PUBLIC 52: Havana

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HAVA NA

EDITED BY SUSAN LORD, DANNYS MONTES DE OCA MOREDA, AND ZAIRA ZARZA

Dr. Lakra, Sin tĂ­tulo (Untitled) (2015). Mexico.

Contents

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Introduction Susan Lord, Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda, and Zaira Zarza

SECTION 1:

Havana: Transitions and Projections 13

Cuba: Babalú-Ayé Tosses His Crutches toward the Future Alan West-Durán

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The Spaces Between: Contemporary Art from Havana Keith Wallace

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From Havana Portraits from an Intimate Outsider Karen Dubinsky

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Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for Us) to Love the Cuban Revolution Rachel Weiss

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Miss Bienal Inaugurates La Primavera del Amor: Genesis of a Platform for Research and Intercultural Artistic Production in Cuba, June 2014-June 2015 Catherine Sicot Artist Project: fragments from Deriva (Cerro) (2013) Manuel Piña Baldoquín

SECTION 2:

Havana 2015 Biennial Dossier 1 71 Between the Idea and the Experience Jorge Fernández Torres 76

Expanded Architecture Nelson Herrera Ysla Artists: Raúl Morilla, 2boys.tv, Tirzo Martha and David Bade, Shilpa Gupta, Héctor Zamora, Francisca Benítez, Víctor Ekpuk, Gilberto Esparza, Nikolaus Gansterer, Dr. Lakra, Didier Faustino, Stéphane Gilot, Ingrid Mwangi and Robert Hutter, Humberto Diaz, Peter de Cupere

Dossier 2 103 Entre, Dentro, Fuera/Between, Inside, Outside Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda and Royce W. Smith Artists: Pedro Lasch, Susana Delahante Matienzo, Elizabeth Stevenson, Levi Orta, Stephanie Syjuco, Omar Estrada, Adonis Ferro, Guillermo Ramírez Malberti, Agnes Chávez

Dossier 3 125 Mountains with a Broken Edge: A Dossier Gretel Medina Delgado and Direlia Lazo Artists: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Michael François, Ryan Gander, Pierre Huyghe, Gabriel Kuri, Tatiana Mesa, Helen Mirra, Navid Nuur, Roman Ondák, Shimabuku, Roman Signer, Ariel Schlesigner Dossier 4 135 Biennial in Casablanca: A Summary José Manuel Noceda Fernández Artists: Daniel Buren, César Cornejo, La Curtiduría, Sandra Monterroso, Guisela Munita, Juvenal Ravelo, Adrián Villar Rojas, Colectivo Pico Estudio, Renán Rodríguez, Rafael Villares Dossier 5 152 Bookmarks: Visual Poetics Yornel Martínez Elías

SECTION 3:

Havana 1959–1968 159

Havana: Irreversible Susan Lord

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When We Were Modern Víctor Fowler Calzada

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Practices and Counter Practices: Toward the Reconstruction of the Imaginary of 1960s Cuba Dannys Montes de Oca Moreda

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Radical Poetics of the Sixties in Cuba: The Case of Ediciones El Puente and Its Revolutionary Existentialism Isabel Alfonso

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When the Doves of Leipzig Flew To Havana in the Hands of Santiago Álvarez Jennifer Hosek and Pedro Noa

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Artist Project: Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger, Florian Zeyfang

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OSPAAAL and OLAS Posters from the collection of Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi

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Contributors

EXHIBITION REVIEWS 244

Play, Precarity and Survival Michael DiRisio

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Akram Zaatari, All is Well Dina Georgis

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Bridget Moser, Tender Offer: Part 1 Francis May

BOOK REVIEWS 253

The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict, Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick, Eds. Chris Vanderwees

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Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters Between Art and Architecture, Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, Eds. Christina Gray

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Art + Care = A Future, Jana Graham with Amal Khalaf and Melissa Larner, Eds. Jacqueline Bell

