Ariel Camejo: Images of La Habana
a hi/story of two centuries
Angewandte Resident Artist [Programme]
La Habana is celebrating during 2019 the
500th anniversary of its constitution. A key spot involved in the process of constitution of modern capitalism through the
colonial experience in the Americas; a city that was fed by the profits of slavery and the economic system of sugar Plantation;
a dynamic melting pot of cultures and people coming from every corner of the world; an exemplary territory of U.S. contemporary
expansion as an emergent imperialist force at the beginning of the XXth century; stronghold of a socialist and anticolonial
revolution; a peculiar survivor of communism in a post-soviet era; this urban space constitutes the perfect example of overlapping
and baroque accumulation.
How does art has responded to this complex scenario
of social, cultural, economic, ethnic, symbolic mixing? To which extent artistic narrative provides the logics from where
it has been possible (desirable, reasonable) to think about Cubaness? Which subjects and subjectivities has been historically
authorized “To Represent” the notion of Cuba-Being Cuban? How these legacies are contested or legitimated by contemporary
visual arts in the island? Here are some of the questions that will be revisited during a tour over two centuries of visual
representations of La Habana.