The 4th Ghetto Biennale 2015, HAITI

Discover The 4th Ghetto Biennale 2015, Port au Prince HAITI, with this year’s theme is “KREYÒL, VODOU and the LAKOU : Forms of Resistance”

The Ghetto Biennale highlights the work of Haitian and international artists from around the world. Their common ground? Exploring Resistance through art. According to Leah Gordon, one of the Founding Curators: “The Ghetto Biennale was firstly conceived as a kind of reverse mechanism of the mobility that most international artists enjoy and a way for the Haitian artists to plug themselves into art networks, to experiment with collaborative practice and to publicise their artwork. You could say that the Ghetto Biennale was primarily created as a Trojan Horse, with an agenda to publicising Atis Rezistans work. “

After the Haiti Revolution, the formerly enslaved peasants had three tools for their ‘counter-plantation’position – the Kreyòl language, the Lakou system and the belief-system and ritual practices of Vodou, a triumvirate of linguistic, territorial and cultural resistance.

Laurent Dubois, writing in‘Haiti: The Aftershocks of History’, notes that, ‘thanks to a remarkably strong and widely shared set of cultural forms – the Kreyòl language, the Vodou religion, and innovative ways of managing land ownership…- they built a society able to resist all forms of subjection that recalled the days of slavery.’

This year’s Biennale welcomes projects that incorporate language, dialogues, place, symbolism and performance or consider global territorial struggles, forms of linguistic refusal and friction, and ritual and esoteric forms of obstruction and intransigence. Artists and curators were invited to explore what potentials these radical tools, Kreyòl, Vodou and the Lakou, have to offer to the contemporary world.

The Ghetto Biennale will have an onsite radio collaboration with Brooklyn’s Clocktower Radio, the production of a new Kreyol version of La Bamba, the screening of a Polish opera in a remote Haitian village, sustainable urban garden production, a Mongolian shaman working with a Vodou priest, a Sun Ra classic performed by a Haitian Rara band, American folkloric practices and many other projects that consider global territorial struggles, forms of linguistic friction, and esoteric forms of intransigence.

The Ghetto Biennale runs from 14th December until 21st December. Stay tuned for a week of performances, screenings and workshops on:
GHETTO BIENNALE