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

Introduction

Jean Herald Celeur, founder of the Haitian artists group Atis Rezistans, is angry. He refused to speak with me in the first month of my research. He argued that in the end I would write whatever I like and his opinion would not carry any weight in comparison with mine. So why should we even bother wasting our time speaking to each other? The past 16 years of his international artistic career, spanning group exhibitions in the United States, Europe, and the wider Caribbean, had made Celeur very aware of the often brutal power dynamics between a White European researcher and a Black artist living in a bidonvil (“shantytown”) neighborhood in Haiti. His former student Frantz Jacques, a.k.a. Guyodo, shared a very similar anger. He had already left Atis Rezistans in 2009, and he discussed his anger boldly, and in unambiguous terms, with visitors entering his exhibition space, Atelier Timoun Klere, to see his art works. This anger is often directed toward curators from higher socioeconomic strata who have been working with Haitian artists since the early 2000s. Celeur’s cofounder of the group, André Eugène, opened his atelier in the early 2000s as a musée d’art (“art museum”) and invited art enthusiasts to come and see their sculptures, assemblages, paintings, and installations within the artists’ own neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat in downtown Port-au-Prince. This established a form of community-based artistic poverty tourism that brings numerous visitors into the informal neighborhood every year.

This art tourism culminated in 2009 in the establishment of a short-time residency project for international artists in the neighborhood, which was polemically labeled “Ghetto Biennale.” The biennale was founded by British photographer, filmmaker, and curator Leah Gordon in collaboration with the members of Atis Rezistans. The biennale takes place every 2 years and brings 40 to 50 visiting artists to Haiti to realize art projects in a time span ranging from a few days to 3 weeks. Although the Ghetto Biennale doubtlessly brings many fruitful new opportunities and global attention to the neighborhood, the art event has also become a mechanism through which a group of Haitian artists living in abject poverty are able to examine in close proximity the consequences of privilege and Whiteness within the artistic milieu, in comparison with their own artistic careers. Artist Guyodo explains,

Since [Western curators and artists] are White, what they say is normally thought to be good here in Haiti. But when we want to explain something, nobody will listen to us. That’s racism. Even when you have a project that has very clear and very good ideas. Because you are Haitian and you are Black, they don’t want to understand you. They will not accept your project. A foreigner with a bad project will get accepted. And even Haitians will be [working] together with this person. As an example, when I would like to organize my own art festival here at Gran Ri, nobody would support my project.

Many local artists question who is benefiting from this art event, which is touted as “the most radical art event in the last decade” (Gordon, 2016) in curatorial self-descriptions.

Following de-colonial activist, scholar, and poet Audre Lorde, I understand anger and conflict as important mechanisms to counter inequality and systems of domination. In this article, I want to show that Haitian artists, through their anger, resist dependencies and affirmative readings of the Ghetto Biennale as a successful inter-klas ¹ community project. These critical voices are often silenced because the anger these artists articulate makes them affect aliens to the happiness, excitement, and heroic entitlement that the Ghetto Biennale often produces within its visiting milieu of art professionals. Sara Ahmed (2010a) has coined the term affect alien (p. 30). She describes how causes for happiness in society are socially bound. Affects are contagious and produce shared identities. Those who do not identify with these particular means of happiness and reproduce their lines are read as the cause of unhappiness. My own emotional response after Celeur refused to speak to me during my fieldwork quickly revealed very ugly hegemonic underpinnings for my own PhD project: I reacted with annoyance and irritation because I expected Celeur to be grateful for my generous gift offering him a platform to articulate his critical opinion through my scholarly attention. The self-image of my own project collapsed in this moment, as it became clear how I had produced myself as the hero of my own story: coming to the Global South to help and expecting gratitude in return. This expectation of gratefulness is an aspect that Ahmed (2016) identifies as a central mechanism of progressive racism:

Progressive racism allows the increase of the power or force of whiteness. It allows a white subject to remain in the position of the one who is active/heroic/giving to the others. If the others do not receive this gift happily, they become ungrateful or mean. Progressive racism helps us to understand how white subjectivity is crafted as heroic in the first place.

In this moment, my annoyance recenters me as the one whose feelings truly matter and reveals my project as a prolonged version of an institutional logic of legitimization. Thus, the critique Celeur had formulated could not get through to me. It took me a while to ask the question “Why should the local community perceive me as trustworthy in the first place? I was not able to see that the Whiteness my own body (and attitude) represents could be seen as potentially threatening and powerful, and not as innocent as I believed it to be. Or in bell hooks’s (1997) words,

Socialized to believe the fantasy, that whiteness represents goodness and all that is benign and nonthreatening, many white people assume this is the way black people conceptualize whiteness. They do not imagine that the way whiteness makes its presence felt in black life, most often as terrorizing imposition, a power that wounds, hurts, tortures, is a reality that disrupts the fantasy of whiteness as representing goodness. (p. 169)

Haitian artists are often trapped in the stereotypical position of the “angry Black man or woman”. Their anger is barely taken seriously; it is read as envy or bitterness and thus stripped of any critical potential. Audre Lorde (2007) adroitly reminds us that anger is a legitimate sentiment to counter inequality and racism:

