Las verdades de Cuba

(cut-out paper – Silhouettes from the official Cuban newspaper Granma. Each sheet has been independently glued to canvas before being cut.
160 x 240 cm, 2013

new#4 copy — View of the installation Las verdades de Cuba, as a part of the group exhibition Wahala: On Representation, Authenticity, Expectations and Other Inflated Concepts, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2013

new#6 copy — View of the installation Las verdades de Cuba, as a part of the group exhibition Wahala: On Representation, Authenticity, Expectations and Other Inflated Concepts, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2013

_MG_1540 copy — View of the installation Las verdades de Cuba, as a part of the group exhibition Wahala: On Representation, Authenticity, Expectations and Other Inflated Concepts, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2013

new#2 copy — View of the installation Las verdades de Cuba, as a part of the group exhibition Wahala: On Representation, Authenticity, Expectations and Other Inflated Concepts, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2013

new#3 copy — View of the installation Las verdades de Cuba, as a part of the group exhibition Wahala: On Representation, Authenticity, Expectations and Other Inflated Concepts, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2013

new#13 copy — View of the installation Las verdades de Cuba, as a part of the group exhibition Wahala: On Representation, Authenticity, Expectations and Other Inflated Concepts, Savvy Contemporary, Berlin, 2013

The project explores the influence of power and ideology in the Cuban mass media and pro-poses a revision of politicized representations of the subject.

Las verdades de Cuba is an aesthetic exercise of re-editing authentic archives. Using the artistic practice of cutting and extracting 95% of the news in blocks of texts and headlines, it symbolically proceeds to an emptying not only of the officials content, but of the very body of totalitarian power and its only weapon of expansion: propaganda.

As a result of extractions and editorial cuts, new documents emerge that reveal these structures of the news design on paper. One newspaper excerpt is layered on top of another and presented as a kind of grid that resembles windows through which one can voyeuristically observe. What is behind? Between the slits, silhouettes of some figures and decontextualised texts are left uncovered, even simulating stencils in urban space or pages of a satirical comic book with comment bubbles to fill in. It remains open to the viewer’s interpretation.