carnet de voyages
table of contents preface.........................8 images..................10- 53 artist’s bio...................55
Preface Nathalie Jolivert’s black-and-white ink drawings come together in Carnet de Voyages as a commentary on what it means to experience herself and her country through shifting perspectives. Drawing stylistically from Haiti’s Naïve and Saint-Soleil art movements, Jolivert helps her audience approach Port-au-Prince and New York City, both through a familiar lexicon of traditional Haitian visual and narrative references, and through a vocabulary of symbols crafted from her own experience and imagination. The stories she tells are rich in the details of everyday life, and they also speak to—and criticize—broader implications of the changing realities of home and of migration. Jolivert takes care in rendering the stories attached to places. The sequence begins at home in Port-au-Prince. Palms reach into a star-studded sky over the elegant wooden eaves and columns of an old house. We are introduced to a figure: uniform, unmarked, with serious and perceptive eyes that are echoed throughout the book. Faces peer at us from amongst tropical leaves. Two figures juggle a soccer ball. We see ribcages of street vendors, starkly, as they sell fruit in the sun. While these early scenes are beautiful in their on right, they also create the vocabulary through which Jolivert weaves together a larger, poetic, story. The streets of Jolivert’s Port-au-Prince come alive with Haitian folktales and proverbs, with vehicles of Haitian commentary and culture, and with actual vehicles: we can see painted buses and Haiti’s iconic tap-taps throughout the collection. Haiti’s buses are famously painted with pithy and inspirational sayings. Here Jolivert uses them to deploy her own kind of irony. The Vodou god of the ocean, Lasirèn, sips a martini on the top of a crowded bus painted with the words “Naje pou n sòti,” or “Swim our way out.” This phrase, which denotes working hard to resolve a problem, has also come to represent the period of intense political, social and economic destabilization beginning in the early 1990s, which still results in waves of refugees fleeing Haiti by sea. Under Jolivert’s pen these sayings,
proverbs and quips alike—which have often been read as funny or incongruous by outside observers—turn into a lens through which she sincerely questions urgent issues Haitians confront in their daily lives. Jolivert takes us from Port-au-Prince to New York City and over the oceans that separate them. We see the bodies of “boat people”— inky black against the waves—as they struggle to stay afloat. In the background is a sinking boat, and we see Lasirèn again, seemingly also drowning. Commercial airplanes fly above them, unconcerned. The traveler on the plane, New York bound, watches the scene as the leaves, stars and drowning figures alike are mirrored in her body. These symbols also inflect her observations of New York in a way that seems nostalgic. A lonely figure sits in “Café NYC” pushing around a miniature recreation of Haitian life, and death, on her plate, while Lasirèn sinks in a glass of water next to her. Later, the palm trees that surrounded the peaceful night-time home are lit like match sticks while tanks, belonging to the United Nation’s “peacekeeping” force, MINUSTAH, roll by accompanied by the words “Brought to you kindly by the world.” Through this series of stories, Jolivert draws on personal experience and observation to critically engage systems of power and disenfranchisement that transcend national boundaries. The resonances produced through the collection—through the repetition of ideas and symbols—make it clear that there are no easy answers. Her approach, however, is hopeful. Jolivert takes up the elements of everyday life in order to question that life and ultimately make it better. Winter Rae Schneider Gonaïves, Haiti
ABOUT ARTIST: Nathalie Jolivert is an architect and artist based in Port-auPrince, Haïti. In her architectural practice, Nathalie is interested in design solutions that value tradition, material history, culture and community involvement. Growing up in Haiti, a developing country with a rich yet complex culture, Nathalie realizes the importance to innovate and provide efficient answers to problems. Her academic years at the Rhode Island School of Design have equipped her with the skills to embrace challenges as sources of Opportunities. Nathalie’s design process is often inspired by local stories which she incorporates throughout her architectural and art projects.
Special thanks to Ayitattoo for the printing costs of this book. Ayitattoo is a company of temporary tattoo designs inspired by Haitian culture.