It is not the anger . . . that will destroy us but our refusals to stand still, to listen to its rhythms, to learn within it, . . . to tap that anger as an important source of empowerment. I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. . . . No tools were developed to deal with other women’s anger except to avoid it, deflect it, or flee from it under a blanket of guilt. . . . If I speak with you in anger, at least I have spoken to you. (p. 130)

Although the Ghetto Biennale often describes itself at a theoretical level as an open wound, negative affects such as unease, irritation, discomfort, and frustration are surprisingly absent as legitimate affects for contemporary art taking place at the event. In contrast, many projects produce accentuated performative art of harmonious inter-klas togetherness of different milieus, which are rooted in socially engaged, participatory art practices. I argue in this article that this is not a coincidence but rather a self-censorship and affective coping mechanism, which favors the production of art performances within feel-good politics ² to overcome sentiments of guilt and shame that are produced by the direct encounter of (White) privilege with (Black) marginality. I conceive the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat as an affective space—a concept introduced by Andreas Reckwitz (2012) to draw attention to the way spaces interconnect with our emotions and influence our behavior. Borrowing from the theoretical work on emotions by Ahmed (2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2016), I analyze the politics of emotions produced within this affective space during the Ghetto Biennale. Preserving the idea of the Ghetto Biennale as happy involves an active turning away from those who might compromise the targeted value of “getting along” and bridging klas barriers, and who are affectively alienated from this goal. The Ghetto Biennale often creates very strong dependencies, which rely on persisting power structures, and unfortunately, it hardly emancipates Haitian artists in the process. What makes the area difficult to work in for curators, scholars, and artists is ironically the easiness, openness, and approachability that this bidonvil (shantytown) neighborhood has developed for its visitors over the past 17 years. The area’s most seductive but also troublesome feature is this availability for foreigners, who are generally welcomed with great hospitality and enthusiasm. Researchers and curators will always be able to find an obliging inhabitant who willingly mirrors their particular research agenda; disobedience and anger as forms of resistance can be easily ignored by replacing interlocutors.

It is important to understand that the Ghetto Biennale is an ongoing, open-ended experimental setup that develops and changes from edition to edition. My research for this article was mainly conducted at the 2nd and 3rd Ghetto Biennale. I conducted informal conversations with all the different participating groups and also undertook participatory observation, which included working as assistant curator at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale in 2011 and co-curator of the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013. Although I often speak in this article in general terms of the encounter between two different milieus, the group of visiting artists from abroad consists of people from very different backgrounds and with varied biographies. More important though, my usage reflects the usage of my Haitian interlocutors, who emically describe all foreign visitors as blan (“foreigners”), irrespective of their skin color and social status in their home countries. From their marginalized position in Haitian society, all of these visiting artists are seen to represent a considerably higher klas and are mostly described in a clear binary to their own position in society. One of my interlocutors explained,

To tell you the truth, what we have in mind when we see foreigners, we think that they have money. . . . People who are living in poverty in general think like that. Foreigners may live in a similar situation like we do when they are back in their home countries, but since they are able to travel here to our neighborhood, we think they have money. And maybe can do something to help us. ³

Artistic Poverty Tourism in Port-au-Prince

Traditionally, the neighborhood between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat was a place where artisanal craft work for the Marché en Fer (Iron Market) in Port-au-Prince was produced. Today the neighborhood mainly produces craftwork for wider Caribbean tourist economies in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Many families began to settle between these workshops and small warehouses, renting small houses made out of corrugated metal. In the past 16 years, the inhabitants of this neighborhood reinvented the area as a destination for adventurous art tourists and adapted to its new visitors with an affinity for contemporary art. This development occurred parallel to the interest of Haitian and traveling curators in the assemblages and sculptures of the group Atis Rezistans.

The starting point for this development was Haitian curator, artist, and art historian Barbara Prézeau Stephenson. Celeur and Eugène introduced themselves to her in 2000, and they invited her to see their own ateliers and musée d’art. Prézeau Stephenson helped them kick-start their careers with several local and also international exhibitions. But she also established the first guided tours through the neighborhood in collaboration with Eugène and Celeur, to give visiting art professionals the chance to witness the urban context and site specificity of the art produced in the area. In the following years, Prézeau Stephenson continued the practice of showing the neighborhood mainly to art professionals from the Global South on the occasion of the biennale project Forum Transculturel d’Art Contemporain. Installation artist and painter Mario Benjamin followed her lead and also made the Grande Rue neighborhood one of his principal destinations in private informal tours he offers to visiting curators, artists, and art historians. Haitian gallerist and curator Mireille Pérodin Jérome (Les Ateliers Jerome), recalled in a personal conversation with me how she was convinced only slowly by Benjamin that she could enter the bidonvil area without endangering her own life:

For the Grand Rue, I took my time because in the past the Grande Rue was impracticable; it was the red zone of Port-au-Prince. Mario repeatedly told me, “Why are you so afraid of the Grande Rue? Those guys [Eugène and Celeur] can give you the appropriate security.” And I let myself get slowly convinced by him. I went to visit them and was very surprised. People I take there are usually also surprised, not only by the capacity of work but also by the fusional connection those artists have with their own art works.

