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Fragment of the video No
NO
Single video channel
4:3 video, PAL, 03:30 min,
color, sound. 2007
The video project NO examines the historical and emotional transition between two opposing utopian imaginaries: the totalizing, collective utopia of homogenizing ambition, and the emergence of an intimate, personal utopia built from individual desire. This exploration unfolds through a performative intervention on Carlos III Avenue, one of Havana’s most heavily trafficked urban arteries.
For this action, Nicaraguan opera singer Osbaldo Acevedo—whose unusually distinctive mezzosoprano register destabilizes conventional vocal
and gender classifications—performs the melody of a well-known opera while replacing the original libretto with a single, improvised, repeatedly intoned word: “no.” This sustained negation operates simultaneously as a symbolic refusal, a rupture with canonical form, and an assertion of a singular voice that disrupts the everyday texture of the city.
Acevedo’s vocal presence creates a brief deviation within the city’s habitual choreography: hurried passersby suddenly become spectators; the public street becomes a stage; the routine flow of the urban environment is momentarily suspended.
Even when interrupted by shouts from the Camellos—the iconic public transport vehicles of Cuba’s Special Period—Acevedo persists, underscoring the tension between the noise of collective life and the insistent affirmation of a subjectivity unwilling to be absorbed by it.
Through this device, NO posits that negation is not merely rejection, but a foundational gesture: a necessary disengagement from a totalitarian utopian project that demanded individual sacrifice in the name of a collective ideal. The vocalized “no,” emerging from a voice that defies categorization, becomes a performative declaration of autonomy—an initial step toward the construction of a personal utopia that rejects ideological grand narratives in order to assert itself from the singular, mobile, desiring experience of the individual.
