People Need Water-Foods: A Photographer Reports From Haiti

New York City-based photographer Nicholas Whalen will share reflections and photographs from the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake and discuss the militarization of "relief" efforts, corporate profiteering, and the exclusion of grassroots mutual aid networks.

This work presents a counter-narrative to US mainstream media portrayal of the disaster, which served to justify the occupation/militarization of relief efforts, and to cast the Haitian people as incapable of self-governance. Media focus on the supposed violence by survivors of the earthquake supported the presence of US troops and the withholding of actual relief. Whalen argues that US troops were sent in to prevent the mobilization of those who seek empowerment through self-organization and an end to the neoliberal order.

The Western colonial legacy continues to suppress any local effort to create a new Haiti based on self-determination instead of servitude. Concomitant corporate colonialism contributes to the domination/sabotage of Haiti's future and helps shape the nature of US actions. The race/class based nature of the US-controlled international response to the disaster is a manifestation of the 500-year offensive to forcibly submit everyone to the Empire's capitalist quest for economic and military hegemony over earth.

The hysterical US response speaks to the power of a community long used to self-reliance and survival against unbelievable odds and whose struggle for freedom from poverty, structural violence and oppression is one of global human solidarity.

Sliding scale admission: $5-$10.