Prézeau Stephenson’s and Benjamin’s first tours opened up the area to a new milieu and slowly helped diminish the stigma of the neighborhood as dangerous and impracticable. It also produced a new inter-klas art network that resulted in several national and also international exhibitions.

The Ghetto Biennale as a Curated Social Situation

I understand the Ghetto Biennale as part of this prolonged process of urban poverty tourism and describe the art event as a particular curated nuance of poverty tourism in the artistic field. Eveline Dürr and Rivke Jaffe (2012) propose urban poverty tourism as a tourist experience that involves visiting urban areas characterized by poverty, squalor, and violence, situating this phenomenon in the context of a recent trend of responsible tourism:

These forms of tourism promise a meaningful and transformative experience that is rewarding for both tourists and local communities. They also cater to tourists’ desire to experience the “authentic” rather than the staged—something that is not primarily “created” for them. (p. 114).

They go on to explain, “Slum tourism will often reproduce clichéd images of the urban poor, but it may also provide openings for more nuanced, alternative or unusual representations” (p. 119).

Building on the groundwork of a network of Haitian art professionals around Prézeau Stephenson, Gordon founded the Ghetto Biennale with the members of Atis Rezistans in 2009. She structured this experimental art event loosely after Bob & Roberta Smith’s art festival in southeast London, Deptford X, and the publication Hijack Reality Deptford X: A “How to” Guide to Organize a Really Top Notch Art Festival. The artist and writer Bob & Roberta Smith (2008) understands his art festival Deptford X as a “social mobility interchange,” “a meeting place where the British obsession with class is diluted,” and he highlights art’s capacity “to be an interface between people from different backgrounds” (p. 68). He sees the art world as a gated community and tries to overcome these spaces of distinction through social engagement and mobility. Gordon’s Ghetto Biennale is quite similarly rooted in considerations of contemporary art as a place of klas privilege and social exclusion, and she took on the complicated task of bringing together artists from extremely different socioeconomic strata in Haiti.

I conceptualize the Ghetto Biennale not so much as an art exhibition as such but mainly as an experimental setup that creates a specific curated social situation. With her curatorial practice, Gordon constructs a social situation every 2 years, where foreign visitors and local inhabitants find themselves literally embodying structural positions of marginality and centrality as they become personally involved in reconfiguring difference, sameness, and inequality in their own individual interactions with one another. Therefore, the Ghetto Biennale is very much embedded in what art historian and critic Claire Bishop (2006) has called the “social turn of contemporary art” or, more recently, as the “return to the social” (Bishop, 2012, p. 3). The understanding of art as a socially engaged participatory practice aims to bridge klas barriers by escaping the boujwa institutional frameworks for art presentation. The artist in this social turn is no longer understood as an individual producer of material art objects but as a producer of situations. Art is seen as a medium that, through participation and collaboration, can rehumanize a society considered to be rendered “numb and fragmented by the repressive instrumentality of capitalist production” (Bishop, 2012, p. 11). Or as Gordon (2009), in her own euphoric description of the 1st Ghetto Biennale, puts it,

The Ghetto Biennale surpassed all my expectations—truly it did—this was the creative act in extreme. . . . The creative act is an energy, a revolutionary energy and the products at the end, the art objects, are merely a part of that revolutionary energy—some parts of society are afraid of that energy—very afraid—but enthralled too—so they gather up the material objects of that energy and worship that—they put it in so-called sacred spaces, the clean, white galleries—but these are not sacred spaces really—but containment spaces or decontamination chambers—spaces where they can separate the art object from the revolutionary energy of creation—what happened in Haiti in these last three weeks was truly a happening in the situationist sense and also a chance to see real deep community action—when I left London I really believed that the concept of political arts was hollow lip service to perhaps an empty ideology—but now I really have witnessed that the creative act can intensely connect people from diverse genders, sexualities, classes, races and nationalities [italics added].

It is not a coincidence that this critical departure from art institutions leads these committed artists into a geographical region like the Caribbean, which is often presented as having very weak institutional support structures for the visual arts. In line with Gordon’s argumentation, Haiti seems to be the perfect country where the “revolutionary energy of creativity” can circulate unhindered and freely, in sharp contrast to Europe and the United States, where a tight network of institutions have allegedly rendered art an empty ideological shell without any sociopolitical impact. In the terminology of Victor Li (2006), this perspective can be described as a neo-primitivism—a primitivism in the service of the West’s own self-criticism. The “primitive” is seen as a corrective to the malaise of Western modernity (Li, 2006, p. 15). Haitian poverty is read as a redemptive and nostalgic experience of an anticapitalist alternative. The Ghetto Biennale is an adventure within this nostalgic leftist fantasy of social and artistic Otherness, far from the all-embracing mechanisms of capitalist commodification.

