Atis Rezistans and the Politics of Artistic Slum Tourism in Port-au-Prince

• In Event: Slums on Show: Poverty and Violence as Spectacular Commodity

Abstract

In the late 1990s the Haitian artist collective Atis Rezistans opened their studios and yards in a ‘slum’ neighborhood in Port-au-Prince as art museums for an international audience. I compare these autonomous and subaltern mechanisms of self-representation in a ‘slum’ with institutional forms of musealizations of these art objects in European and North American art exhibitions. Research discusses how these art objects travel between societies, different milieus and ‘art worlds’ and thus acquire transcultural qualities which mediate communication, exchange and misunderstanding between cultures and individuals of extremely different socio-economic strata. The musée d’art by Atis Rezistans create a space where visitors and local artists find themselves embodying structural positions of marginality and centrality, as they become involved in re-configuring difference, sameness and inequality in their interactions. Gétho Jean Baptiste’s exhibition space Royaumes des Ordures Vivantes and André Eugène’s Musée d’Art: E Pluribus Unum will as serve my main case studies for this purpose. Is the creolization of allegedly “bourgeois” art institutions in this particular neighborhood a means to escape marginalizing frameworks and to acquire agency or are the members of Atis Rezistans re-establishing persisting discourses of primitivism and authenticity? I argue that the members of Atis Rezistans virtually re-produce their own poverty as handy objects for transnational consumption. Furthermore, I argue that they use established discourses of marginalization and Othering for their own ends in an “auto-orientalist” manner. I will conceptualize these mechanisms of artistic presentation as an instance of opacity in a Glissantian sense and as strategic cultural and socio-economic alterity.

Author

• David Peter Frohnapfel