connexion.cu
Conexion.cu is a project that connects Cuban artists from different locations and styles but with a grass rooted commitment to art as a common ground. The project will have four exhibitions over the course of a year, with a few workshops along the way. One exhibition in the home city of each artist: Santa Clara, Cienfuegos, Matanzas and Alamar (outskirt Havana).
Hip hop brings us together, especially the work under the umbrella of Kbola's project (https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063491860763). As an anthropologist and coordinator of this project, it is very important to us to tackle social issues in modern Cuban society like Habana centrism (little chance to develop their true potential to those who don't live in Cuba's capital), racial disparity, lack of free speech, misogynistic and homophobic attitudes.
All of the artists have a very different aesthetic. Undoubtedly the selection criteria of these artists has been their social activism and sentient being awareness. It is not about exquisite techniques but about works that reflect the artist's rich inner world as a subject intertwined in a very complex social context. These artists are, without a doubt, faithful exponents of a Cubanness that barely participates in the Cuban official narrative. Their interaction will be a fertile space for creation that would bring relevant Cuban outstanding issues in the spotlight.?
The Exhibitions will also be a bit unorthodox. We plan to have a stage where artists will do spoken word. We will also invite some local poets with progressive lyrics. And the most exciting part is the artists doing action painting during the opening and whatever they create, will also be part of the collection. Story telling throughout visual art and poetry. A modern and attractive way to engage young Cubans in social issues.
Donations are welcome and needed! No matter how small the contribution, it will be heartily grately apprecitaed. Donations over 50euro, will be rewarded with a piece of art from?conexion.cu. It would be also very helpful if you share this text with other people in your network keen to support art. The money raised from art selling will split it 2/3 for the artist and 1/3 for project budget.
Inmaray Tillet?(Cienfuegos, 1987)?https://www.instagram.com/inmaraytillet/
She is a single mother of two adolescent boys. Her days go by between raising her children, almost individually, creating her works and working at Heritage preservation Office in Cienfuegos. Art saves her from all the miseries of Cuban daily life. It helps her to express her voice as a black warrior woman. Most Cuban academic artists adopt a superiority pose over self-taught artists but not Inmaray. She is the only one in this project with academic background nevertheless that has not been an impediment to collaborate with self taught artists.
The sui generis beauty of femininity as a symbol of adoration, of a type of image and archetype of the feminine represented through the black woman, culturally Afro-descendant, is the recurring theme that weaves?Inmaray Tillet's series from beginning to end " Studies under pressure”.
Using a mixed technique, more usual carbon or graphite, highlights the aesthetics of hair as an attribute of natural decoration that runs from the cult of the deities of the Yoruba religion, also insinuating the possibilities of pro-Afro movements so fashionable in Western culture, with the so-called “espendrums” to the "relaxed afro hair" so fashionable within Afrocuban women.
The hard lines of the faces resemble self-portraits of the soul of the black Cuban woman who bears the double fellatio of a Latino, macho, racist and exclusive society with the torpor of an official discourse that disguises miscegenation as the idyllic result of a culture stained glass Cuban Meanwhile, the life of the Cuban woman fades under the suffocation of those fake makeup from magazines.
Amet Laza?(Cienfuegos, 1986).?https://www.instagram.com/ametlaza/
He?is the only one of the artists who does not live on the Island but in the Netherlands. Together, we founded together the Kbola's project (2012) and later the independent art gallery-workshop “Poco Bonito” (2014).?Amet Laza, like the rest, made a social committed art. His recent works have changed significantly as they now reflect the experiences of a Cuban from the diaspora. He is a very versatile artist. His main technique is painting but he also dabbles in three-dimensional works, graffiti, performance and video art.
The grotesqueness of bad paint is more uncomfortable because of the perfection with which?Amet Laza?masters the technique of drawing the absurd. The colorful brushes on cardboard describe as strokes on the skin of the nation such a merriment of festive brilliance, that it would seem like the dream world of children's comics if the surreal Cuban existence was not known, where reality and fiction blur into historical and daily epics.
Comics could narrate the battle of an existence of broken symbols determined to survive, which are recomposed in the temple of the political discourse of the revolutionary super-earthly and legendary superhero and decomposes in the street language of the superhero mortally tied to the land where he lives. His mutant body of idealized and dying revolution. The central argument is the look without nostalgia of the temple of the dead gods in the insular pantheon.
