Jean-Claude Saintilus in his home altar atelier and yard, between Grand Rue and Rue du Magasin de l’Etat in downtown Port-au-Prince in 2017 Leah Gordon
“I am dead already. I just haven’t been buried yet,” says Jean-Claude Saintilus at the beginning of The Sculptors of Grand Rue, Leah Gordon’s 2008 documentary.
Claude (as he was known) Saintilus is speaking at the beginning of November and it’s Fèt Gede, a time of celebration, a Haitian festival of the dead. Framed in the shadow of his yard against the backdrop of his assemblages, he is explaining the connection between his ancestors, the Vodou spirit world and his artworks. “I can be here today and tomorrow I’m gone, but I will still exist, my spirit will still be here. That is why, when a person dies, I like to take his head and make him live again. I take his skull and create a sculpture from it…”
Gordon, a British artist and curator who is well versed in Haitian art, was there to make a film about Atis Rezistans, the collective to which Saintilus belonged, shot in the slum neighbourhood in downtown Port au Prince where he lived and worked beside the city’s main thoroughfare. “And then he kind of becomes possessed by Gede during the interview,” she recalls. Saintilus begins singing and the camera pans to a skull embedded in the work he has created in his yard, an altar piece to family and the Gede spirits.
Now Saintilus has passed away—in bodily form, at least—Gordon and others who worked with him want to preserve his legacy. “There was never a feeling that he was acknowledged by the very few art institutions in Haiti,” says Gordon, who hopes to make a book of his artworks from the many photographs she has taken.
Installation of works by Jean-Claude Saintilus at St Kunigundis Church, at Documenta Fifteen 2022, Kassel, Germany Photograph: Frank Sperling
“As the artists [in the collective] grew more prominent, Claude rarely stepped into the spotlight,” says Katherine Smith, an ethnographer and academic who has written extensively about informal artist networks in Haiti and the Caribbean, and who knew Saintilus well. “But really he was the soul of the group, the one who gave the movement its depth, connected it to something sacred. Claude lived in close rapport with Gede, the trickster spirit who governs over life’s end and inevitable renewal. This showed in his work, how he mentored other artists and the way gentle humour and gravity suffused his demeanour.”
Like Smith, Gordon met Saintilus in the mid-2000s. She had been asked by the International Slavery Museum in Liverpool to begin the process of commissioning a permanent sculpture by Atis Rezistans. Gordon has been visiting Haiti since 1991, but hadn’t met the collective until then. Through its best-known members—André Eugene, with whom she would soon create the Ghetto Biennale, Frantz "Guyodo" Jacques and Jean-Hérard Céleur, who have both since left—she was introduced to Saintilus, who was quiet by nature compared to the three “superstars”.
Gordon worked with Saintilus and interviewed him many times, collaborating with Atis Rezistans on exhibitions at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), the Fowler Museum at UCLA, in Los Angeles (2012), Pioneer Works in Brooklyn (2018), Documenta Fifteen (2022) and several editions of the Ghetto Biennale (from 2009), which invites international artists to show work alongside Haitians in informal settings in two of the poorest districts in Port au Prince. Some of the artists have become wary about being pigeon-holed as Vodou artists, she says. “Claude stayed very firm with his spirituality. So, everything he made, every move he made, he felt, was led by the spirits.
Jean-Claude Saintilus, Vyej Mari (Virgin Mary), 2015 Daniel Bradica (Courtesy of the artist and Pioneer Works)
“In all the interviews I did with him, he talked so much about his parents and his grandmother and the spirits that led them. There's always this kind of mythopoesis about his pieces—that he is using the skulls of his family members. So there's one piece that's his mother, one piece that was his grandmother, [one that was] his auntie. Now, whether or not that is absolutely true or not… But it’s very much for him. He created in his yard a kind of memorial for family members.”
She explains that his assemblages, which are also made up of junk and car parts and the like, memorialise ideas he had about Vodou and his family, “but they're certainly not ritualistic objects that hold any intrinsic spiritual power in themselves”. Smith remembers him telling her about making his yard “into a new demanbre, or ancestral land, replete with reposwa, repositories of spirit. These reposwa took the form of artworks.”
In the Port au Prince neighbourhood where he was born in 1960 and where he lived and worked all his life, there is a tradition of wood-carving that dates back to the 1940s and 50s, when handmade objects were sold to tourists. There is furniture-making and also a lot of welded material, because the area is a repository for car parts, and so a focal point for mechanics. And there’s an artist community that mixes the two. “But Claude never did any of that, really. He seemed to just drape gentle materials over strange objects and come up with quite incredible, ethereal objects. They are nearly all figurative.”
“He very much identified as an artist,” says Gordon, who adds that he was also a talented drummer, a member of a foot band (a neighbourhood street orchestra) and a great singer. “It's pretty obvious for everybody, when you see any of his work, that it's very special.” However, the process of his work was a mystery to her. “It was changing all the time. It was always a surprise as to what you would find there each time. I never, ever, in my life saw him do any work. It seemed to get done in a space-time continuum I had no access to,” she laughs. “But when I arrived at his yard, there was always new work, some of it more frightening than others.”
In the past, this work might have been described as naive or ‘outsider’, primitive even. Now, this kind of art is often described as ‘self-taught’, says Smith. “But I think this is erroneous. These artists are building their own grassroots institutions to train others, typically in their neighbourhoods: yon ede lòt, in Haitian Creole, [means] one helps another, rather than the myth of the self-taught genius. The Atis Rezistans built on [the Haitian] tradition of collectives, but took it in a new direction, making art that was more politically charged. They were not the first group to use recycled material, but the hyper-local waste they worked with was integral to the meaning of their work… For many critics who focused on Vodou, this fact was often overlooked.”
"This creativity is remarkable for a country that has suffered so much: hurricanes, earthquakes, cholera, political assassinations, gang war, all in the past two decades. The last has led to an atomisation of the Grand Rue arts scene, as artists have had to move away from downtown, along with more than a million people — nearly a tenth of the population — displaced by the security situation.
And you’ve got many of these informal economies going on downtown and traditional crafts, all mixing together. So it was just like a magical moment, which now, unfortunately, looks like it's being destroyed .”
So why has there been such a vibrant arts movement? “Grand Rue is the most exciting road I've ever been on,” says Gordon. “I've been to a lot of other Caribbean countries where this [explosion of art] hasn't happened. Downtown Kingston is pretty dull.”
She points out that there is a recent artistic lineage that has perhaps inspired the artists of the Grand Rue. Pierrot Barra, an artist and Vodou priest who died in 1999, stood out for his use of odd materials, such as found dolls’ heads. And there’s the success of artists such as Myrlande Constant, who has taken Haitian flag-making and turned it into a new artform that has been critically well-received on the international stage.
“Vodou has always used artists,” says Gordon. “Such a big part of it is visual. [Haitian] art has its roots in Vodou practice. And you’ve got many these informal economies going on downtown and traditional crafts, all mixing together. So it was just like a magical moment, which now, unfortunately, looks like it's being destroyed .”
Jean-Claude Saintilus; born Port au Prince 12 March 1960; died Port au Prince 8 November 2024.
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