Artists And The Aidification Of Haiti

Artists and the Aid-ification of Haiti: The 2009 Ghetto Biennale
by Ana-Maurine Lara
African American Studies/Anthropology (PhD 2015)
Yale University




























Yale University
Dept of Anthropology10 Sachem St
New Haven, CT 06511
ana.lara@yale.edu
646.354.3051

“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…This gathering of brokenpieces 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...” (Walcott 2)

“How can one reconcile a political and human horror that resulted from several intertwinedlayers of colonial histories and occupations with such a blithe importation of a cultural model based on the world’s fairs, which so exemplified the conceits of Eurocentric supremacy?” (Rogoff 46)



The above quotes reference the tensions that I will examine in this essay. Through a reading of the art emerging from the Grand Rue artists and the 2009 Ghetto Biennale, I will discuss Vodounaesthetics and art globalization and how the two rub against each other in ways that reveal the complex relationship between Haitian practices and articulations of autonomy and humanitarian aid. This reading will also include a brief glance at the contemporary context of Haiti, post earthquake, and the ways in which the relationships between artists that were formed during the Ghetto Biennale complicateand disrupt `traditional’ notions of artistic collaboration.

This reading will employ Anna Tsing’s concept of “friction” and Arjun Appadurai’s concept of “flows”. Tsing, in her book Friction, frames globalization as an analytics of “the global” – “how emergent cultural forms…are persistent but unpredictable effects of global encounters across difference.” (3) She goes on to state that“friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power” (5) between differently situated global and transnational subjects. While this is one useful framework for understanding the ways in which the intersections of art and aid in Haiti are exposing the seams of power relations and new subject formations on the ground, I also find it useful tobring in the concept of circulation, what Appadurai has termed “global cultural flows”(33). Here I will use circulation not as a closed system of movement between scapes, but as a constant process of ruptures, such as those that are central to Vodoun aesthetics. Beginning from the location of Vodoun aesthetics, I will unpack how circulation is actually part of an on-going practice of social andartistic transformation that is central to Vodoun artists, and how circulation within this aesthetics challenges globalized economic forces.

Conceived as a response to the limits imposed on the movement of Haitian artists outside of Haiti, the Ghetto Biennale redirected the flow of artists and their art to Haiti for the purposes of establishing an artistic presence “on the margins”(actually located in the center of Port-au-Prince) of the Haitian and international art worlds. Comprised of artists whose work already has global circulation, the Biennale did not seek to disrupt the on-going circulation of art, but rather the “valuation” that emerges from the commodification of art entering global networks. This valuation redirects the center of artistic production away from...