Notes on How to Irritate a Group of Committed Artists: Politics of Emotions at the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince

Abstract

The Ghetto Biennale was founded in 2009 by British photographer, filmmaker, and curator Leah Gordon in collaboration with members of the Haitian artist group Atis Rezistans. The biennale is rooted in considerations around contemporary art as a place of klas privilege and social exclusion. The organizers took on the complicated task of bringing together artists from different socioeconomic strata in a short-time residency project in an informal neighborhood. Many of the visiting artists produce art that can be described as a socially engaged artistic praxis. By analyzing the Ghetto Biennale as a curated social situation that produces artistic poverty tourism, I discuss the varied hierarchical inter- klas relationships between the participating visiting and local Haitian artists. These relationships are often informed, I argue, by the politics of pity and a competitive sentiment of touristic shame that produces in return critical suspicion and a spiral of moral accusation within the visiting artistic milieu: Who collaborates most sincerely and decently with inhabitants of a neighborhood living in abject poverty? The visiting artists try to escape this spiral by self-censoring all potential self-interests in their praxes through a renunciation of authority and authorship and by declaratively presenting their projects as altruistic spaces of community empowerment that give a voice to “subaltern” artists. The members of Atis Rezistans in this narrative are seen to be constantly at risk of further marginalization by powerful actors from higher socioeconomic strata. But they actively deploy their own agency by negotiating these politics of pity for their own socioeconomic benefits.