Dyaspora All Up in the Mix: Jean-Ulrick Desert, Mapping Fragmented Archaeologies

Abstract

Jean-Ulrick Desert’s artwork explores diasporic black postmodernity. A Berlinbased artist who has lived in the United States, Europe, and Haiti, Desert produces evocative and enigmatic work about the black diasporic experience. Participating in a visual lexicon that decodes the inevitability of fragmentation, Desert liberates himself from the constraints of working in any one medium or style. Using diverse artistic media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, he creates multidimensional spaces shaped by his formal education in architecture and his years as an exhibition designer. Personally coded narratives are intertwined with contemporary Western art practices rendered in provocative ways. Subtle strategies of pastiche anchor his earlier artworks and challenge the hackneyed nature of so-called identity politics. His recent use of self-presentation participates in the visual language of camp and sartorial play, incorporating elements that dare as well as elements that reveal truth. His satirical performance “actions,” photographs, multimedia installations, and ephemera ingeniously challenge notions of racial visibility and cultural authenticity. Desert’s “self-portrait” drawing series, L’ABCdaire de ma vie privee (The ABC’s of My Private Life) (2005), creates opportunities for the evocative exploration of race, cultural identity, belonging, and memory (see Color Plate 1). Images culled from his personal photo albums combine with simple letters and unassuming words in French, Kreyol, German, and English on fine paper lined with precisely spaced thin pencil and ink strokes that mimic the penmanship notebook pages he used as a child while living in Haiti. The plate for the letter B places us in Brooklyn, the mecca for Haitians. It is during this first part of his transnational migration that Desert realizes that he has become black and foreign; his frenchyness makes him exotic and othered. He does not feel oppressed; rather, he feels bewildered by these racial and national labels. While the images are embedded within the cultural specificity of the Haitian dyaspora, they resonate with the