Etal de cosmetiques
Boîte de cordonnier – Bwat kòdonye
These objects are survivals!
Strolling down town,
walking or driving
streets are crowded
crowded with people, crowded with sellers. Sidewalks are markets, places of survival. Anything can be sold and nothing goes lost a pair of old shoes or two bananas,
it doesn’t matter.
When you’re hungry, when you have nothing you do what you can with whatever you have, and if nothing is what you have...
you’ll just have to make something out of it... something out of nothing.
The sidewalk is where everything happens and it becomes a mall:
each seller has to be noticed
struggle for visibility
goods are jazzed up,
the spot organized
comfortable and shadowed.
Tools and objects
Themselves survivors,
as cats, they have multiple lives.
Immortal objects capable of adjusting to alternative roles.
To die is a luxury reserved to those countries where everything is consumed.
Where goods are bought and dumped with an ease here unknown.
Objects carrying marks of their past lives multiple soldering,
rusted nails chips
hammer strokes traces
and the dirty old paint layering off.
Objects made up by components with a previous life
employed in objects now discarded and abandoned now recomposed in a complete renaissance of the body
... and the soul !
And a heart-warming spirituality of the object itself it's unexpectedly discovered
lives and experiences led with honor and dignity
vision and imagination
practicality and aesthetics.
The ability to see potentials beyond appearance.
Objects revealing us their importance in the lives of those who built them.
Objects which speak love for the care they were conceived and then put together.
Objects simple in concepts in their absolute economy of the elements composing them.
These objects send us back in the days prior to modernity
We hear them talk about an ancient preindustrial era where nothing was standard.
Through these objects we rediscover everyday’s life in the big cities of the world as it probably was in the past centuries when codes, laws and conven- tions weren’t as strict. When in London, Paris and New York we could find the same typology of tools to help the street seller in his job ;
Tools, toys and accessories of our grandparents’ ev- eryday’s life now almost everywhere disappeared. Almost invisible in today’s crowded and noisy Port- au-Prince, we discover these objects for the first time as they were not part of the present urban landscape.
Roberto Stephenson