Haiti: art, Kanaval and vodou
Discussion with Leah Gordon (Ghetto Biennale) and Sebastian Rypson (Anthropologists in Art)

Grand Rue in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, is among the most suffering districts of the city, destroyed dramatically during the earthquake in 2010. At the same time, the district is the cradle of an active community of artists, who make use of useless materials, everyday articles and waste found in the vicinity to create intriguing assemblages.

Although recollections of the natural disaster and the cholera epidemic are the daily bread of the Haitians, the Atis Rezistans collective continuously animates the life of the local people, changing the remains of the former material culture into works of art and transforming the everyday dystopia into a positive vision of survival. Moreover, the Port-au-Prince district became the home of the Ghetto Biennale, the first artistic event on such a big scale, the aim of which is to promote and bring closer the art of Latin American and Caribbean artists and, in particular, artists from Haiti.


The Kinomuzeum Festival kindly invites you to the meeting with Leah Gordon, photographer, documentarian and one of the curators of the Ghetto Biennale and the Haiti pavilion at the Biennale in Venice in 2011, who is going to talk about the strategies of survival and resistance and about the role played therein by grass-roots artistic practices, the ecstatic carnival and voodoo.  The interviewer will be Sebastian Rypson, connected with the Dutch curator platform - Anthropologists in Art, academic and anthropologist, working, among others, on the research on narration of the Polish presence in Haiti. In 2011, Rypson established cooperation with Bartosz Konopka and Piotr Rosołowski, playing the role of the Haitian culture consultant at the extensively commented film, The Art of Disappearing [Sztuka znikania].