenson, 106. source: Njami, Simon, Jean Loup Pivin, Joel Andrianomearisoa and Pascal Martin Saint (ed.). 2012b. La Chambre de Mario Benjamin/The Room of Mario Benjamin. Paris: Revue Noire Édition [publication without page numbers]. Fig. 14: Artwork zwazo (bird) by Jean Herald Celeur, photo taken by author at Celeur’s studio in Port-au-Prince in 2015, © Jean Herald Celeur, 110. Fig. 15: Artwork zwazo (bird) by Jean Herald Celeur, photo taken by author at Celeur’s studio in Port-au-Prince in 2015, © Jean Herald Celeur, 110. Fig. 16: Assemblage Anj (Angel) by Jean Claude Saintilus, deceased person unknown (skull), photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2013, © Jean Claude Saintilus, 129. Fig. 17: Assemblage Grand Brijit by Jean Claude Saintilus, deceased person unknown (skull), photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2013, © Jean Claude Saintilus, 129. Fig. 18: Tablo with the the motif zwazo (penis) by Reginald Sénatus, photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Reginald Sénatus, 135. Fig. 19: Sculpture Bawon Kriminel by Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a. Papa Da, deceased person unknown (skull), photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a. Papa Da, 135. Fig. 20: Assemblage Ipokrit (Hypocrite) by Getho J. Baptiste, photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Getho J. Baptiste, 141.

List of Illustrations | 315

Fig. 21: Two eskilti klasik by André Eugène created in the early 1990s, photo taken by author in 2014, © André Eugène, 191. Fig. 22: André Eugène’s musée d’art, installation of artworks by multiple authors, photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2013, 211. Fig. 23: Interior of Getho J. Baptiste’s Royaume des Ordures Vivantes, photo taken by author in Port-au-Prince in 2014, © Getho J. Baptiste, 226. Fig. 24: Assemblage Etazini Tonbe (USA’s Downfall) by Getho J. Baptiste, photo taken by author in 2013, © Getho J. Baptiste, 234. Fig. 25: Detail of the metal sculpture Ayiti (Haiti) by Getho J. Baptiste, deceased person unknown (skull), photo taken by author in 2014, © Getho J. Baptiste, 236. Fig. 26: Assemblage zonbi (Zombie) by Getho J. Baptiste, photo taken by author in 2014, © Getho J. Baptiste, 238. Fig. 27: Untitled assemblage (‘sexual predator’) by Getho J. Baptiste, photo taken by author in 2014, © Getho J. Baptiste, 238. Fig. 28: Assemblage Doktè Ipokrit (hypocritical doctor) by Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a Papa Da, photo taken by author in 2013, © Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a Papa Da, 240. Fig. 29: Several carved wooden sculptures by Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a Papa Da presented in the peristil area of his Musée des Esprits e d’Art, photo taken by author in 2013, © Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a. Papa Da, 243. Fig. 30: Papa Da’s altar with a figurative sculpture by Bòs Papit, photo taken by author in 2015, © Alphonse Jean Junior a.k.a. Papa Da, 245. Fig. 31: Closeup photo of sculpture by Bòs Papit, photo taken by author in 2015, © Bòs Papit, 245. Fig. 32: Guyodo’s studio Atelier Timoun Klere (entrance and interior), photos taken by author in 2015, © Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, 250. Fig. 33: Guyodo’s series Kings and Queens presented on the floor of his Atelier Timoun Klere, photo taken by author in 2014, © Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, 252. Fig. 34: Interior of Guyodo’s Atelier Timoun Klere, photo taken by author in 2014, © Frantz Jacques a.k.a. Guyodo, 255. Fig. 35: Exhibition GUYODO at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2004, photographer unknown, © La Fondation AfricAmericA, 261. Fig. 36: Exhibition GUYODO at Le Centre Culturel AfricAmericA, curated by Barbara Prézeau Stephenson, 2004, photographer unknown, © La Fondation AfricAmericA, 261.

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Fig. 37: Guyodo’s solo exhibition Above the Ground at El-Saieh Gallery in Portau-Prince in 2014, deceased person unknown (skull), curated by Tomm ElSaieh, © Tomm El-Saieh, 283.

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