One of the twin marble lions that guard the entrance to the main square of this city today looks wallpapered in all its magnitude and attracts the attention of hundreds of locals and some tourists.
The covering of the feline on the left, at the base of which is embedded the plaque that identifies the city as a Cultural Heritage of Humanity, is part of the actions integrated within the framework of the Fourteenth Havana Biennial.
The main visual arts event on the Island arrived this weekend in the only city founded by French settlers in the Spanish dominions in America.
The public intervention Ramifications, part of the Tree of Hope project, brings together 15 local artists who joined the itinerant work undertaken in January by creator Alejandro López in the neighboring colonial city of Trinidad, also a world heritage site.
Going beyond the traditional spaces of institutions (galleries and museums) to bring it closer to the people, is the purpose of the creator of the Tree of Hope.
I proposed to make a project that would include several provinces, participants in the Biennial, which will end (its tour) in Havana, López explained when opening the open-air exhibition.
The artist described his creation as a processual work, in continuous change and movement.
Before arriving in Cienfuegos, 240 kilometers southeast of Havana, the artistic project traveled from Trinidad to the colonial town of Sancti Spíritus, the provincial capital to which the cradle of the expo belongs.
The two marble lions that give access to the José Martí Park from the east arrived in Cienfuegos in 1862, coming from New York to become the first urban furniture of the town founded 43 years earlier. (1819).
For Cienfuegos, this is the second time that it serves as the location for a segment of the Biennial, after in 2019 the local artistic collective Mar Adentro staged large-scale public interventions in the surroundings of the Royal Dock, an emblematic space of the embrace of the city with the surrounding bay.
