|
|
During the month of March the Galería Habana exhibited a show titled Slowly, Not So Deep. It was in fact two simultaneous exhibits of works by Ernesto Leal and Manuel Piña. Leal’s contributions consisted of a series of installations combining digital images with written texts. By parodying the official line and the police state atmosphere now plain to see on the Island, Leal set up an ironic dialogue between the language of his work and the language of political power.
Without going beyond the rhetorical currents now commonplace in a good part of contemporary Cuban art, Ernesto Leal’s work offered a densely textual preamble to the series of works by Manuel Piña, which in that context appeared like zones of silence that seemed to insinuate itself provocatively into the baroque and overly repetitive atmosphere of Cuban art today, and that reproduced, in a way no less subversive, the silences and omissions with which official discourse has continued to construct the history of the nation in recent decades.
A series of colour photographs in large format dominated the first part of Piña’s exhibit, scenes taken of some of the avenues of Havana where statues or commemorative monuments of historical events from the time of the Republic were once displayed. The series of photos, titled On Monuments, documented every empty site left by the statues that were torn down after the triumph of the revolution in 1959. Thus they became a testimony of the mutilations: monuments constructed over the traces of the absent monuments.
The frames tend to enclose the fragments of walls or ground level where the orifices left by the sculptures of commemorative plaques still persist. In that way each photo is composed over the combination of wide shots, like macroscopic approaches to the public space. As compensation for lack of anecdote the photographs offer a multiplicity of senses and a densely woven fabric of meanings. The same lack of anecdote also helps to transcend the spatio-temporal link with the referent, thus displacing any indices of a specific context and opening possibilities for a reading that goes beyond local implications.
Although some of these compositions remind us of the visual effect of various photos of Aguas Baldías (a series that Piña developed during 1994), what is clear is that they seem to continue the proposals that have kept evolving from the time of his exhibit Manipulaciones, Verdades y otras Ilusiones (Centro Wifredo Lam, 1995). The relationship between truth, history, and document is questionednow as relationship between power, history, and the monuments.
The image, as base of these questionings, continues to move away from the aesthetic structures traditionally attributed to photographic documents. In fact, Piña tends to break with the traditional forms and methodologies more strongly all the time, to force his way beyond the borders of the strictly photographic and to conceive his own artistic activity outside the methodological and aesthetic constraints imposed by the "profession" of photographer.
That tendency was again confirmed and reinforced in the remainder of the works included in the exhibit at the Galeríe Habana. A light box that showed an image on each side was linked with a video in which one could see a pickaxe being wielded to uproot a small plant. The obsessive movement of the tool, monotonous and violent, referred more to the processes of destruction than to those of production. It evoked the different mutilations of social memory and seemed to indicate the construction of a sterile road for the utopias.
The work, titled A Couple of Short Stories and a Longer One, proposed a multiple spatial relationship, as much to associate the perception of the light box with that of the video as to understand the light box as a three-dimensional object requiring a way of looking and an attitude very different from how we usually view flat images. In the light box the photo of a palm tree (now the national symbol of Cuba) is combined with the picture of a tower on top of which rest large tanks containing drinking water. The palm was truncated, probably as a result of being struck by lightning. The tower was inverted, with the water tank resting on the ground, as if it had never been put in place or had fallen. The inversion of the tower and the destruction of the palm paralleled each other. At the same time they were also equivalents of the disappearance of the monuments on the streets of the city. All those images come together in their implications of frustration, abrupt interruption of processes, intervention of uncontrollable forces over the course of events.
A Couple of Short Stories and a Longer One also refers to the contradictions and the clashes between the stories of individuals and the meta-narratives from which official power constructs history. That confrontation is summed up in the installation that gives the title to the entire exhibit. Slowly, Not So Deep is an interactive installation. Motion sensors installed in the roof of one of the rooms reacted when spectators walked in and a tape was activated that could be heard from five loudspeakers distributed around the same space. Each speaker reproduced the tape at different moments, so that one did not hear the same fragment at the same time. A single photograph in the room showed a crowd carrying Cuban flags, participating in a political demonstration with enthusiasm and monotony similar to the pickaxe digging into the earth shown in the video of the earlier room. That one photo provided the synthesis of an iconography of the revolution meant to legitimate the official discourse with the homogeneous image of a working class, collectivist, and egalitarian society. In contrast to that almost abstract and totally depersonalized vision of the masses, the speakers broadcast fragments of interviews that Piña had carried out with different people, those who on their own expressed their ideas about the historical reality of Cuba and their own version of what it is like to experience in the flesh an unfinished utopia. The simultaneity of voices and discourses made the space of the room into a fabric composed of a series of crisscrossing rumours, weaving together a sonorous palimpsest, the duplicate of an extra-official and extra-institutional version of more than four decades of history.
It is interesting that a day after the opening of this show it was announced that the Premio Latinamericano de Fotografía Contemporánea was awarded precisely to Manual Piña for his work Deconstrucciones y Utopías, completely different from what was shown in the Galería Habana, but with a sense that completed all the discourse of his solo exhibit. In addition to calling attention to Piña’s work in the most overt way, this prize indicated a turning point in institutional political circles vis-à-vis Latin American photography. That change has been prompted by innovations coming from within the profession of photography itself in Latin America, with Piña’s work being a solid example of such a shift. Thus Manuel Piña not only continues to be one of the best representatives of contemporary Cuban art, but also one of the main figures who incorporate new discursive strategies and new ideological proposals into the very core of contemporary Latin American photography.
Translated from the Spanish by Cola Franzen
|
|
|
