A video summary of the Havana Biennial's opening week

Coinciding with the 11^th edition of the Havana Art Biennial, Havana Club International presents A Smell that Comes through my Window: Havana Cultura, the first exhibition showcasing the works resulting from the Havana Cultura Visual Arts Project’s residency program.

The exhibition’s title is rooted in Cuban popular culture and refers to what the neighbors are cooking. Since Cuban houses are not hermetically closed, kitchen smells frequently penetrate surrounding homes. Metaphorically, the expression “A Smell that Comes through my Window” speaks of what is coming up next. In the context of emerging art, it translates into forecasting new aesthetic and thematic trends among younger artists; what is being “cooked” in terms of art in Cuba.

The show opens to the public on May 14^th and runs through September 15^th at the Museo del Ron Havana Club’s gallery. 

On the Havana Art Biennial

Mary Cork, the first of the foreign curator invited to participate in the first session of the Havana Cultura Visual Arts Project, reflects on the experience of spending two weeks in Havana discovering the Cuban contemporary art scene.

For two weeks in the beginning of May 2011, the creative arts organisation Havana Cultura invited me to be the resident curator of the first stage of their new visual arts residency programme in Havana, Cuba.

Having no first-hand experience of Cuban life, culture or art meant that I arrived in Cuba with an almost impeccably blank slate and with hardly any preconceived idea of what my visit might be like. Hence, I saw my role as a London-based curator in Cuba for the first time as mainly investigatory. Not only was I there as a witness of the resultant projects made on the residency, but also to try and locate their place within the context of Cuban art and contemporary art as a whole.

The work proposed and completed in the first part of the residency show the many sides of Cuban contemporary art practice. The most recurrent theme I identified was a tendency towards making work that encompassed the notion of society’s increasingly present globalisation and the position of the ‘isolated’ Cuban artist in relation to it. In a world where many of us are beginning to think of ourselves as global citizens, the question of what it means to be Cuban starts to take on new meaning. 

Alejandro González, the first artist I visited, explores this with a richly saturated series of photographic portraits called Cuba, año cero (“Cuba, Year Zero”). Many photos, particularly the ones shot in Havana, depict the teenagers as tribal creatures, outsiders moving in social groups like the frikis, emos, repas, and mikis. His images ask us to consider what is unique about the teen angst that his subjects embody, whilst simultaneously making us aware of the shared experience of all teenagers of the world.

In Anatomía del tiempo (“Anatomy of Time”), Reinier Nande has recreated a journey that literally drives through social boundaries. Nande has created a visual analogy for the dream of social mobility, an aspiration not easily accessed in Cuba today.  Nande is guarded about this work: he doesn’t over-explain it conceptually, taking instead the figurative ‘back seat’ by letting the viewer experience the journey as though they were a passenger in the car with him. The only text in the piece appears as a caption that reads ‘objects in the rearview mirror are closer than they appear’, the standard message imprinted on a car’s rearview mirrors, but in this case loaded with alternative meaning.

The final participants of this stage of the residency are a collective made up of the artists Yunior Aguiar, Javier Castro, Luis Gárciga, Celia González, Renier Quer, and Grethell Rasúa. For Un olor que entra por mi ventana (“A Smell that Comes Through my Window)” these six artists staged a several-months-long performance centred around the popular Cuban working class lottery game, the Bolita. While it seems wound up specifically in Cuban culture, themes like communal eating and handed down traditions are universal. The communality of the work isn’t merely reflected through the working relationship of the artists, but also through their engagement with a self-organised and self-endorsed practice that has originated in spite of societal rules, joining together many members of society through their participation. 

Anabel Zenea's Génesis opposes an artist's individuality to the multiple influences that play a role in the forging of his or her creative self. In this manner, she also tackles the broader and universal subject of identity formation. The following extract from her project proposal summarizes the work's main themes and motifs.

"The project is based on the use of blood donated by those people who have influenced the formation of my being up until now.

This element [blood] will be contained in tiny holes carved in a life-size, full-body self-sculpture covered with a transparent and colorless resin in such a way that the inside is void.

The sculpture, naked as if in a body that is presented for an anatomical study session, will be placed inside a sort of vertical fish tank filled with water in such a way that the resin is camouflaged due to its transparence and it appears as if the tridimensional body was shaped by the blood dots.  This will accentuate the sculpture’s flotation posture.

As a sort container of the universal liquid matrix, water, this fish tank evokes the idea of creation through an appearance that to a certain degree makes us think of laboratory equipment.  At the base of the tank is a light that is deflected by a mirror fit at the top so that the inside is fully illuminated.

