Open Architecture Network

A comment by Jacques Leenhardt, Research Director Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France Jacques.Leenhardt@ehess.fr The Vevé of Afa, as a sacred grove, is an incredibly interesting project that attempts bridging the ecological restoration of a degraded agricultural place with the religious practice of descendants of Haitian emigrants to the eastern region of Cuba. It deals no so much with some religious beliefs involving a respectful attitude toward nature, which would be to my own mind somehow questionable, but it deals with the very convincing idea that a genuine practice more than a volontarist program, is able to transform the ecological conditions of a place. It gives a chance to a kind of social dynamics as unsetting ecological transformations. This very place of the region of the Rio Cauto that originally was covered with a dry forest could be restored under the condition that a new relation to the soil and vegetation being defined and developed by a community animated by new behaviors. Replacing an exhausted agricultural process by a new purpose for the given place, the project provide us with a model of disconnection/reconnection of some groups of inhabitants. Maria Ayub saw the potential of transformation of the project elaborated by a group of artists living in the region, the group Taller ENNEGRO, composed of Afro-Haitian emigrants proposed for the City of Palma Soriano (Province de Santiago de Cuba). In elaborating the project of a sacred grove on ecological premises, according to the existing model of Osun Sacred Grove in Nigeria, which connects the genuine Yoruba culture as existing to the present in Nigeria with the remains of that tradition in the Haitian voodoo, the concept reinforces the chances of articulating the western concept of ecology with the traditional experience of worshiping nature as a goddess. In the detailed forms that this concept should take place, Maria Ayub has taken into account many aspects of the religious beliefs of the involved population, in the formal as well as in the symbolic aspects. This emphasizes the fact that the aesthetic of the grove is part of its ability to gain a new signification, and to be implemented as ecological place by beliefs and practices that will actually perform the transformation of this agricultural place into a new ecological shrine.