2nd Ghetto Biennale 2011

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ARCHIVED WORK OF PARTICIPATING ARTISTS & SCHOLARS

Fungus Collective

We were able to make two sculptures we were proud of. From the outset we had decided that since we would only have been in Haiti for one week, we would stay away from trying to make anything too 'emotional' about peoples direct experiences of abject poverty or earthquakes. Also we wanted to do a piece that was reflective of our own world, and not a 'copy' of the Haitian aesthetic.

We based our “Holding It All Together” tape piece on the idea of finding what was 'level' in a very wobbly world. We established a straight horizontal line and then used coloured tape to symbolically 'hold together' an earthquake damaged building. There are all sorts of connotations that speak directly to the Biennial and aid in general, as well as the Haitian visual culture. Besides that it just looked cool, and people in the neighborhood seemed to really like it.

Our other installation relied on the same underlying principles, but it was a more collaborative piece , which added another layer, in that people could help create and change the work. For this one, we mad a lot of coloured paper cubes and then filled in holes in a damaged wall.

In both sculptures we wanted to find a visual way to represent 'our' world, and we thought, our lives are all about order and systems, straight lines and modularity, ideas we could abstract using perfectly horizontal bands, and repetitive shapes. Both these elements really' jumped out,' when put in the context of the chaotic Haitian street.