Maracas Valley Studio Productions

Films

Synopsis

Voodoo is an expressive religious belief system providing Haitian society with the avenue through which the African soul of this nation survives in syncretic form. Voodoo is perceived not only in terms of its religious ritual and practice, but as a source of economic and artistic creativity, a signature of Haitian identity. The vèvè or the ground drawings made by the houngan, the voodoo priest or assistant (serviteurs) to invite and propitiate the loas or divinities provide a trail for us to uncover the indissoluble relationship between African religion and culture. Selden Rodman (The Miracle of Haitian Art (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1965)  and others have argued convincingly that the transmission of the skills of executing the vévé over generations of voodoo practitioners was itself an informal school for art and artistic sensibilities. Despite the contemporary commercial popularity of the arts of Haitian voodoo,  I argued in Imaging the Caribbean  and the documentary film The Sign of the Loa that the hidden messages and values of this unscripted belief system remain submerged. This capacity to remain unmapped and resist decoding yet be a continuous fountain of creativity of one sort or another is itself the sign of the loa’s presence and its continued watchfulness over Haiti’s vicissitudes. 

The Haitian  vévé shown in this brief experimental documentary were executed in my yard in Mountain View, Maracas Valley in 2007. I was then writing the book Imaging the Caribbean: Culture and Visual Translation (Macmillan, Oxford, 2009) and wanted to make use of photographs done originally in Haiti by other researchers, but for copyright reasons could not use these. So what I did instead was created my own vévé drawings  using flour as the medium. Rex Dixon took the photos while I was doing so. At least one of these is in the book Imaging the Caribbean as Figure 6.26.