On Saturday, Haiti Cultural Exchange opened "Rasin San Bout," or "Roots Without End" in Fort Greene.
The evening was rife with energy as artists, curators, musicians and community members gathered at HCX not simply for the opening of an exhibition, but for an encounter with a history that remains deeply present in a neighborhood long shaped by Brooklyn’s Black cultural life and creative communities.
Curated by Régine M. Roumain and Micaela Walker, "Rasin San Bout" brings together contemporary artists of Haitian descent with a remarkable archival record: nearly 50 hours of recordings made in Haiti by American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax during his 1936-37 travels.
The exhibition draws from 40 of those recordings, spanning lullabies, Rara music, sacred practices, Konbit and other forms of Haitian cultural life. Nearly nine decades later, these recordings become the starting point for a new generation of artists to listen, interpret and respond.
Selected through an open call, the exhibition features work by Laïssa Alexis, Love Aritus, Marie Casimir, Megan Delianne, Stephanie “Philomen” Dorceant, Jennica Drice, Sydney Rose Maubert, Christopher Mitchell, Marie Guilloto Stuppard and Zarita Zevallos. Across the gallery, their practices engage the archive through textiles, film, sound and other visual forms, refusing to leave Lomax’s recordings in the past. Instead, the artists treat them as material to be questioned, extended and reimagined.
This distinction is important. Archives are often presented as records of what has been, but they are also shaped by who is looking, who is recording and who has the power to preserve. In "Rasin San Bout," Lomax’s recordings are not treated as a definitive record of Haitian cultural life. Instead, they act as a point of departure.
The exhibition’s title captures this movement particularly well. The word "Roots" suggests origins and a fixed relationship to the past, but they also grow, extend underground, encounter other systems and continue beyond the point from which they began. For a Haitian diaspora whose cultural life extends across Haiti, Brooklyn, Florida and countless other places, the metaphor feels especially apt.
In Fort Greene, that conversation takes on another dimension. Haiti Cultural Exchange has long provided space for Haitian artists and audiences to encounter one another through exhibitions, performances, film, literature and public programming. "Rasin San Bout" continues this work while asking a deceptively simple question: What does it mean to inherit an archive?
"There is a lot of violence happening in the capital of our island," said artist Megan Delianne. "At the moment, a lot of our artistic pieces and cultural artifacts are lost."
Delianne mentioned Hotel Oloffson, a cultural landmark located in central Port-au-Prince, Haiti, which was set on fire earlier this year. Delianne described the incident as a "travesty."
"Haitian art, Haitian architecture, Haitian culture is one of a kind," Delainne said. "It cannot be replicated, and it needs to be preserved by any means necessary. The work of Alan Lomax is exactly the kind of preservation that we need."
The answer offered in "Rasin San Bout" is not preservation alone, but participation. In each of their own ways, the artists take material recorded nearly 90 years ago and place it in conversation with the present, allowing memory to become something active rather than static. The result is a small but powerful exhibition less concerned with reconstructing Haiti than with considering how Haitian cultural memory continues to transform.
"Rasin San Bout" is now on view at Haiti Cultural Exchange, 35 Lafayette Ave. in Brooklyn, through Nov. 15. For more information on exhibition programming, please visit the Haiti Cultural Exchange events page.