However, one central dilemma in this perspective is that the artists working between Grande Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat often do not want to counter the mechanisms of the “bourgeois” art establishment like their visitors do but are eager to plug themselves into exactly this system. The artists I came to know in Haiti are actively looking for inter-klas dialogues, and they do not want to resist boujwa constructions of value for the visual arts; instead, they professionalize themselves in a way that enables them to participate in globalized art networks as autonomous global players. At the Ghetto Biennale, two important diametrical counterpositions are at play: Whereas one side includes participants trying to escape art institutions by traveling to the allegedly “authentic” margins of the contemporary art world, the other side consists of artists trying to find ways to plug themselves into exactly these institutional networks centralized in Europe and the United States. One of the most challenging aspects of Gordon’s curatorial work is to mediate these two, often conflicting, positions.

Politics of Pity and the Spiral of Accusation

According to art historian Caitlyn Lennon (2012), the most troubling feature of the Ghetto Biennale occurs after the event closes its doors. While all the visiting artists, scholars, and journalists return to their home countries publicly praising the success of the art event, life goes back to normal in the informal neighborhood. She asks in conclusion, “The disparities between these two drastically different outcomes beg the question who actually benefit from the Ghetto Biennale?” (p. 63). A central sentiment that visiting artists at the Ghetto Biennale often have to face is rooted in these moral considerations: How legitimate is it to participate in an art event that takes place in a bidonvil area, where artists expose themselves to abject poverty from a privileged position? Is it wrong to produce socially engaged art out of the misfortune of other people’s socioeconomic marginalization? Is it only morally acceptable to engage with a slum community if this contact leads successfully to upward mobility?

Witnessing the unfortunate life circumstances of people living in poverty often produces an affective coping mechanism among visiting artists, which I describe, following French sociologist Luc Boltanski, as a politics of pity. In line with Hannah Arendt, in his book Distant Suffering, Boltanski (2004) analyzes two emotional responses after spectators encounter the suffering of another group from a distance: indignation and tenderheartedness. The distance described by Boltanski should not be understood too literally in the physical or geographical sense; according to sociologist Anna Szorenyi (2009), “rather it is a distance between ‘classes’ of people, defined according to their ‘condition’, specifically according to whether they belong to the group of the ‘lucky’ or that of the ‘unfortunate’” (p. 99). The first step in the politics of pity involves a distinction between those who suffer, the unfortunate, and those who do not, the lucky. To have knowledge of people who are suffering, Boltanski (2004) argues further, points to a moral obligation to give assistance and to act generously; otherwise, the spectators of suffering can be accused of viewing suffering for their own personal pleasure:

Someone who observes the suffering of another without indifference but without lifting a finger to relieve it may be accused of being personally motivated or interested in viewing suffering, perhaps because it interests him or even gives him pleasure. The criterion of public speech or conversation is precisely what enables us to distinguish between a way of looking which can be characterized as disinterested or altruistic, one which is orientated outwards and which is motivated by the intention to see the suffering ended, from a selfish way of looking which is wholly taken up with the internal states aroused by the spectacle of suffering: fascination, horror, interest, excitement, pleasure etc. (p. 21)

The first emotion described by Boltanski as a reaction to suffering is to become indignant. The spectators feel no longer disarmed and powerless but acquire through their indignation a weapon in the form of anger. This anger expresses itself in a speech act that is formulated as an accusation. The spectator shifts the focus from the pitied unfortunate’s place to that of the accused persecutor. Therefore, the accusation needs a direct addressee, and a persecutor needs to be identified (Boltanski, 2004). The second emotional response to suffering on the part of spectators, when they no longer go down the road of indignation and accusation, takes another route and sympathizes with the unfortunate’s gratitude inspired by the intervention of a benefactor. The moment pity takes the definite form of tenderheartedness, a route is marked out that turns away from the search for a persecutor, and so from accusation, and directs attention to the possibility of an act of charity performed by a benefactor (Boltanski, 2004).

The network of artists who participate in the Ghetto Biennale often seem to move exactly in this emotional field between indignation and tenderheartedness. These two sentiments are also the source of many of the conflicts that take place during the biennale. All visiting artists participating in the biennale come under suspicion by other visiting artists for potentially selfish motives to participate in the event, or they are celebrated as the source of generous acts of kindness. Reciprocal moral accusations are very common among visiting artists, who often discuss during the Ghetto Biennale whether other visitors should be legitimately present in this informal neighborhood. The inhabitants of the neighborhood, and especially the members of Atis Rezistans, have been classified in the category of the “unfortunates” and therefore seem to be constantly in danger of being further marginalized by visitors who belong to the “lucky” category. As a result, all inhabitants of the neighborhood become enwrapped in a cloud of protective benevolence. In a telling email interview, Lennon (2012) quotes visiting artist Karen Miranda Augustine about her experience at the Ghetto Biennale in 2011:

I wasn’t there to take disaster photos, to do research for a PhD, to shoot source material for a film—this wasn’t an anthropological exercise for me. I was there out of a love and respect for Haitian culture, history, art and spiritual expression. . . . At times, I almost felt as if I were one of the few who was there truly out of reverence. (p. 42)

