Survivors, 1995
The photographs and installation works that make up this series are shown in a personal exhibition of the same name at the Domingo Ravenet Art Gallery in Havana. The installations were made with sand, lime, stones, wood, and other materials recovered from the beaches of Havana, Cuba, during the most critical period of shipwrecks associated with the Cuban migratory phenomenon of the 1990s, known as the “rafters’ crisis“, “boat people crisis” or “balsero crisis” (Crisis de los Balseros).
Art and Politics: For an Aesthetics of Decadence
Survivors, perhaps from the coordinates of art and politics (or political art), tries to propose some questions about the structures of power in a political context where decadence, disorientation, confusion, laziness and a deep historicist disaffection swarm. In this breeding ground, the bureaucrats perpetuate conflicts generating phantasmagoric threats and existential vicissitudes of all kinds that make coexistence and solidarity difficult, to later offer themselves as messianic saviors of the vilified nationality…
Homeland & Nationality Pamphlet: Retrograde Pseudo-Utopism (Decay)
Decay. From images and symbols that give away a direct reference to the sociopolitical situation of Cuba at the time of the creation of the series, Survivors, why not? is structured as a homily that discusses the institutionalized dogma and the rite of resignation, with works that move between agony and cynicism, between disappointment and renunciation. Survivors, in short, intends to articulate a discourse of decay that questions the rigid concept of homeland while gloating, not without perplexity, over the fall of the most precious values and paradigms raised by the island’s official discourse.