Death and Fertility: Haiti’s First Appearance in Italy

The Venice Biennial of Contemporary Art saw four new countries presenting their own official pavilions this year: Andorra, Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and Haiti. The presence of these countries at the Biennial represented their participation in the most important global showcase of the contemporary art world. A year and half after its devastating earthquake, Haiti took up the challenge of asserting its position in the cultural world, alongside 88 other nations, with two parallel exhibitions.

The first is "Haiti Kingdom of This World", which was displayed in Fondazione Querini Stampalia, until 31 July 2011. This was an itinerant exhibition curated by the Haitian Giscard Bouchotte, which displayed the work of 15 Haitian artists, including Mario Benjamin e Maxence Denis. The exhibition had already been shown previously in Paris in April/May (see The Courier issue 23) and will now tour the globe for the next three years.

The second event was an outdoor exhibition entitled "Death and Fertility”, which was held at Riva Sette Martiri until 28 July 2011. It was conceived by Italian artist Daniele Geminiani, and showcased three artists from Port-au-Prince’s Atiz Rezistans collective. Along the narrow back streets around The Grand Rue, this community of artisans produce handicrafts for the tourist market out of recycled materials from the city’s car repair district. Jean Hérard Celeur and André Eugène are two artists who have no formal training in the arts but grew up in this creative environment of junkyard recycling. Together they set up the Atiz Rezistans project, which expands the collective by training other artists. These artists use readymade components, thereby combining economic need with creative expression and intellectual reflection.

The founders of the collective, Celeur and Eugène, along with Claude Saintilus, were the three artists featured in the Biennial exhibition. The displays consisted of sculptural collages of the human form made out of junk from Haiti’s poor economy, including engine parts and computer entrails, as well as colourful textile fragments. These expressive sculptures recall fetish effigies and explore aspects of the “Gede” family of spirits, which in the Voodoo religion embody both death and fertility and are celebrated with rituals. From a contemporary-political point of view, some of the pieces also allude to the tragedies of HIV, the earthquake, poverty and political unrest.

The exhibition was displayed in two 12-metre shipping containers, one blue and one red, arranged in a T-shape. Through these containers, the curators aimed to represent the colours of the Haitian flag and the poor neighbourhood near the port of the capital city where the artists live, as well as making reference to Haiti’s economy, which is based on exploitation and maritime trade.

The curator, Geminiani, was supported by English photographer Gordon Leah, who has worked with the Atiz Rezistans group for a number of years, carrying out research, writing articles and helping produce texts and images for their website (www.atis-rezistans.com), available in English, French and Creole. He also produced the videos featured on the exhibition website (www.deathandfertility.org) in which the artists discuss their work from their studios in Port au Prince.

The exhibition aroused great interest in Venice, with the Financial Times quoting it as one of their five “must see” of the 2011 Biennial.

Sandra Federici