Leviathan (Hispanic-American Center of Culture), Havana. 2023
(Ephemeral installation that degrades).
Personal Exhibition shown in one of the most emblematic spaces of the Office of the Historian of the City of Havana, Cuba.
January 13 to February 17, 2023.
Potestas vs. auctoritas: On how to monopolize and instrumentalize authority.
Authority, due to its implicit character of exemplarity, has been sustained, since Augustan Rome, on the Platonic factors of wisdom, which are associated with prestige, respect, trust, the ability to reach consensus and consent. Authority constituted then and constitutes today a kind of recognition that does not allow self-imposition, but must be granted or bestowed. But when and under what circumstances does the exercise of authority degenerate into authoritarianism, what leads us, once in power, to confuse discipline and obedience to rules with blind meekness, how do we go beyond consensus to land in imposition, exclusion, scorn, denigration of the different and dissenting, or the repudiation and exclusion of the dissident, on what arguments is violence justified by those who only seek to cling to power? These and other questions give rise to Leviathan, a curatorial project based on a single ephemeral installation piece.
Leviathan: Power without authority and authoritarianisms.
“The Abode of Leviathan” reflects on power without authority and on the authoritarianisms that emanate from absolute power, power without limits, greed and excessive ego. It reflects on the quasi-divine connotation and the dogmatically religious character of all “coexistence” based on the absolutist theism of totalitarianisms.
Leviathan: The absolutist theism of totalitarianisms.
In such a way that the installation consists of an accumulation of dozens of inflated garbage bags; that is to say, a sea of black containers, precisely emptied of all content other than air (perhaps pneuma; that stoic breath of life?), which little by little it will even lose, until it almost completely deflates. We allude here, without forced ecologisms, to the philosophy of garbage (philosophy of culture?) and to the gregariousness of man-garbage, stripped of identity and paradoxically condemned to disintegration in the mass. Allusion is made here to the disciplined will; to the dispensability of the subject, to uniform collectivism and the Machiavellian anonymity of the hypnotized mob. Here we allude, yes, to a subject to be used and thrown away; to a being that is annulled, ignored, devalued, neutralized, substitutable, recyclable: a being that is no longer…
Philosophy of garbage: Gregariousness of the garbage-man condemned to his own alienation in the mass or hypnotized mob.
On the other hand, “The Abode of Leviathan” assumes that, in the homogeneity of the mass, subjected to power exercised without authority and beyond the arbitrariness of diffuse “hierarchies”, each subject is reduced to mere statistical values; although no one counts, in the mass everyone is a number and his value lies in the data he carries, voluntarily, or under iron control. So, each bag carries an assigned code; the same identification number that mixes several references that I will not yet make public.
Hegemonic neoliberal “matrix”: The novelty, the sacrosanct technology and the real power of the Market….
But ” The Abode of Leviathan” does not focus exclusively on dystopian authoritarianisms, which it unquestionably does; but, from an open discursive polysemy, it also makes direct allusion and questions, with the same emphasis, the so-called Western democracies, where behind the sweetened sensation of personal freedom and the apparent capacity to change things, you can vote for everything to remain the same. In this sense, yes, the work also makes direct allusion to the hegemonic neoliberal “matrix”, mediated by the sacrosanct technology and the real power of the market.