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While tourists arrive in Havana from all latitudes looking for sea, one group of artists preferred to go in search of the laboured breathing of other shores of the city. In early May of 2001, Sandra Ceballos, René Quintana, and Christina Padura left the center of the capital bound for the hidden village of Párraga, located on the edge of a Havanese town named Arroyo Naranjo. Since the hotel industry had not yet reached this distant place, Sandra Ceballo decided to get there first. Dressed in the odd outfit of the tourist she covered her frivolous touristic gaze with the darkest sunglasses she could find. Like all tourists, she carried a camera, but instead of palm trees, infinite stretches of sand, blue horizons and sexy bathers she chose different subjects, landscapes of extinct stars, and faded glories. She was attracted to the bathrooms, kitchens, and bedrooms of the precarious living places of Párraga, and also by the tedium of the inhabitants’ lives. Routine interested her as much as any fleeting novelty that aroused the curiosity of the neighbourhood. That’s why she never missed a chance to watch the delivery of the official ration quotas of potatoes to the market, or to capture with her lens the languid cat sleeping on the roof of Chachío’s house.
Ceballos and her companions had nerve and courage enough to dare knock art Chachío’s door and ask if they could live with him for a while. He is a long time resident of the outskirts of Párraga, whom the artists had chosen at random. Any house, some with more and some with fewer leaks in the roof and rickety walls, would have served just as well to allow the artists to share the most private habits of the people of the village, the promiscuous bustle of that poor neighbourhood, the inclement weather that got through the patched roof and the buckets of water stored for bath time (this was probably the only time Ceballos would be able to show off her bathing suit, but she had to be careful and not be wasteful because here even water is scarce). Showing no surprise at such an unusual request for housing, Chachío agreed to take them into his very modest dwelling for a couple of weeks, only provided that his usual siestas would not be disturbed.
Those would be some of the moments of relative calm which René Quintana could use to collect his clues found among other people’s leftovers. Quintana is an artist who likes to work with rubbish. He searches in trash cans and rearranges scraps to create objects that take on a dislocated practicality. More recently his work has been directed toward living with those who produce the garbage or live in the midst of it. His archaeologist’s passion resembles police investigation. First he submerges himself literally in other people’s refuse, then lets the most compromising things float to the surface. Then, after he has waited for an incriminating selection, he chooses whatever constitutes evidence of things that had remained hidden. Voyeur, archaeologist, policeman, vigilante, home invader, garbage collector, René Quintana is all of these. His work takes place on those borders where such diverse activities overlap.
The young artist Cristina Padura goes has a different objective. Her work has gone from using photographic images to dissolve representational space to an evaluation and critique of the documentary process itself. However, at present she is interested in the "sound" resulting from the intimacy of urban and suburban spaces. The parallel that Padura establishes between the presumed truthfulness of photographic documents and the literal transcription of the city’s rumours makes her "printed plates" an option different from the "uses" of journalistic documentation. Padura records the sounds Chachío makes in his sleep, the voice of a woman nearby telling another when the market will be stocked with potatoes, the noisy passing of an old Russian truck that transports the food rations for the families of Párraga, the cry of a clever street vendor, the noises that go along with the fragrance or fetid odors of the neighbourhood, the gossip going back and forth between two bored women, political jokes, the details of the recent baseball game, the segment of the soap opera of the moment, and even the demanding protest from the gut of Chachio’s cat who had just woken up. The attraction of Padura’s work lies in the fact that it captures precisely the sonorous background of those locations where her work evolves as it intersects with the ambiance. The result is simplified in minimalist lead sheets on which are transcribed in printed letters the mute rumours of Párraga.
The period of hospitality agreed upon by Chachío came to an end and the foreigners enlivened the evening with farewell beers and music heard from neighbouring houses.
When night came, Ceballos put away her camera and her sunglasses, Quintana organized his evidence in meticulous fashion, and Padura kept checking the latest example of her "newspaper." In a few hours the hospitable host will return to his routine while his guests will board the bus that will take them back to the other extreme of Havana, or one should say, back to its other extremes, its other excesses, its other lacks.
"And now here we are, on the other side of the city," Sandra Ceballos said to me a few days after their return. And immediately asked herself, "On the other shore? No, we are in the center where we always were; here, from where one cannot see the coasts, only flashes and podiums in the depths. And the hysterical crowds parading beneath the sun..."
Translated from the Spanish by Cola Franzen
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