Analogue Photocollages (2018-2021)
For me as an artist, When the memory turns to dust is a reflective process in which I combine the empirical, psychological and critical. I conceive the random gesture between the selection of a certain photographic document and the preconception in invoice of different stories, as a rescue practice where the apparently disposable, old or residual bear the weight of a memory that is presented to me as a pretext to recontextualize and resemantize the frozen story on photographic paper. I appropriate myself of a found testimony that covers the 1920s to the 1980s; I archive it, classify it and transmute it into a new metaphor. I conscientiously manipulate, meticulously elaborate other realities, juxtaposed, assembled, mutilated, where I do not intend to disguise the traces of time on paper, nor the seams resulting from these photo collages.
I consider myself a restless prowler, a visual archaeologist who operates technically and discursively on the elasticity of a record of reality; an original story that I reactivate through the conception of an aesthetic ontology that encompasses the ideological, the social, the political, the religious, the familiar… This series is a kind of built and resurrected testament in which meanings and mixtures of a culture such as the Cuban one and of mixed and singular race are distilled, a series which delights even today in nostalgia and sustenance of an astonishing and worn-out ideal. I assemble landscapes, portraits, customs scenes or abstract motifs to reformulate that individual/social memory; to enrich that heritage often found within a Cuban family; and to offer a possible interstice that reminds us of who we are and how we see ourselves, away from the contemporary artistic debate.