Human beings are born and live in a world of ties forged by the deployment of emotional experience. It can’t be denied that each of us has a singular character that makes us into unique and unrepeatable entities. Nonetheless, we can’t look over the fact that we build ourselves through interaction with the “Other” in order to answer the question of who we really are, thus discarding the idea of a pure self.  

Génesis is a project that dialogues from an anthropological perspective, contrasting the individual ideal with the collective. The piece is built on the experience of the sacrifice undergone by those people who have had an influence in the formation of my being from a subjective point of view, whether it is from an ethical, educational, or creative point of view. The sacrifice is carried out through the act of donating a bit of their blood so that a procedure with cosmogonist  undertones will result in my image. Like molecules, the blood dots that converge in the shaping of my figure connect symbolically and indirectly those individuals that summarize the story of my life.

Yamisleisy García Socarrás's installation is based on the uses of door in major literary works such as Alice in Wonderland . Below is an explanation in the artist's own words.

"Wonderland is an allusion to a series of literary works such as Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Stevenson, or Los siete locos by Roberto Arlt… in which doors have an important role as metaphors, as symbols, as turning points. In my case, I appropriate the historical meaning that has been attributed to this object for years and I display it once more as an enigmatic object, accentuating it through an installation in which the golden door (0.30 X 0.40 cm) will be fit into the lower right side of a wall whose dimensions vary depending on the space. The bigger the wall, the more explicit the intention of the work will be. In a certain way, I place the spectator in a surreal world by subverting artistic codes, specifically literature, by cancelling out a power by rendering access impossible."

                                                                                            Yamisleisy García Socarrás

Abel Barreto's proposal for the Havana Cultura Visual Arts Project scholarship is in line with his previous work related to the universe of sound. His goal is to estheticize the figure of the loudspeaker by creating  a glass sculpture whose properties are in stark contrast to this object's social uses. This is how he explained his intention:  

"The sound universe has been central to my work, whether it be directly or symbolically. In certain occasions sound is an end in itself- for example in the construction of ambiances-, and in other it is a support to evoke other subjects.

Loudspeakers, mines, musical instruments: beyond the physical sound they make, they refer to a social conscience structured in decibels, to a historical memory where sonority exists as a learned mass discourse, and it is this discourse that travels through sounds that are ironically deaf, inarticulate, silences measured in scales, and self-destructive sounds, until we arrive at the symbolic replacement of spoken discourse for an object that is esthetically beautiful.

The loudspeaker is treated in my pieces as an iconographic reference to sociopolitical discourse as a trigger of a sound memory that is based on social consciousness. In Nube, fifty-four crystal loudspeakers make up an infinite, variable, indefinite structure whose appearance is arbitrary.

Reinier Nande presented a proposal for a piece that would simulate the different points of view offered by a car's windscreen and rearview mirrors. The installation invites the spectator to reflect on the notions of time and equality in socialist Cuba. In the ensuing paragraphs, Nande exposes the different elements that served as a theoric basis for this piece.

“He believed in infinite series of times, in a growing and vertiginous net of diverging, converging, and parallel times. This plot of times that approach, bifurcate, cut or ignore each other secularly comprises every possibility. We don’t exist in most of those times: you live in some but not me; in others, I exist but not you or we both exist. In this specific time, in which a favorable future awaits me, you have arrived at my home; in a different one, you crossed the garden and found me dead; in yet another, I say these same words, but I am a mistake, a ghost.”

                                                                       Jorge Luis Borges, The Garden of Forking Paths

"The work is composed of a monitor that simulates a windscreen, with an image that moves forward towards working-class neighborhoods of Havana. And from the three rearview-mirror screens, a residential landscape is left behind. The multiplicity of landscapes beings up one question: Which of two is the original landscape? Is it the one that we’re approaching or the one that we’re leaving behind due to the present’s brevity?

This project insists on simulation; reality is simulation. By referring to parallel worlds, the piece cancels out the distinction between depth and superficiality, or between authenticity and artifice. Like in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in which you enter a universe lacking precise rules where skill and fortune cannot be distinguished and the only goal is to intensify fortune and to ramify it. This got my attention because it reminded of something I had read by Jean Baudrillard: what is opposed to law is not in any way the absence of law, but rather the rule. If you look at it in this manner, when I cross Lewis Carroll’s mirror, I’m visiting a place where you break the law to obey the rules, a different type of rules.

On a different note, the screen’s position—which generates a situation of dialogue and interaction, or interference and dissociation that result from the trio reality-fiction-desire— adds to the work various simultaneous and variable presents (…) outside the screen (…), where the spectator is standing in his role of observer (…). This support gives me the possibility of structuring the piece through the Borgian Aión, an empty form of time that has liberated itself from the present’s physical presence and has thus unwound its circle, stretching itself in a straight line forward and back.