Augustine denounces all potentially selfish interests in participating in the art event and highlights instead her genuine reverence for Haitian art, culture, and religion. She points her finger at other, less genuine endeavors during the art event. During the 3rd Ghetto Biennale 2013, the decision of a group of visiting artists to leave the official biennale hotel Hotel Oloffson, located downtown, to have dinner in a restaurant in the wealthy suburb Pétion-Ville was already enough to spark criticism among other artists and curators, because the money spent could have found a better purpose in the sphere of the “unfortunates.” In the specific context of Haiti, the alleged persecutors of Atis Rezistans are easily to be recognized in Haiti’s “selfish” klas privilejye, which is often symbolized by the wealthy suburb Pétion-Ville, in contrast to downtown Port-au-Prince, where the mas pèp-la (“common people”) live and work. A very small minority in Haitian society obviously control more than a large impoverished majority. Therefore, many Western artists participating in the Ghetto Biennale are quick to point a finger at the established art and gallery scene located in Pétion-Ville, which is often accused in very generalizing terms of disapproving of the artists living between Grand Rue and Rue du Magasin de L’Etat, even though the history of the group Atis Rezistans has shown a strong interconnectedness with this established local art network since the mid-1990s (Frohnapfel, 2018).

Everyone who is not living in a bidonvil neighborhood in Haiti and belongs to the sphere of the “lucky” is eyed with suspicion. Critical accusations like the following by literary scholar Carolyn Duffey (2015) are also very common during the Ghetto Biennale: “The ‘bourgeois’ Haitian artist establishment actively disapproves of the work of Atis Rezistans,” I see this reaction as a direct manifestation of a politics of pity, which tries to redirect the pity and guilt experienced by the direct encounter with marginality toward a concrete group of persecutors. In narratives during the Ghetto Biennale, the sculptors between Grande Rue and Rue Magasin de L’Etat are very specifically produced as an artistic form of “subaltern” resistance from below. This leftist heroic narrative of “class struggle” needs a concrete image of an enemy, which can be found easily in the Haitian established art scene. Through this narrative, visiting Westerners are able to stage themselves as committed partners in an artistic “class struggle” from below. Their ontological complicity (Bourdieu, 1990) with their own klas position, skin color, and/or nationality is significantly forgotten in these narratives, as they redirect and deflect their own guilt, shame, and pity toward concrete local persecutors. As their casual conversations and written texts construct the entire established local Haitian art scene as a problem, these artists and curators from abroad are able to establish themselves, in contrast, as part of the solution. Colin Dayan (2010) describes a very similar process in the wider context of metaphorical representations of Haiti: “If Haiti stands as a metaphor for misery, for helplessness, then the outsiders can assume that such a nation needs the United States to save it.”

I have analyzed elsewhere in detail how narratives of class friction can become a technology for White curators and scholars to rebalance and recenter their discursive authority over Caribbean art (Frohnapfel, 2017). I encountered several of these heroic narratives in informal conversations at the Ghetto Biennale. One visiting British artist spoke of herself as a new Che Guevara who was producing a revolution in the streets of Port-au-Prince, even going on to assert that she would not be surprised if she were to be assassinated by members of the Haitian art establishment for helping organize this supposedly “revolutionary” art event. Whereas some art professionals in Haiti may disapprove of Atis Rezistans and feel misrepresented by their numerous exhibitions in Europe and the United States, as noted earlier, other actors in the artistic field have been crucial and central to their global recognition, opening up important doors for inter-klas dialogues in the artistic field in Haiti. It is important to understand that the artistic milieu in Port-au-Prince is of course not a homogeneous entity. There are obviously brutal mechanisms of power at play, which keep a large majority of Haitians in marginalization and poverty through structural discrimination. But there have been many Haitian art professionals who are concerned about this situation of local and global inequality.

Haitian curators, artists, and gallerists from higher socioeconomic strata are also not shy to turn moral indignation back at the participants and organizers of the Ghetto Biennale. The spiral of moral accusations keeps spinning. Many are highly critical of the biennale, which is often described by them as a “polemic spectacle of poverty” that barely improves the living situation of the inhabitants and mainly benefits the careers of visiting artists and curators from abroad. These reactions imply that it is only morally acceptable to engage with a community living in poverty if this engagement is rooted in generous patronage and leads to acts of humanitarianism. I think it is important to understand that this critical plea from a high moral ground, to engage only with marginalized communities if this action is rooted in philanthropic engagement and sociopolitical improvement, can also be a mechanism that reestablishes social barriers. It triggers a correctness that problematizes inter-klas relationships to a degree that no communication or interaction other than humanitarianism seems possible between different socioeconomic milieus. It also may explain why many socially engaged artists are eager to use a celebratory and often revolutionary rhetoric to describe their own art projects, because in this spiral of accusation, artists have to legitimize their artistic practice against moral accusations and their own sentiment of guilt by presenting their artistic practice as a good social practice.

Harmonious Performances of Inter-klas Togetherness

I realized during my research that one of the strongest taboos in inter-klas relationships during the Ghetto Biennale is to beg directly for money. Many visiting artists are very vocal about their annoyance and frustration when Haitian artists hustle for money or try repeatedly and obtrusively to sell their sculptures to them. All direct requests for financial support have to be camouflaged behind emotional stories of sick family members or have to be introduced with embarrassment if you want to avoid the irritated annoyance of visiting artists and jeopardize your relationship with them. Otherwise, it will trigger unpleasant responses from the visiting artists, which further alienates both social groups from each other. Requests for financial support lead visiting artists back to the socioeconomic discrepancy they set out to dismantle in the first place by striving for the re-creation of social bonds and the establishment of nonhierarchical social collaborations. Requests for financial support are direct reminders for these social actors that they remain anchored in socioeconomic privilege and ontologically complicit with systems of domination. They are forced to realize, bluntly speaking, that they are perceived as a source of hard cash.

