The exhibition project Cuba introspettiva. Esperienze performative di videoarte (Introspective Cuba. Performing Experiences in Video Art) in the former Hospital of San Rocco, National Museum of Matera, highlights a Cuban art scene devoted to the use of film and poised between contestation, socio-anthropological analysis and human history. An artistic scene marked by twelve artists active from the 1980s and 1990s (Juan Carlos Alom, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Luis Gómez Armenteros, Tony Labat, Sandra Ramos, Lázaro Saavedra) to the last thirty years (Analía Amaya, Javier Castro, Susana Pilar Delahante Matienzo, Ernesto Leal, Glenda León, Grethell Rasúa).
Through the video-image, Cuban artists affirm an introspective gaze dense with sensations, deviations and transfigurations, in a continuous dialectical relationship with limitations and stereotypes. An empathetic and reflective gaze that encounters urban contexts (the streets of Havana), the community's behaviour and habits, and incorporates characteristic melodies and sounds through the synaesthetic potential of video (both Afro-Cuban rhythms and reggaeton). This gaze, with ironic and sarcastic traits, at times restless, or rough and unemphatic, resembles certain Cuban literature - from the direct and anti-dogmatic writing of Virgilio Piñera or Edmundo Desnoes to the biting and harsh language of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez in which the traces of the marginal universe are sedimented.
The twelve experiences in Matera offer a narrative kaleidoscope of ethical commitment, free of any epicism, it is accompanied by the internalisation of history (with its drifts) and of those desires that bind the individual to the group. A mosaic of pieces imbued with a syncretistic ‘temperament’ that interweaves public and private space (often denied by the precepts of Communism), socio-cultural events and unexpected imaginative paths. The arguments do not bear a ‘revolutionary’ idealism or mass identity, but pursue countless existential and identity choices, maintaining an open relationship to diversity - including black and mestizo identity. The narrative devices appear manifold: voiceovers, interviews, archive footage, amateur footage, animations, and bodily actions performed before the camera.
In addition, an incredible performative urge emerges that moves unevenly on different thematic levels, between the founding values of experience (solidarity, the freedom of the individual) and the search for a poetic, sensitive dimension that courts the ‘magic world’.
Taken as a whole, the video art project at the National Museum in Matera fully expresses Cuban art's idiosyncrasy towards the protocols of power and any ideological agenda. Under its introspective and reflective attitude, Cuban art is undoubtedly the space of a critical conscience.
It should be pointed out that, since the 1959 Revolution, Cuba has been and continues to be an influential cultural crossroads for South American and Third World art. An international scenario where numerous institutions such as Casa de las Américas and the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), or the ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte) with three separate schools - music, visual arts and performing arts - and especially the driving force behind the Centro Wilfredo Lam and the Bienal de La Habana (launched in 1984) are of importance.
This solid promotional platform resulted from the cultural policy programmes launched by the Cuban government, especially after the constitution was amended in 1976, and, at the same time, fuelled by Cubans living in the United States. Although the government has always legitimised the control of cultural production, there have been more openings when the balance of power has shifted in favour of nationally inspired (Latin American) Marxist socialism, and less towards Soviet inspired ‘Marxist-Leninist’ socialism. The artistic collectivity in Cuba has ridden, from the 1960s onwards, crucial changes, including the breaking down of social hierarchies, egalitarianism, the granting of land and housing to large segments of the population, the universalisation of education, income equality, the abolition of private property and its conversion into personal property.
Moreover, it must be considered that Cuban intellectuals (from Jorge Mañach to Virgilio Piñera), tired of lobbying, had to address a Revolution that did not oblige them to ideological positions. The ideology of greatest symbolic weight was nationalism, in its reformist variant - although liberalism and socialism played an important role. In fact, ‘left-wing nationalism’ (Che Guevara) made the majority of the population feel included in the socialist revolutionary process. The Cuban government's initiatives for culture gave the illusion that anything was possible in Cuba, except opposition to the Revolution. Memorable Fidel Castro's words from his speech Palabras a los intelectuales given during three days of meetings with many intellectuals in the National Library in Havana in 1961 following the discussions provoked by the censorship of the documentary PM. Castro had declared ‘[...] dentro de la Revolución, todo; contra la Revolución, nada [...]’ to define guidelines not on the formal freedom of the artist, but on freedom of content in the interests of the Revolution. However, these guidelines introduced a capricious scheme that classified artists as dissidents or not.
