Lech Szporer

The Haiti Project/240 Flutes (Haiti, 2014-2015)

The Haiti Project/240 Flutes (Haiti, 2014-2015)

School teacher Marcel Jean wanted to replace guns with saxophones. Having grown up himself in Cite Soleil, Haiti, one of the poorest and most dangerous places on the western hemisphere, Marcel Jean wanted to encourage the kids growing up there to choose a path outside of gangs and prostitution. He wanted to inspire them with music. That’s when he came up with the idea to start Cite Soleil School of Music, the very first music school in Cite Soleil.

The Haiti Project depicts the transportation of a shipment of donated musical instruments from my Give Kids Your Instruments nonprofit headquarters in New York, USA, to the Cite Soleil School of Music and Timoun Yo Se Espwa Ayiti (Kids Are Haiti’s Hope) orphanage in both Cite Soleil (later Léogâne) and Carrefour, Haiti.

The gifting of 240 Flutes to child survivors of trauma was conceived as a conceptual artwork. 8 Flutes were distributed among the 8 child survivors of the 2010 earthquake at TYSEA. And the remaining 232 flutes were distributed to all the children at Cite Soleil School of Music.

Flute Distributions are essentially audible social sculptures and sound art interventions.

Give Kids Your Instruments believes that kids need music and art, especially those growing up in crisis areas, because music and art helps us heal from trauma. Our objective was to bring a shipment of hundreds of musical instruments to the first music school in quite possibly the most dangerous and poverty-stricken part of the western hemisphere. In 2014, we used Indiegogo to launch a crowdfunding campaign called Sing Soleil to raise funds to transport the shipment of musical instruments and to document the project with a small production crew.

Acknowledgements: This project could not have been done without Patrick Merentie and his family in Haiti, Marcel Jean and his team at Haiti Scholarship Association.