Racist? Or Empowering? The Ghetto Tarot

In downtown Port-au-Prince, the capital of a mysterious, captivating and seemingly poor country named Haïti –land of the mountains- one can find a museum filled with an art collection of creativity and ingenuity in the middle of the Haitian Ghetto. Where a foreigner walks through the streets filled with plastic trash, dust and old car tires and perceives misery and desperation, a group of artists called AtisRezistans (resistant artists) find inspiration in the midst of the chaos; inspiration to create the world they dream of, inspiration to transform trash into something beautiful, inspiration to craft art. The pieces of art inside the museum are a reflection of the beauty they see hidden within the waste.

Every two years AtisRezistans invite Western and non-Western artists to their home to create art together. The exhibition that arises from the collaboration is called Ghetto Biennale. The idea is to portray a more creative aspect of the Haitian reality, to counterbalance the current, dominant negative portrayal of the country.

AtisRezistans are claiming the word “Ghetto”. They free themselves of its depreciating undertone and turn it into something beautiful. Their act of appropriating a word loaded with unfavorable sentiments by altering its meaning is an act of inspiration. It has inspired hundreds of visitors and it has inspired me.

My name is Alice Smeets, I am a photographer and filmmaker from Belgium, who has traveled extensively to Haiti in the last 8 years. I met AtisRezistans during their second Ghetto Biennale while I was exploring the fascinating live of the Haitian citizens. I became friends with some of the artists and we stayed in touch ever since.

Their philosophy of turning trash into art, thus a negative into a positive gave me the idea to create a tarot deck in which I wanted to translate their philosophy, recognizing that the confrontation of our inner feelings and emotions is what tarot is all about.

The Haitians loved the idea, being acquainted with cartomancy from the Voodoo religion. They immediately jumped on board to help realize this project and we replicated the scenes of the The Rider Waite deck (that was originally designed in 1909 by artist Pamela Colman Smith) in the slums of Port-au-Prince using only material we were able to find or create locally.

We chose to call it “Ghetto Tarot” to create a connection to the Ghetto Biennale and to provoke a discussion around the topic, to have people question their assumptions about what the ghetto really is and to change the often-negative connotation that the word usually implies into a positive one.

Find out what the word Ghetto means to the Haitians.

Our intention has never been a glorification of the life in poverty, but to feature the Haitian Ghetto in another light. Since generations Haitians have witnessed people telling them that they are poor and that they need western “solutions” to their problems and many have associated themselves with this idea a long time ago.

Our objective is to highlight the creativity and strength of the citizens of the Ghetto and we are certain that inside of them lays a treasure of innovative ideas to dissolve the circle of dependence and victimization that will break through if the world starts looking at their skills and capacities instead of their deficiencies. That plays an important part of the objective behind the photography of the “Ghetto Tarot”: reaching beyond cultural walls of prejudice and ignorance to achieve a much-needed transformation of the collective conscience perception of the Ghetto.

The photos are calling to the emotions of many viewers. They either create excitement about the beauty that is captured in the middle of the Ghetto or about the fact that the ancient tarot cards come alive while they can also act as a trigger to the emotion of anger that some of us carry within us.

My hope is that the Ghetto tarot photography will lead their observers closer to a complete awareness of these sentiments where he/she starts to feel them consciously to be able to release them if necessary.

The undertaking of the Haitians made me realize that it lies only within us to assign value or judgment towards a tangible or intangible thing, which creates a positive or negative emotion. We give a word meaning according to the way we were raised, our personal experiences of the past and depending on who has taught us to speak. If we realize that we can choose if we look at destruction and see despair or if we choose to see the start of something new, we can change the meaning of every word, action and emotion and discover the power of our own thoughts.

That means we are not slaves of our past, we are not imprisoned by our current society, but we are free if we choose to be. We can give ourselves the freedom to create our own reality!

The Haitian artists have understood this freedom by turning trash into art and through the Ghetto Tarot we are sharing it together with the world.

And if you want to find out how to change your perception… ask the cards!