Conversations about hierarchy, privilege, and Whiteness are surprisingly difficult to have in this artistic milieu, which is ideologically loaded with an idea of patronage toward the “subaltern” klas and often with a genuine intention to help. Haitian artists need to make sure that visiting Westerners feel reaffirmed in their artistic and ethical endeavors, and they need to ensure—if they want to bond successfully with visiting artists—that this milieu is able to overcome and forget its own sentiments of guilt and shame, which are instantly produced by the direct encounter of privilege with marginality. Many of the art projects at the Ghetto Biennale, therefore, share an aversion for negative affects like unease, disruption, irritation, discomfort, and frustration. This affective aversion in socially engaged art is a response to the politics of pity and often results in performances of harmony.

Visiting artists favor the creation of harmonious situations between both social milieus by realizing art projects such as drawing or knitting workshops for children, dinners, parties, concerts, or dance performances. The experience of abject poverty and the politics of pity as a coping mechanism freeze all social inter-klas relationships into a stiff social etiquette that seems to make any form of conflict or critical dialogue impossible, because everybody is afraid to leave the position of benefactor and possibly transition to the site of the persecutor of the “urban poor.” A very characteristic project in this trajectory was Nourish, by North American artist Lee Lee, who participated in the 3rd Ghetto Biennale in 2013. She decided to collaborate with local grandmothers and staged several joint dinners and lunches where she accompanied the grandmothers through the process of preparing local meals for their families. Lee Lee (2013) described her project as follows:

Food prepared slowly, with love, offers comfort and empowerment to those who are nourished by it. During the Biennale, I envision a series of dinners occurring two or three times a week. I would like to work with local women from getting the ingredients at market and directly from local farmers. As we prepare traditional meals together, I aspire to learn from the women who demonstrate love through nourishment. Through the process, I would create portraits of both the food producers and mothers/grandmothers, as well as record the traditional preparation methods in order to preserve their wisdom.

In a personal conversation with me, she also described her project as a form of feminist empowerment, because these marginalized grandmothers and their everyday practices can be valued and recognized through her art project. The valorization in this case was achieved through the gaze of a White North American traveler who helped stage dinners for everyone to come together to eat in apparent harmony. Interestingly, Lee Lee’s collaborations unintentionally led to a dispute between two grandmothers who started a fight with each other because one of them proposed ownership over Lee Lee and, getting a little rough, asked the other grandmothers to leave the project immediately. This minor situation of conflict between two elderly women shows how socially engaged art projects are already seen as a new resource to access, about which people in the neighborhood are fighting. Curator and art critic Nato Thompson (2015) points out that socially engaged art projects are always cultural experiments in power, and the Ghetto Biennale as an experiment in power has influenced the local infrastructure of power within the community.

Two years earlier, at the 2nd Ghetto Biennale, Lithuanian artist Jurate Jarulyte had already collaborated with Haitian grandmother Rose Marie Paul for her relational aesthetics project (Bourriaud, 1998), Pale avem, kalbék su manimi/Talk to Me, where Jarulyte and Paul spent several sessions together and tried to communicate with each other without sharing a common language. For their last joint session, they also prepared a meal together. In a retrospective, Jarulyte (2011) wrote, “I am asking myself if the collaboration with Rose Marie Paul could be called ‘a project’ as it evolved as an honest enriching relationship and friendship.” As Bishop (2006) points out in her work on the social turn, socially engaged artists often question the authorship of their own art projects by describing them as a shared social situation. In the case of Jarulyte the status of being an art project is lost altogether. The renunciation of authorship, or the “humble lack of authorship” as Bishop (2012, p. 26) calls it, is a characteristic instrument to stage socially engaged art as a selfless, benevolent practice of empowerment. Authorship is equated with authority and therefore needs to be deactivated. Upscaling an art project where two people lack a shared language to speak to each other into friendship is a common rhetorical move that creates a facade of interracial and inter-klas harmony, instead of directly articulating the shortcomings, complicities, and conflicts of socially engaged art projects.

Another example of a staged performance of harmony took place at the 3rd Ghetto Biennale when two different artist collectives organized several street parties and concerts within the neighborhood. The parties were organized by Vision Forum and XKlub at Rue du Magasin de L’Etat. The first concert mixed the sounds of interviews the group had carried out in a project called Is Misunderstanding Misunderstood? The second and third concerts were collaborations with Atis Rezistans artists Jean Claude Saintilus and Pierre Adler. Local musical traditions such as hip-hop and vodou drumming were mixed with electronic music and played publicly in the streets. The final concert, which became a street party in the area, was a collaboration between Vision Forum and visiting artists Jean-Louis Huhta (a.k.a. Dungeon Acid), Joyce Ip, and Roberto Peyre (a.k.a. XKlub). In the center of the party, Joyce Ip, Roberto Peyre, and Jean-Louis Huhta built a runway, where everybody was encouraged to dance moving up and down in the spotlight:

