In our swiftly fragmenting world where the homogeneity of hegemony is sliced and shattered daily, we are all prospective refugees. Monoliths we have lived with for centuries unaccountably shift, like Mount Everest did a few months back, or Paris only days ago. Cities slip beneath the waves, like Port Royal, Jamaica did in 1692, or are buried beneath rubble, like Port-au-Prince in 2010. Could that contemporary Haitian prophet, the prolific artist/writer/actor Frank�tienne, be right when he states that the only order there is, is to be found in chaos?
Mwen pa sav (dunno)–but this certainly seems to be the case in our cozy little republic, which, just as it did with the Ebola pandemic, is now going tizik over Isis. Rest assured citizens, just as we were fully prepared for Ebola, so we are ready for the returning jihadists. Security arrangements at last week's football match against America were so tight that several hundred fans were able to push their way into the fully locked-down national stadium. Who knows if they had tickets? Who cares? Christmas is coming and after that is Carnival and as we all know Chinimad blessed, ent?
As the lives of millions are devastated or simply terminated, so far at least at the kind of long distance which means these losses do not radically impinge on our consciousness, we still good to go. But our present good fortune is merely paper thin and as our beloved cynic, VS Nightfall pointed out some while back–the world is what it is: chaos or the kind of order inflicted with an AK47, if you're lucky, or old school sword if you're not.
However chaotic the world scene appears right now, there's no need to reach for the gramoxone. We've just celebrated one of festival of lights and another is merely shopping weeks away. Not all destruction is permanent and while many will question the efficacy of art and the arts in general to realign our axis, a regional event begins tomorrow which demonstrates humanity's phoenix-like capabilities. From November 27 through to December 15, the fourth Ghetto Biennale will take place in the Port-au-Prince downtown slum of Grand Rue in Haiti.
Inaugurated in December 2009 shortly before the devastating earthquake of the following January, the Ghetto Biennale was conceptualised by Haitian artist Andre Eugene and British photographer/curator/artist Leah Gordon, after a conversation about the problems Haitian artists encountered when applying for travel visas to attend those global biennales where the cr�me de la cr�me of the art world disports itself, amid glamour, glitz and luxury.
Their thinking went: "If the art and artists could not be taken out of the slums, then other art and artists would be taken into the slums, and networks established regardless of visa politics." The Grand Rue district is home to Atis Rezistans, a collective of Haitian sculptors who have become famous for creating art from the detritus surrounding them.
The Ghetto Biennale brings two very different worlds and their expectations together and by working alongside one another, the event challenges many preconceptions about art, poverty, privilege and access.
For most Haitian (and definitely Grand Rue) artists, their art is about survival and selling what they make is crucial. They would love to be able to attend and participate in the same biennales which consolidate global art power. Visiting artists have to get their heads around the "ghetto" with its associations of poverty, inequality and crime–not the usual location for an art exhibition. Visiting artists fund themselves and commit to creating from the surrounding environment, bringing no materials with them.
The fourth Ghetto Biennale will highlight three aspects of Haitian culture central to the Revolution/War of Independence 1791-1804: Vodou religion, Kreyol language and the lakou system of land ownership, all of which constitute a counter-narrative to the plantation system the revolution helped deconstruct. Atis Rezistans and the Ghetto Biennale are potent reminders that man-made or natural destruction is not final; that our deeply divided world (economic, political or religious) is not beyond salvaging and that "ars longa vita brevis"–art is enduring while life is short.