"Peddlers Romance,"our largest collaborative piece thus far, is a continuation of our "Buy the Yard" series, which comprises bolts of painted canvases mounted on dispensers and sold by the yard. This approximately twenty-foot-wide work consists of text and images on canvas covering the front and back of two large vertical scrolls that are each a hundred inches tall. The smaller, right scroll winds clockwise, the larger, left one counterclockwise, revealing a quotation (repeated on the entire reverse span of the canvas) from "Divine Horsemen" by MayaDeren, the avant garde film maker. Although only one set of three six-foot-wide panels of images are seen between the two scrolls, all together the work contains two sets of panels, each one repeated twice for a total of twelve yards of canvas.
(Photo above and 2 below by Valentino Griscioli courtesy Istituto Italo-Latino Americano )
The first panel next to the larger scroll, subtitled "Peddler in Sardinia," is based on an African Peddler we had actually seen at the beach in Sardinia. In the second panel, "Jungle" we have coopted the familiar jungle scenes that make up a good amount of the stereotypical images of Haitian self-taught artists. The third panel is a reworking of an actual book jacket photograph (that predates 1972) of some of Haiti’s respected painters displaying their wares outdoors.
That Deren, a well respected ethnographer, aestheticizes a mundane scene of Haitian women carrying on their heads goods to markets at dawn points to a salient aspect of the politics of memory--mainly, that we marshal it in often self-serving ways. But parody, deconstruction and irony in general is not our motivation. As we have stated in an essay for our debut collaborative show, "We are abstract nationalists." "We believe that we contribute to sociopolitical struggles of Haiti ...in subjective, cultural forms." As V. Cybil Charlier has stated, when one inhabits two worlds, one often simultaneously belong to both and none." Living andezo (or "between waters") allows us to see some of the thruths and falsities of the alternate sides of our own idea of memory. So, aside from the doubling of the presented images with Deren’s text, "Pedler’s Romance" is an affirmative work that points to the will to embody through memory our sense of our own social, cultural and historical experiences. In fact (since it contains repeated graphite portraits illustrated from photographs of ourselves), the work is an extended self-portrait of ourselves across historical and art-historical memory and, more pertinently, across the vicissitudes of the African and Caribbean diaspora and its representation.