Qco?(Santa Clara, 1987).?https://www.instagram.com/qco332gancho/. His place of residence is irrelevant because he could always be found in El Mejunje. That special place in Santa Clara, one of the most bohemian places in Cuba, if not the most bohemian of all.?Qco?is a self-taught artist whose art and music saved him from a criminal life. His work reflects all that and more. Also their religious beliefs (Palo monte, one of the three great Afro-Cuban religions).?Qco?is also a winner of the Salon award from the city of Santa Clara and is a musician (spoken word, rap and reggae).
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The limits of good and evil and the paths that lead us to enter the labyrinths that feed our own demons, is the constant of?Qco. Using oil paint, with a predominance of black and white on paper. It leaves no loophole for reading where both moral extremes are blurred. The good, as a legitimate attachment to love and faith and both represented in the image of the feminine, of the home and of the cult of the divine that transcends us. Evil lurks like a second skin, as a barrier between the natural energies that guide the universal order and the bad thoughts of man that lead to harmful actions against his own nature and against mother nature, are the proposals of the works "Without Munanzo", "My demons" and "Secrets under the skin."
Adier Martel?(Matanzas, 1994).?https://www.instagram.com/sharif__adiermartell/
He is a graffiti artist. He has also been coordinator of the graffiti part within the "Urban Potaje Festival". The father of a beautiful girl, he has had to put his brushes aside to become a beekeeper. In today's Cuba getting daily food has become a challenge." However, before my call to join this project, he did not think twice and responded in the affirmative.
Adier?is a self-taught artist. His work is deeply marked by the graffiti technique with the use of paper as a support and the use of ink and acrylic on a stencil. He also dabbles in the installation with recycled materials and graffiti on walls throughout the Island. His work is connected with the Cuban reality and specifically with the frustration of the individual on the Island in the face of a chaotic situation and the inability to change reality when trapped in a totalitarian system. The work of?Adier?and?Yasser Castellanos?is very connected, not only on an aesthetic level (very graphic) but because of their political activism, their work echoes the dissent of Cubans, they amplify what many speak sotto voice at home.
Yasser Castellanos?(Havana, 1974).?https://www.instagram.com/yasser.castellanos/
He is the artist with the highest visibility. Not so much for his work, which I consider excellent, but for his activism, being a member of #MSI and the #acuerteladosdesanisidro. He has actively participated in civic campaigns for artist's freedom of expression (against Decree #349). In addition, Yasser is a defender of animal rights and together with his wife, they have an animal shelter. His works are fundamentally of political protest and he uses the Cuban flag in most of his paintings and graffiti. Yasser is the founder of the Cuban hip hop movement and also a spoken word artist like?Qco.
Yasser Castellanos?inhabits the divine as an allusion to the common consciousness of purity with which the highest values and ideals that Cubans distinguish and claim are identified, even their total absence, mixed in a universal icon of nations: the flag as a symbol.
His visual proposal "Cuba" dismantles the tricolor meaning of the Cuban flag based on its singular cosmogony. Thus, each color acquires its own universe, on paper or canvas. White, used as purification and also as resistance and resilience, is an inexhaustible source of life and spirit that connects us with the original land of our ancestors and the one where we were born. Blue, in contrast, is the absence, deterioration or abandonment, of the spirit. It is the force of an earthly order that is repressing and violent. It is also the sea that contains us as a barrier or physical space that limits us and at the same time encourages us to free ourselves. Red is liberation, the divine energy that flows through the arteries that feed the body in Cuba and that can contaminate or oxygenate the soul of that common body where Cubanness lives.
The life of the Cuban nation has been mortgaged by surrendering to the idolatry of the false gods of freedom and earthly paradise. Cuba needs the connection between all its souls.?Conexion.cu?aims to motivate this reflection towards the healing of the national soul.
Also part of this project are?Helen Ochoa?(curator),?Dj Freaky?(audiovisual production and promotion) and myself,?Carlos Infante?(coordinator).
Note: Financial strategy is by crowdfunding but I will not do it in a formal crowdfunding platform because it is very difficult to do so due the US Embargo. Instead I will send to friends who are kin to support Cuban art.
Contacts:
Instagram:?https://www.instagram.com/conexion.cu/
email:?[email protected]
cel: +31626117235