Of the happy conjunction of a poem of Eliseo Diegothe emotional and practical ties of the curator Sabrina Fanego With the castle of the Royal Force and Friendship of a group of artists, the exhibition emerged Military contoursclosed on Sunday.
It was an attempt to link contemporary art with archaeological pieces, put to dialogue speeches of modernity with objects that have, in addition to their intrinsic beauty, the value of having survived the corrosion of time, from the colony to the present day.
Fanego, the curator, thus recounts the genesis of the sample and its aspirations:
Military contours It is a very intimate project that is born of my interest in the archeology of Cuba and my friendship and collaboration with the archaeologists and museologists of the Archeology Cabinet of the Havana historian’s office. This relationship goes back to my childhood and intensified during the short social service time I worked with them in the Museum of Archeology. They are very dear people and that I admire a lot. The director of that museum, Antonio Quevedo, also directs the Museum of Real Force and is, thanks to him, that this exhibition was possible.
The purpose of Military contours The museum has been to intervene, so that contemporary art and archeology live together, on equal terms. In its diversity, the set of works dialogue (affirming and assimilating, questioning and rejecting) with the museological script and collections, with the possibilities of space-capital and also with its recent history, which is tangential to the history of Cuban art.
These guidelines were the ones that transmitted to the artists from the beginning, and all in a certain way were achieved. However, as I feel more artist than curator and I prefer to operate intuitively and spontaneously, I gave them the greatest possible freedom, with which several of the most interesting proposals and locations were born from them. Some works had already been exhibited (however, they found novel irradiations through museography) and others created something new for the Expo. The latter is the case of artists such as Orestes Hernández, Larry, Lisandra Isabel García, Sergio Marrero and Orlando Hernández. At the same time, the objects belonging to the Diego Eliseo collection make up a kind of exergo-altar whose poetic substance is fundamental in the sensitivity of this project.
Eliseo’s text in question is “Ode to the young light”, in whose first verses it reads:
In my country the light
It is much more than time, it takes
With strange delight in contours
military of everything, in the relics
Slut of the flood.
The poet did not refer to the military universe when he speaks of “military contours”, but to the rigidity – I think – that he necessarily has the act of reducing to the exterior lines the things that define us and fix us in a certain context.
So that the title of the sample and the chosen scope – a strength— They led the visitor in a very restricted sense, when trying to relate the “heresies” of the artists circumscribed to the military. More suggestive as a title I would have seemed “the brief relics of the flood”, which alludes to the various catastrophes facing any existence, and the most terrible of all: past death and the one that will inexorably come.
Saved this aspect, it can be said that Sabrina’s efforts are more received as an artistic gesture than curatorial. That kind of exhibition encrypted in the museum speaks of its link with the space and with the activity of the men and women who collected the pieces that make up the permanent sample. All this linked to its own development as a person of a sensitivity that tries to express itself for various causes.
There is humor in certain pieces that “sneak” in the showcases and solemn spaces of the museum, and there are desires to make clear – consciously or not – that the legitimation of art begins by the creator himself, who must be convinced of his need for communication with the other and of his healthy eagerness for permanence. Why what else is art if not An attempt to violate the devastations of the end of existence?
Thus the viewer could go from pieces such as “hermetic”, from Alina Águila, abstract, to the work of Ponjuán, “memory of the triumphant revolution”, which consists of one of those popular vessels of 1959 with the images of the protagonists – each one in their level – of the deed that evicted Batista of power; In this case, Che, Fidel and Urrutia, that politician who was president of the Republic of Cuba only for six months.
I am citing the works not because of the order they had in the sample, but for which it has remained in my memory.
Following the poetics of giving things a second life, José Messiah uses in “Gerardo’s hand”, objects found. In an inaccessible space of the, naturally dark fortress, an electrical resistance dismisses light and heat.
For its part, Orlando Hernández near with a drawing to colored chalk an old artillery piece (“counterattack”), and at an angle of the room, also circumscribed by the artist’s line, places a cardboard box that he calls “Pandora”. They are two works in one.
Saving my reading of each piece, because this is always a personal exercise. I will only say that many of the exposed works take me hand in hand to the issues that are under discussion in our trouble present as a nation.
Darena Pedroso frames in the spaces containing stickers, small gold jewels. His work is called “instead.” Meanwhile, Larry – so, with a lowercase – weapon practically an altarpiece entitled “Dead Pilluelo (cloud of anguish)”, in a showcase that continues objects of proven seniority, which produces, at least, an effort effect. This is not Larry’s only work that was exhibited, but the one that most caught my attention.
Finally, I want to point out the presence of Eliseo not already as a demiurge, but as a simple playful deadly. It is known that the immense poet who was liked to play soldiers With their two children already adults. They rewrite the story with dice, and even sang the hymns of each contestant army, composed of them. It was a joy to see them play, moments that took their roles in the only possible way, as children do: seriously. There is a game of cards that were from the poet, so sensitive to “the designs of luck” and a deliciousdestroyer? hand painted.
I have pieces to name, but the space does not give so much. Already in This column We have referred to Sabrina Fanego as a young ascent artist. Now we greet her appearance as a curator. More and greater efforts can be expected from its delicate and attentive sensitivity.
