Haiti. January 2010.
This is a story about the spirits. About the relationship between the survivors and the deads. Vudù in Haiti is everywhere and it’s the cultural substrate of the perception of the death. The earthquake, with his 300.000 victims, uncorked a powerfull atmosphere. While I was covering the day by day events, I decided to use my leica M6 to catch this atmosphere. In this work, I feel I have found back the Haitians.
When the dust covered all the colors, the spirits tempted to raise again the will versus the fatality.
Then, I stopped to be, and I agreed to remove the part of myself that had brought me to Haiti.
I stopped to tell, because the tale itself become a way to be present.
Then, I was able to be, on the border between presence and absence, as a spirit among the living people.
And in that moment I could start to search Haiti, not my Haiti nor yours, not the beauty nor the tragedy.
In the mist, each single body or gesture draws a letter, all the bodies draw words, that become sentences, of the tale written by the island.
In the death of the deads, in the gestures of the acting, in the life of the research of life, while the country was burning and nothing more had a sense or a limit, at last I understood that there are no reasons why things happen.
But nothing compares with the spirits that all of us met and with whom we spoke.