In 1971 during the ‘Primer Congreso de Educación y Cultura’, the government also stated: ‘el arte es un arma de la revolución’ (art as a means of disseminating revolutionary socialist ideas). And this intention encountered rejection among the artists, who were reluctant to restrictions.
I will not dwell here in analysing the debates in Cuba - particularly during the so-called Quinquenio Gris (1971-76). One thing is certain: Cuban art conducted experimentation free of conditioning and, in the case of video art, generated visceral and cerebral images that were always in flux, moving from illustrative and declamatory profiles to a mixture of high and low visual codes.
The artistic experience formed in Cuba distrusts the political strategies that rhetorically cling to Nation's symbols, on the contrary it deals with a ‘shared’ cultural repertoire, mutable and in constant ferment, made explicit by dance, sounds, voices and common language as indispensable experiences to be explored. The artists enter into relationships with neighbourhoods and forgotten spots, giving space to the innermost impulses and embodying the energy of the polytheism of Santería (known as Regla de Ocha, or Lucumí). Furthermore, they interpret precariousness, social vitality and forms of survival.
An example of filmic redescription of anthropic contexts is given to us by Juan Carlos Alom's black and-white film Habana Solo in which music and musicians permeate the city of Havana (its landscape and its subjects). Alom asked various musician friends, of the most diverse musical tendencies (Frank Emilio, Tata Güines, Enrique Lázaga and José Luis Cortés, among others), to play a solo with their instrument lasting up to two minutes.
Habana Solo is an imaginative documentary rigorously shot with a 16 mm camera that visually depicts, in the sense of repainting, decaying neighbourhoods and people in their casual gestures, freely expressed on the streets of Havana. The urban footage is combined with film footage of musicians engaged in their improvisations. Alom made palpable the spirit of the city possessed as much by the solos as by the sounds and noises it habitually produces, highlighting the movements, ranges and fluidity of the bodies.
Instead, the artist Javier Castro uses the video camera to develop an anthropological look that ‘digs’ into society, showing all its facets, even the most uncomfortable ones. His narration is devoid of scenic virtuosity, free of any apologia. And, using the interview, he puts the camera in direct relation with the social body. This is the case in the video El beso de la patria shot in front of the house where José Martí - politician, writer and national hero (supporter of Cuban sovereignty) - was born.
Living close to Martí's house, Javier Castro was able to approach this historical figure differently than how he is usually (and officially) shown in Cuba. Over the years, the national hero has been assumed by his neighbours as ‘one of the neighbourhood’. The heroic aura in which history inscribes its characters is humanised and deconstructed. Starting from this process of civic solidarity outside any epic pretence, Javier Castro's video captures all the glimpses, voices, opinions and looks of the people around the national hero's house, configuring the collective imagination that hovers in the barrio.
Other artists, such as Ernesto Leal, appropriate political imagery (of a celebratory nature) to deconstruct and ‘delegitimise’ it. Unable to practise an explicit opposition and exposed to censorship, they accentuate the reflexive and communicative metaphor using video.
For Diglosia, Ernesto Leal captures with his video camera some words that are part of propaganda writings painted on walls and panels, or of signs along the streets, and, juxtaposing the footage, composes a disenchanted and stinging discourse. Diglossia in linguistics indicates the presence in the same community of two languages or language varieties (one ‘low’ and the other ‘high’, as in the case of the national language and dialects). Exploiting this parallelism, Ernesto Leal addresses the problem of a society, the Cuban society, that lives with a dual discourse: that of the State and that of individuals, shedding light on the moral paradox that lies at the heart of the communist illusion - the idea that one can ‘build a people without people’, i.e. speak to the masses without taking into account their individuality, their active political participation and their cohesion as thinking entities. In the video, a long articulation of words - such as ‘difficult to deal with power fanatics’, ‘without freedom of conscience there is no culture possible’ - counter the rhetoric of the Cuban political establishment.
