By sundown, at least two hundred people had gathered around the community center, in the clearing under the mango trees. Fried plantains and pikliz were served, a troupe of performers put on a little one-act comedy, illuminated by flashlight, and music thumped from the sound system of a motorcycle taxi.
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.
Jankanez and our first little obscura.
We released the little camera obscura into the world, meaning that we handed it over to the growing crew of curious children who had been watching us assemble it. A cycle began in which a group of children crammed their heads into the obscura's viewer, while another group danced and frolicked in front of the lens, and then they switched places. This cycle ran it's course until the daylight was exhausted.
Upon first arrival, we established a little workshop outdoors, and began fashioning a camera obscura out of cardboard. The strange endeavor drew a crowd, and we spent many long sunny silences in the observant company of our Komye friends - folding cardboard, taping, cutting vellum - as explaining exactly what we were making was far beyond our abilities in Kreyol.
We attempted a more ambitious studio shoot today, this time relocating to a room that offered greater control of ambient light. The gown that we pulled from the costume closet encouraged us to be bold - it seemed to banish any shyness from the room, and multiple photographers covered the scene while other girls gave artistic direction. Another couple of handheld camera obscura were fabricated and employed.
We threw ourselves headlong into setting up a studio shoot, which gave some of the girls a chance to get their hands on some professional lighting gear and experiment with lighting a scene. Their taste tended towards the dramatic, with heavy shadows, vivid colors, and high contrast. Meanwhile, another faction of girls built a few camera obscuras out of cardboard with which to view the scene, and for the photographers to try and shoot through.
We spent the day on the roof, playing with direct sunlight, creating images of the sky and the buildings around us. We enacted The Camera Dance, working together to create a physical embodiment of the camera, throwing light (tissue paper) through an aperture (someone's encircled arms) at a sensor (a piece of black cardstock), but only when the shutter (a black blanket) is open. We brought out a few film cameras and fired them with their backs open, to watch the shutter action. To gain an understanding of just how fast 1/8000 of a second is, we did some action photography, capturing some girls in mid-leap.
We continued our experiments from last week, this time in a bright room, testing whether the striking images we were producing in the black chamber would still appear in the light of day. We played a game called "What's in a camera?" in which each participant drew a diagram of the interior mechanisms of a camera, to their best understanding, and then tried to convince others of the validity of the system they drew. Inserting magic and whimsy into the diagram was fair game, as long as their diagram represented some sort of a system by which images are captures.
The planetarium at the Girls Club - what makes it so special is not just that it's the newest, sharpest planetarium in town, with a perfectly seamless perforated metal dome, but that it's programming goes far beyond the night sky. Dave Pentecost, the dome's curator, embraces experimental film and new media, and the planetarium serves as a honey pot: attracting artists with the opportunity to create and compose for New York's only readily accessible hemispherical theater. These visiting artists then share their work with the girls, and everyone wins.
Here's the planetarium in the New York Times.