The intention is to facilitate a platform where the creative impulse is expressed through gesture, appearance and musicality rather than art objects, imagery, workshops or talk. For Ghetto Biennale 2013 we rather walk the walk, where body language and made up music instruments do the talk. (Peyre, 2013)

The artists positioned their street party in opposition to other Ghetto Biennale projects that relied on art making, workshops, or conversations. The term art is here dissolved into a “creative impulse” where everyone is able to participate freely without restraint. All potential hierarchies are dissolved into rhythmic movements of drunken and dancing bodies. The artists try to stage a collective, almost ritualistic experience that is supposed to bypass all possible asymmetric relationships of power, offering instead a fictional harmonious space where everyone is “invited to show off and freak out” (Peyre, 2013).

The biennales feel very seductive, like a sequence of different parties and concert events. But performing equality is something other than being equal. These projects produce a surface of inter-klas happiness for the biennale. I see a danger in these harmonious feel-good moments, which produce celebratory sentiments but conceal conflicts. They imply that the Ghetto Biennale is already doing enough to overcome klas barriers and social hierarchy, because artists from different socioeconomic milieus seem able to performatively inhabit the same space for a short time frame. They conceal inequality and help increase the affective alienation of many local artists from this art event. Following Marilyn Frye, Ahmed (2010b) argues,

Oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. . . . To be oppressed requires you to show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. . . . If an oppressed person does not smile or show signs of being happy, then he or she is read as being negative: as angry, hostile, unhappy, and so on. (p. 66)

What about the inter-klas conflicts, which do occur? What about the anger and frustration the community wants to articulate? What about the dependencies and hierarchies, which remain intact?

A crucial feature of Boltanski’s concept of politics of pity is the distance he describes between two social groups. The Ghetto Biennale, as a curated social situation, set out to bridge exactly this socio-spatial gap by bringing two separated groups together for an art event. As I have shown, however, the distance described by Boltanski is affectively reestablished through a politics of pity in moments of intense proximity, every time contact between the two groups reveals the persistence of unbalanced power dynamics. Haitian artists can profit most from the art event if they learn how to manage visiting artists’ politics of pity for their own benefit through emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) and by helping the visiting artists to feel heroic, accomplished, giving, and tender-hearted during art performances. As I have sought to demonstrate, art performances can become a technology of deflection, redirecting attention away from social disparities and complicities. This is exactly the progressive racism that underlies the social structure of the biennale.

Summary: Countering Privilege With Anger

The first phase of excitement triggered by the seductiveness of these new inter-klas encounters during the Ghetto Biennale seems to have slowly diminished in recent years. I encountered several disappointed voices—which stand in sharp contrast to the excitement visiting artists and curators experience because of the harmonious feel-good politics of the art event—for example,

I am part of Atis Rezistans since 2007, and I still cannot feed my own seven children. I don’t understand, what use does it even have to be an artist if you still cannot support your own family from it? Sak vid pa kanpe! [“An empty sack can’t stand up!”]

or “I work very hard every day with my own two hands to become a great artist like Celeur and Eugène and to improve my sculptures, but I still cannot buy me something to eat in the evening.” Over the past few years, many artists have come to the painful realization that they have remained poor and marginalized and the art tourism in the area has not produced the desired upward social mobility. Art historian Krista Thompson (2015), following Peggy Phelan, points out that we need to interrogate the implicit assumptions about the connections between representational visibility and political power and the “limited effectiveness of strategies of visibility” (p. 39). Even in a state of “hypervisibility,” the social and economic marginality of specific groups can remain unchanged. The members of Atis Rezistans are a concrete example of this unfortunate process.

In the wake of the Ghetto Biennale, a new generation of artists has emerged since 2009, who barely produce art objects but concentrate mainly on networking activities to attach themselves successfully to this visiting art milieu. These artists do not feel the same frustration because they have translated the Ghetto Biennale into their own grammar of popular resistance. One of my interlocutors explained,

Let me explain it you: To be successful in our group [Atis Rezistans], you have to use your own mind. Nobody will help you; nobody will guide you to be successful. You have to use your mind to create your own world of contacts and friends. Only with foreigners you get opportunities to do something, and you will be able to travel or participate in exhibitions. . . . Sometimes we have here very frustrated artists in our group because the leader of our group will not give you these opportunities. You have to create opportunities for yourself by meeting blan [“foreigners”].

Many artists have accepted their dependency and cater directly to the visitors in their neighborhood for socioeconomic benefit. Haitian artists’ management of emotions recenters the position of visiting artists as the ones whose feelings matter the most, but it also reveals how Haitian artists can enact their agency by wittingly manipulating interracial and inter-klas anticipations and desires (Frohnapfel, 2018). But many Atis Rezistans artists do not want to have to rely on mechanisms of trickery and seduction. They angrily pointed out to me their frustration that, in the end, the people with the biggest career advantages are not the best artists of the group but those who directly cater to their network of visiting art professionals from a klas piwo a. This frustration is often articulated as anger and directed at the curators of the Ghetto Biennale, who are understood to be responsible for this situation.

