Behind the commerce of Port-au-Prince’s Grand Rue, a tight network of workshops turns the city’s cast-offs — engine parts, wire, tires, broken electronics and other salvage — into sculpture and functional objects. Many of these makers are part of Atis Rezistans, an artist community that has helped define contemporary Haitian assemblage, drawing on Vodou iconography and the material realities of the street. Their work is built from necessity and inheritance: a practice of reuse that is both an aesthetic language and a livelihood.

After the 2010 earthquake, when schools and studios were lost across the city, Grand Rue’s workshops doubled as spaces of care and instruction. Frantz Jacques, known as Guyodo, a core figure in Atis Rezistans, organized informal classes for neighborhood youth; more broadly, the collective has described teaching and supporting younger artists as a central mission. The images in this series focus on that everyday labor of fabrication, mentorship, and making meaning from fragments, rather than on an event, showing how art and craft sustained a local economy and a culture in recovery.