Previsión: Sanación decolonial
Single video: 12.20 m, b/w and color, PAL, sound and mixed media on canvas. Exhibited at the group exhibition Now that we found freedom, what are we gonna do with it?, at HANGAR, Lisbon, Portugal, 2022
The project reflects on the necessary process of decolonisation in today’s Cuban society and proposes a historical review of the origins of racial prejudice in Cuba. The work is based on the public demand to tear down the statue of José Miguel Gómez: second president of the Republic of Cuba and responsible for the massacre in 1912 of the first independent party of men of color.
One of the works directly alludes to the Previsión newspaper and the two founding leaders of the PIC, the Afro-Cuban party that this newspaper represents. Both they and the main logo of Previsión are recreated in stencil style with black acrylic on sheets of the official Cuban newspaper Granma pasted directly on jute.
In 2016, the now deceased Dominican art critic and curator Alanna Lockward gave a lecture on Decolonial Politics at the Faculty of Arts and Letters at the University of Havana. There Lockward showed my video Túmbenlo, produced in Havana in 2010, where its protago-
nist: Alexei aka El Tipo Este, raps his song Calle G, in whose lyrics he demands the demolition of JMG’s statue in the face of the Cuban state’s refusal.A clip of the subsequent reaction and discussion of the rapper’s claim in his song was recorded by Lockward in video format. The students skeptically question the academics present as to how valid it really is to tear down such a statue.
The intervention of journalist and writer Gisela Arandia Covarrubias begins this video, making clear the historical need for a process of decolonization in Cuba today. Her important reflections question the official discourse put forward by some young students and show how little information they have had on decolonial studies.
Both materials: Túmbenlo from 2010 and the debate in the classroom of this university in 2014, dialogue with each other, in a new video that has didactic animations that illustrate historical contents raised in the discussion.