It is not surprising that Leah Gordon is very visible in the Black urban community and her career is observed carefully and with skepticism by many, very critical eyes. Her committed engagement with the members of Atis Rezistans allowed her to establish herself as a curator since 2009; she is now able to travel around the world to participate in congresses about biennales or curate her own art exhibitions. Her success is disproportionate in comparison to the success of many Haitian artists within the group. One member of Atis Rezistans formulated this situation boldly as follows:

Gordon’s career as a curator is based on us and the art we are producing here in this neighborhood. When you read her biography, you will realize she was almost nothing before working with us. She needed us more than we needed her. . . . Gordon is only famous because of us.

The Ghetto Biennale is promoted as a community project and fruitful inter-klas collaboration, but these critical voices show that artists living in the neighborhood are challenging the idea of its being a successful collaboration. Over the past 10 years, the refusal to speak about newly established power imbalances and hierarchies has led to divisions within Atis Rezistans. I heard that members of Atis Rezistans had started to call the event Leah-ak-Eugène-byenal (“The Leah and Eugène Biennale”) behind the curator’s back, because they questioned whether any direct agency was facilitated for their own artistic careers by the art event. They also witnessed Eugène’s ability, because of the biennale, to establish himself successfully as the central leader of the group, localizing and centralizing the previously mobile poverty tourism in the neighborhood to focus mainly on his own musée d’art from 2009 onward. Tellingly, Celeur, co-curator of the first three installments, repeatedly called himself a komisè zonbi (“zombie curator”) in our conversations. Although Gordon appointed him curator for the first three installments of the biennale, according to him, he never had any direct say in the art event’s creative decisions and he saw his appointment as no more than lip service.

In her book White Innocence, cultural anthropologist Gloria Wekker (2016) describes how interracial encounters often function within a racialized common sense that has been established over 400 years of imperial rule and continues to play a vital but unacknowledged part in meaning-making processes today. Wekker, following Edward Said, explains this racialized common sense as a cultural archive that is centrally located in our minds and feelings. In analyzing the politics of emotions that take shape during the Ghetto Biennale, I have sought in this contribution to show that leaving physical art institutions behind does not change the larger institutional logic, or the racialized common sense of our hearts and minds. By positioning a group of Haitian artists, voluntarily and involuntarily, as available for visiting artists, and by managing their affective economies through emotional labor, this joint art event reproduces a long-standing colonial history of power that evokes Wekker’s racialized common sense.

The harmonious feel-good politics during the Ghetto Biennale camouflage the varied tensions, complicities, and unequal power dynamics, without offering an alternative space to lay bare these tensions and discuss the biennale’s shortcomings directly and openly. bell hooks (1992) adroitly points out that “by [simply] expressing the desire for ‘intimate’ contact with black people, white people do not eradicate the politics of racial domination as they are made manifest in personal interaction” (p. 28). It is comparatively easy to renounce systems of domination such as Whiteness, klas privilege, and nationality through a speech act, declarative gesture, art performance, or written article, but the example of the Ghetto Biennale shows that it is much more challenging to do so in practices, personal relationships, and everyday realities.

As an antiracist practice, media scholar Tanja Dreher (2009) points out the possibilities (and limits) of the politics of listening. She argues that attentive listening can offer the most ethical possibility for a privileged person in a situation of interracial debate. Following Kate Ratcliffe’s (2005) concept of eavesdropping, Dreher develops eavesdropping with permission as a decentering tactic that privileged people can employ while participating in conversations with minorities, without the risk of being perceived as a direct addressee in these conversations or of dominating the conversations. Eavesdropping with permission enables privileged people to engage with the life experiences of minorities without centering their own opinions and feelings or forcing less privileged individuals into the position of explaining themselves to White denials of marginality (Dreher, 2009). Many visiting artists and curators fail to listen in a similar self-reflexive fashion, or more precisely, they selectively hear only what they want to. However, it is precisely such moments—which trigger discomfort and irritation—that should not be avoided. Dwelling on uncomfortable feelings can be a starting point for unveiling the persistence and complicity of privilege in situations of good intentions and targeted change.

It is telling that those Haitian artists who are persistently critical of the event’s organization and power structure, and who keep reminding committed visiting artists, curators, and scholars directly and indirectly about these power imbalances, tend to leave the art event. This anger or unhappiness is an important articulation of community resistance, which intends to break loose from persistent mechanisms of dependency and inter-klas obedience to the visiting milieu of “generous” supporters. But this anger stands in the way of curators and visiting artists getting past their own guilt and feeling accomplished in their socially engaged endeavors. The contradictions and shortcomings of the Ghetto Biennale should not prevent us from communicating with the urban poor or from engaging critically, artistically, intellectually, or emotionally with them, their critical opinions, and their art works. On the contrary, the biggest strength of this biennale project is indeed the production of a space where inter-klas tension and conflict become possible. But the organizers and artists of the Ghetto Biennale need to develop tools for listening to anger and frustration, rather than avoiding, deflecting, or fleeing from them “under a blanket of guilt” (Lorde, 2007, p. 130) that often expresses itself in feel-good politics.