Andrés Alejandro Castellanos Díaz (Santa Clara, 1994). To date he has held three individual exhibitions: Fracturas, 2025 (Galería Holguín, Holguín; Galería Santiago Apóstol, Santiago de Cuba, and Galería Pórtico, Santa Clara); Oché, 2025 (Cpae Gallery, Santa Clara) and Sedimentos, 2024 (Pórtico Gallery, Santa Clara, and Ramiro Ricardo Gallery, Holguín).
Among his professional activities is the connection with the experimental group Teatro-Adentro, from his hometown, where he has performed, in addition to being in charge of the lighting design of several pieces.
This is how it is told and it tells us:
My initial approach to photography occurred while I was studying Industrial Engineering at the Central University of Las Villas. An indefinite impulse pushed me to learn about her. When a friend told me that she was taking a basic photography course, in the next call I signed up. It was a very beneficial experience, plus the teacher was the excellent photographer Carolina Vilches.
From the initial knowledge learned there and thanks to the generosity of a friend, who shared the use of his camera with me and later gave it to me, the need to express myself through photography took root in me.
In the FEU amateur artist festivals I found the space to show my work and exchange with other creators: I received the impulses that pushed me to continue creating.
Together with the personal projects that I began to develop, a connection was born with the artistic and cultural life of the city of Santa Clara, which I maintain to this day. Then, by belonging to the Hermanos Saíz Association, I have found the doors open to exhibit my work at events and galleries in the country.
Photography is one of the ways I use to raise my voice within the complex social fabric in which we live. With it I try to channel my desires, dreams, frustrations, complaints and pain, always aspiring to compose from beauty and the search for poetry.
The photographic series developed over long periods of time have allowed me to cover the assumed themes in depth and condense their essences. Photographing is also the possibility of building bridges with other human beings, generating connections and feeding/stirring the spirit.
In photography I have found a gigantic universe of possibilities in which I have a lot left to discover. Always with my feet on the ground and an attentive gaze, I aspire to continue confronting this time that I have had to live.
I feel influenced, first of all, by literature. My passion for reading since I was a child expanded the horizons of my imagination and revealed to me the power of art to transform us. Then, there is the music, where the trova plays a central role; cinema and theater.
When I began to study photography, I discovered the work of many photographers who impacted me and who have left marks on the way I look from the camera. Among them are Raúl Cañibano, Daido Moriyama, Graciela Iturbide, José A. Figueroa, Marta María Pérez, Ansel Adams, Cirenaica Moreira, Kaloian… At the same time, the study of visual arts has transformed my vision of photography and the possible ways of exhibiting creative projects.
Regarding the works that have marked me, I am going to refer to two (although I could cite several): “Señor enmarcado” is a photograph by Graciela Iturbide of a very high poetic flight in which precise composition and the symbolism of life and its limits are combined. It is a photograph that always makes me think of the song “Un hombre” by Ariel Barreiros. The second is “Martí, 1957” by Ernesto Fernández, that head of Martí in which past and present, scaffolding and blindness come together, a photograph that passes through us as a nation.
Having the possibility of having a circle of friends linked to artistic creation has been one of my greatest motivations, especially in those moments when strength falters. The works of the Teatro-Adentro group and all the work of the Callejas publishing project, creative nuclei to which I have the joy of belonging, are constant impulses to continue creating.
The third city
The third city It is the first photographic series that I began to consciously develop. It proposes a look at the elderly with whom we live/coincide daily, at their dreams and nightmares, but also at their joys. Living beings that transformed this island and many of which make, day after day, the decisive effort to survive.
These images are part of Sediments (2024), my first personal exhibition in which I combine photography with installation and site specific.
Fractures
Fractures It aims to be a mirror placed before the nation, the exercise of looking at ourselves (poetically) without lowering our eyes. It is my second personal exhibition, in which a set of photographs collide that have the Cuban flag as the center, and that were taken during my first years taking photos, to which is added another selection of more recent images, connected between them by their symbolic charge and the aspiration of forming a visual poem from the fracturing and superposition of layers of reading.
The country of Nomeagree
The country of Nomeagree It constitutes a visual diary marked, like a hot iron on the haunch of a beef, by the pain, frailties, breaks and agonies of my environment. The Cuba of these days, with its sharpened contrasts and its receding lights, is moving towards the naturalization of apathy on a social scale. In my daily walk through Santa Clara I register/confront my reality. Stopped moments of an island and its people who seem to fear us as a formula to save themselves.
Santa Clara, 2025
I really enjoy doing street photography and exercising my gaze, which is capable of composing in fractions of a second. This image, behind its lines and shapes, brings together technology and what is alive, what moves and what is tied to the past.
Benefit to certainty
Accustomed to living as a society next to a stuffy image of Martí, we often lose sight of his lucidity. This photographic series was born from the urgency of finding him again in the common space and, through his fiery eyes, finding certainties.
Island
Martyrdom, light, asphyxiation, resurrection. If I had to define Cuba today, I would use this photograph. In the midst of these dark days, my greatest wish, as the poet sings, is that “we summon goodness to climb the mountain.”