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union (1989-1991) Cuba has continuously faced complicated periods of crisis and not easy moments of economic transition - from the dramatic ‘El Período Especial’ to the slow moment of recovery with the presidency of Raúl Castro in 2008. Enduring are the lights and shadows of political vicissitudes and the tremors of the human universe affected by conditions of uncertainty and vulnerability. The videos in the exhibition Cuba introspettiva comment on the transformation of this experience through the bodily energies and inventive abilities of the subject (even before the collective). For the video installation Life from the Spinning Washing Machine by Luis Gómez Armenteros, self-photographs of the artist's face superimposed on images of interiors and external locations (a street with palm trees, the roofs of houses and the low cliffs of Cojímar, a circus in the distance), or found footage and patterns occasionally modified by coloured filters, run on three asynchronous projections. We see Gómez's face sometimes serious, sometimes smiling, with barely noticeable grimaces, covered by a skull, or by the image of a toe with a wart and, for a few moments, by an ellipse turning in on itself. One's own traces of identity, combined with personal experience, run fast, becoming the signs of a tragicomic life that constantly fluctuates.
María Magdalena Campos-Pons's portrait fluidly convey her Creole and Afro-Cuban identity. In the video Just Another Day, we see her with her face made up in white, almost dusty, intent on slowly extracting from her mouth an indigo-blue textile thread (in allusion to the colour of Yemayà, goddess of the sea, mother of living creatures and of the Orisha according to Yoruba mythology). In addition, the ejection of the rope brings to mind the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade engaged in plantations from which indigo is extracted; while the painted face recalls both the cultural heritage of rituals and the symbolic elevation of the issue of slave labour in the Caribbean.
We can assert that video art in Cuba is both documentary and evocative as well as imaginative and visionary. The video medium, despite arriving late to the island compared to the West, North America and Asia, became particularly important in the 1990s and 2000s, as it allowed artists to express a freedom of thought and examine class differences, diversity and female potential – just to name but a few issues.
Parallel to the Cuban cinematic experiences from the 1960s onwards, which scrutinise individual and social conflicts - such as those of Sabá Cabrera Infante, Julio García Espinosa, Orlando Jiménez Leal, Santiago Alvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, Manuel Octavio Gómez and Sara Gómez - video art in Cuba represents an important field of metalinguistic, processual and conceptual experimentation. If Cuban cinema has practised, in the bosom of the ICAIC - i.e. in the unfriendly meshes of the institution - an innovative and uninhibited observation of events, often attentive to marginal stories discarded by the accredited ‘revolutionary’ narrative, artists' video has intensified the non-conformist scope of the audiovisual and its destabilising character.
Cuban artists born in the 1980s and raised in a Cuba that has seen the demise of real socialism and a succession of economic crises, do not feel that sense of renewal that had driven filmmakers Sara Gómez and Julio García Espinosa in the era of social reconstruction (in terms of work, education and housing for the population) during the 1960s and 1970s. And unlike cinema, they use digital technology, now widespread in Cuba since the 2000s, to ‘circumvent’ the official aesthetic paradigms dictated by the government's increasingly dogmatic cultural apparatus. Their experimentation carries a multifaceted identity: a cultural mélange devoid of any puritanical notion of identity. Forerunners of this loss of centrality and the narrative syncretism of video art are the videos made by Tony Labat in California in the 1980s, in which cultural subcodes, behavioural registers, languages, circumstances and types of different figures are combined.
In conclusion digital proves congenial to the reworking of sources and the hybridisation of genres, forms, and different languages.
A remix culture is gaining strength in Cuba, reaffirmed by the creative use of found footage - stock footage or archive films (some even censored), and amateur footage. For example, Lázaro Saavedra re-presents and musically reinterprets old films destined for invisibility and allows for a reinterpretation and a new semantic/visual ‘investiture’. For Reencarnación, Saavedra uses a fragment of the film PM (1961) by Orlando Jiménez Leal y Sabá Cabrera Infante, which was immediately censored because, in recounting Havana's nightlife in the port bars during the days of the struggle against the Bay of Pigs (Playa Girón) invasion, it distorted reality by conveying a dissolute image. Moreover, the film's censorship motivated the memorable meeting in the National Library between Fidel Castro and Cuban intellectuals. Saavedra chose sequences showing people dancing under the effects of alcohol in a nightclub. The steps and movements in the video are guided by the rhythms of a reggaeton song by Cuban singer-songwriter Elvis Manuel. Saavedra makes transparent a theme hidden until recently: the non-recognition of subaltern cultural manifestations, foundations of Cuban culture, considered legitimate only on the fringes of institutions.
Therefore, it can be deduced from the exhibition in Matera that the video practice experimented by the artists in Cuba represents a place of mutations and ‘mutuations’, where a mixture of documentary attitudes and performative vocations of realism and abstraction take place. It is an interesting junction of introspections, personal archives, spaces of revolt, and imaginary impulses, useful for discussing the world with a critical conscience.