(…) Chronos expressed the action of bodies and the creation of material qualities. Aión is the place of incorporeal events and of attributes different from qualities. Chronos was inseparable from the bodies that filled it as causes and matter; Aión is populated by effects that travel across it without ever filling it. Chronos was limited and finite; Aión is unlimited like the future and the past but finite like an instant. Chronos is inseparable from circularity and the accidents of this circularity like blockades, precipitations, explosions, dislocations, hardenings…Aión is time’s eternal truth: a purely void form of time that has freed itself from its present corporeal content, and with it has unwound its circle, extending itself in a straight line, perhaps more dangerous, more haunting for this reason…

This line that marks present time allows for the process (…) that articulates stories, the same story that indefinitely divides itself, that takes us back to the past o projects us in different possible futures. The spectator— the video’s main character (…)— lives in infinite series of Borgean times, divergent, convergent, and parallel. This plot of times, episodes of the same story with different ending or reminiscent of certain recurrent pasts, are indistinctly thread, organized, or disorganized. That is, there are scenes that are completely repeated, others that are cut and give way to an episode the spectator does not expect (…). In the video-windscreen there can be a person stopping a taxi; in the rearview mirrors, the same person executes the same action in a different context. In certain scenes, you may find the Panopticon’s guard and in a later one discover that he himself is being watched. It’s an exchange of roles, a bifurcation of times that comprises every possibility, even the unlikely situation that the character jumps from one time to another, from one screen to the other. This is my way of structuring different spaces and times and different stories or episodes. I make an effort so that scenes behave like prolonged pasts and futures.

Un olor que entra por mi ventana is a group project that discusses notions of particular relevance in Cuba's social context such as luck and interdependence. This is how the artists outlined their proposal during the selection process:

“We take two references as a starting point for the current project, one linked to our social reality and another one linked to our experience working as a team. The first one has to do with not having a stable and secure system to ensure basic and vital needs, particularly food…The second one has to do with the strategy we have followed as a team for six years: sharing each other’s luck assuming the successes and failures that go along. We have also applied the latter to the intellectual dimension of our work, and in many cases we shared the obsessions of some of our friends, taking risks and moving at their rhythm.

During these years of teamwork, we each made individual artistic proposals and shared them with the rest of the team, thus composing new works. Right now, our goal is to execute a collective piece continuing this same strategy: to all share each other’s luck by eating at the same table with a purported autonomy which is in fact dependent on variables and decisions that are totally conjectural, “on luck”.

We will carry out an action during the production months which will be recorded through an installation. We will play 'Bolita' [illegal Cuban lottery] with part of the budget assigned by Havana Cultura. Each one of us will bet on the animal [in order to avoid detection by the authorities, each number is substituted by an animal] of his or her choice during the six months of production and obsessively stick to this bet. If one of us wins, the animal will be bought and eaten by all…In this table each one will keep a record of the lottery results. This information will be registered in any way the player decides- written with a pen or permanent marker or by simply scratching the surface-, and will take into account wins and losses- that is, the number that wins each day, its meaning which varies with each game, and the number of the animal which we bet on each day- until they 'luckily' coincide.  At the center of the table will be scratched a summary of the process followed in the making of the piece.

 The dishes in which we will or will not eat will serve to keep track of our luck. Each day, six plates-one per player- will be the evidence of everyone’s effort in search of the same goal: to be favored by luck. If one of us achieves it, the six dirty dishes will be piled up at the winner’s place. If there are no winners, they will be piled up at one end of the table. There will be a total of 1080 plates, six each day for a six-month period."

 Yunior Aguiar, Javier Castro, Luis Gárciga, Celia González, Grethell Rasúa and Renier Quer

Alejandro González presented a proposal for a photographic series depicting Cuba's modern-day teenagers. He initially planned on focusing on urban subcultures, but later decided to also cover the countryside. This is how he expressed his interest in the subject-matter:

“This millennium’s mass media outlets have homogenized urban subcultures to the point that a teenager in modern-day Havana resembles a teenager in Shanghai.

Adolescence is a period of search, discovery, and confrontation, as well as a period of ideological formation. In these processes, the conflicts experienced by young people are the same regardless of regional differences.

Twenty years ago I was almost the same age as the young people shown in my pictures. The doubts, satisfactions, and longings were the same. The only thing that separates us is the political-geographic situation of that moment: the Socialist Block was disappearing and Cuba was left alone.

The young people I have portrayed did not experience the period of economic welfare that resulted from exchanges among socialist countries. They were all born during the Special Period, a moment of moral and economic crisis. This social transformation affected political discourse in light of the chaotic reality.