Halka/Haiti: 18°48'05"N 72°23'01"W

Inspired and provoked by the title character in Werner Herzog s film Fitzcarraldo, two artists and a curator decide to revisit his mad plan of bringing opera to the tropics. In an attempt to undercut Fitzcarraldo s colonial romanticism, they decide to confront a set of particular historical and sociopolitical realities by staging Halka, considered to be Poland s national opera, in the seemingly unlikely locale of Cazale, Haiti, a village inhabited by the descendants of Polish soldiers who fought for the Haitian Revolution in the early 1800s. On February 7, 2015, a one-time-only performance of Halka was presented to a rapt local audience on a winding dirt road. A collaboration between Polish and Haitian performers, the event was filmed in one take to be presented later as a large-scale projected panorama in the Polish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. This volume provides both a multifaceted conceptual framework for the project and a detailed record of this remarkable endeavor. With an introduction by the project s curator and an interview with the artists, the book also features three newly commissioned essays from literary scholar Katarzyna Czeczot, diplomat Géri Benoît, and anthropologist Kacper Pob ocki alongside Michel-Rolph Trouillot s seminal reflection on the global silencing of the Haitian Revolution. Also included are questionnaires completed by the project s Haitian and Polish participants, translated selections from the opera s libretto, extensive photographic documentation of the rehearsals, and stills from the film itself.