carnet de voyages
table of contents preface.........................8 images..................10- 51 author’s bio................53
“Naje pou l sòti: swimming her way out” In Nathalie Jolivert’s rich collection of black-and-white ink drawings, she guides us through her own journey away from home while also showing us how her personal travels resonate with broader experiences, both in Haiti and of migration. She teaches her viewers a new vocabulary of symbols for understanding her experience of Port-au-Prince. At the same time, she touches on a familiar Haitian visual and narrative lexicon, which makes visual reference to Haiti’s Naïve and Saint-Soleil art movements, which she uses incisively throughout the collection. These two sets of symbols, when used together, offer a powerful commentary on what it means to experience the self as it encounters different places, and to be able to purposefully engage the stories these encounters produce. 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 home. We are introduced to a figure—uniform, with serious and perceptive eyes that are echoed throughout the book. Jolivert establishes a coherent artistic style that she maintains for the rest of the work—a fluid, hand-drawn look at times, at others graphic and stylized, both styles feature unhesitant depth and stark contrast. 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 tells us a larger, and ultimately 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: one can see painted buses and Haiti’s iconic tap-taps weave through the collection. Haiti’s buses are famously painted with pithy and inspirational sayings. Here Jolivert deploys her own kind of irony. The mermaid god, Lasirèn, sips a martini on the top of a crowded bus painted with the words “Naje poun soti,” or “Swim our way out.” Often visitors to Haiti have read
the kind of lettering that signposts Haiti’s street life as incongruous with the harsh realities in the country. Under Jolivert’s pen these sayings, proverbs and quips alike, turn into a lens through which the artist sincerely questions the very real and 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 beneath the waves. 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. A lonely figure sits in “Café NYC” pushing around a miniature recreation of Haitian life on her plate, while Lasirèn sinks in a glass of water next to her. The stories Jolivert assembles critically engage the problems posed by life in her home country. The palm trees that surrounded the peaceful night-time home are lit like match sticks while tanks, maybe belonging to either or both the United Nation’s “peacekeeping” force, MINUSTAH, roll by accompanied by the words “Brought to you kindly by the world.” Through this series of journeys, Jolivert situates Haiti’s ills within both personal experience and systems of power and disenfranchisement in a way that makes it clear that there are no easy answers. Her approach, however, is hopeful. She chooses to plunge in headfirst and swim her way out. Jolivert takes up the elements of everyday life in order to question that life and ultimately make it better. Winter Rae Schneider PhD Candidate and Teaching Associate at UCLA Department of History
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.