KOMYE, HAITI
We planned our trip so that we would be in Komye on the 12th of January, which marks the fourth anniversary of the 2010 earthquake. The epicenter of the quake was a few miles from Komye, and every year since, the village has held a ceremony that honors the memories of those who were claimed by the disaster.
Our trip also coincided with a visit to Komye by Ayiti Resurrect. In their own words, Ayiti Resurrect is:
a team of visionary artists, community builders, holistic healers, and organic farmers with bloodlines in Haiti and the African Diaspora, working in collaboration with a rural community in Leogane to support the healing and upliftment of the survivors of the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
We were lucky enough to be present for the tail end of a week of activity organized by Ayiti Resurrect: workshops, skill shares, reforestation and infrastructure projects, as well as the operation of a pop-up dental and health clinic. Ayiti Resurrect members commemorated the quake through sharing their gifts as performers, and they inspired us to participate in the memorialization of the quake in our own way. To this end, we created a camera obscura that would project the January 12th sunset landscape into the community center. We harvested some bamboo from the land of our friend Zaude Sanon, lashed together a frame from which to hang a sheet of drafting paper, and adorned it with flowers from the forest. We paired this with our first working prototype of how a lens might interact with the dome: a cardboard baffle cut precisely to the window's dimensions, with a beautiful Jaeger objective telescope lens mounted along the center axis, using no small amount of gaffer's tape.