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  • Dyaspora All Up in the Mix:Jean-Ulrick Désert, Mapping Fragmented Archaeologies
  • Jerry Philogene (bio)

Jean-Ulrick Désert’s artwork explores diasporic black postmodernity. A Berlin-based artist who has lived in the United States, Europe, and Haiti, Désert produces evocative and enigmatic work about the black diasporic experience. Participating in a visual lexicon that decodes the inevitability of fragmentation, Désert liberates himself from the constraints of working in any one medium or style. Using diverse artistic media, including drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and installation, he creates multidimensional spaces shaped by his formal education in architecture and his years as an exhibition designer. Personally coded narratives are intertwined with contemporary Western art practices rendered in provocative ways. Subtle strategies of pastiche anchor his earlier artworks and challenge the hackneyed nature of so-called identity politics. His recent use of self-presentation participates in the visual language of camp and sartorial play, incorporating elements that dare as well as elements that reveal truth. His satirical performance “actions,” photographs, multimedia installations, and ephemera ingeniously challenge notions of racial visibility and cultural authenticity.

Désert’s “self-portrait” drawing series, L’ABCdaire de ma vie privée (The ABC’s of My Private Life) (2005), creates opportunities for the evocative exploration of race, cultural identity, belonging, and memory (see Color Plate 1). Images culled from his personal photo albums combine with simple letters and unassuming words in French, Kreyòl, German, and English on fine paper lined with precisely spaced thin pencil and ink strokes that mimic the penmanship notebook pages he used as a child while living in Haiti. The plate for the letter B places us in Brooklyn, the mecca for Haitians. It is during this first part of his transnational migration that Désert realizes that he has become black and foreign; his frenchyness makes him exotic and othered. He does not feel oppressed; rather, he feels bewildered by these racial and national labels. While the images are embedded within the cultural specificity of the Haitian dyaspora, they resonate with the [End Page 208] universal language of migration, “foreigner,” and displacement.1 Executed with the fine precision of a draftsperson and in deft spatial arrangements, the four drawings of L’ABCdaire de ma vie privée tease out discomforts and anxieties through the presentation of familial images and simple text punctuated by a sense of loss, silence, longing, and isolation brought on by migration and transition. Questions of cultural specificity and personal identity as they are transformed through diaspora, specifically the Haitian dyaspora, inform this ongoing drawing series.

In what is perhaps his signature piece, the public performance Negerhosen2000/The Travel Albums v. 2 (2007), one is greeted by a traveling black flâneur, one who is well versed in the postmodern language of pastiche and destabilizes reified notions of culture, race, and corporeality (see Color Plate 2). The sartorial splendor of the black dandy equally informs Negerhosen2000’s troubling presence while teasing out national, racial, and sexual anxieties. In a detailed and elaborately patterned vest and finely embroidered formfitting pinkish-white Lederhosen, complete with blond hair extensions sewn into a decorative felt hat and cowbells announcing his presence, Désert parades about European cities. As a “guerilla” (re)action to a verbal attack in Berlin in 1996 that violently challenged his right to “walk while black,” the performance theatrically engages ideas about modernity and mobility and speaks to the power of the black body to index modernity. Extending into large-scale color photographs and self-made postcards, Negerhosen2000 deliberately highlights the special relationship between photography and performance, calling attention to the performative aspect of taking photographs. As he meanders about towns, daring to be out of place in his role as the twenty-first-century flâneur/dandy provocateur, Désert converses with the public, and eventually, this walking curiosity is photographed, often alongside his audience. As an evidentiary visual statement of their encounter, Désert asks viewers to send him a copy of the photograph with their handwritten notes detailing their reactions to Negerhosen2000. Meaning is derived, in part, from the interaction between artist and audience. Hundreds of images that detail this familiar yet...

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