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Service Media: Is it “Public Art? Or is it Art in Public Space?, Stuart Keeler, Ed. Daniella E. Sanader

INTRODUCTION: Havana SUSAN LORD, DANNYS MONTES DE OCA MOREDA, AND ZAIRA ZARZA

A Serbian artist hangs a parachute from what is left of the roof of an abandoned bicycle factory in Havana’s El Vedado neighbourhood. A Venezuelan collective builds a Space of Peace near where the Hershey Train has stopped in the Casablanca district since 1913 to take people across the Island of Cuba. An Afro-Cuban artist performs a spiritual tribute to Ana Mendieta in the Pabellón Cuba, where in 1968 the first Exposición del Tercer Mundo (Exposition of the Third World) was mounted. A Mexican artist sculpts light and music in the spaces of the famous art school, ISA (Instituto Superior de Arte), built by a Cuban and two Italian architects in the 1960s.

These are but a small few of the numerous examples of expanded architecture, transculturation, and historical conversation that took place in May 2015 during the 12th Havana Biennial.

Three years earlier, in May of 2012, Cuban artists Los Carpinteros staged Conga Irreversible at the 11th Havana Biennial, a new performance that inverted and reinvented a traditional street dance. Elements of the music, lyrics, and dance were performed backwards by dancers and musicians wearing black sculptured costumes as they moved through the expansive and significant boulevard of Paseo del Prado along with hundreds of habaneros and international visitors. The performance playfully turned inside-out the narratives of revolution, nation, utopia, and faith that have animated the last 55 years of Cuban society (and, arguably, other nationalist or social movements of the post-war period).

Between these two moments of international cultural relations as expressed through the 11th and 12th Biennials, one of the most dramatic political theatres in the Americas played itself out in Washington and Havana. On 17 December 2014, Cuban President Raul Castro and US President Barak Obama each delivered a speech about undoing the nearly 55-year blockade against Cuba.

Leading up to this monumental moment, Ottawa had offered an uncharacteristically generous (for the Harper government), but historically consistent, gesture by hosting the representatives of these “closest of,” or “intimate,” enemies (as Alan West-Durán remarks in this issue), during their negotiations. Thus, this is a momentous time for Cuba and for the Americas, as the last iceberg of the Cold War thaws through the changes in US/Cuba relations. The results on the ground are numerous in their contradictions and complexities. As Karen Dubinsky writes her in essay, “shortly after ‘D17’ (as it is now known in Cuba) everyone from Netflix to Conan O’Brien to Airbnb arrived to see (and benefit from) just what was so forbidden for 50 years.” During the 12th Biennial in May 2015 Bronx Museum executive director Holly Block, a long-time curator of Roman Ondák, Here or Elsewhere (2006/2015). From 12th Havana Biennial Project Montañas con una esquina rota (Montains with a Broken Edge).

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SECTION 1

Havana: Transitions and Projections

CUBA: Babalú-ayé tosses his crutches toward the future ALAN WEST-DURÁN

On 17 December 2014, Barack Obama announced a drastic reorientation of US policy towards Cuba. Diplomatic relations were to be restored (which happened in July 2015), travel restrictions and remittances guidelines loosened, and business and trade relations expanded, all with the ultimate goal of normalizing relations between the two countries. Embassies have now opened. The news stunned me. Having left Cuba at the age of seven in 1960, I have lived close to my entire life under the menacing cloud of USA-Cuba misunderstanding and hostility. I grew up in Havana, then Houston, New Orleans, Panama City, San Juan, New York, and, finally, Boston as a child of the Cold War. And yet, because of the intransigence of USA-Cuba relations, never quite released from its grip. Cold War? Not between the USA and Cuba—the war was red hot (pun intended), fuelled by political passion, ideological fervour, imperial arrogance, and nationalistic ardour. Now only the Koreas remain as the last remnant of the Cold War. Whether Presidents Obama and Raúl Castro realized it or not, 17 December is an important date on the Cuban calendar—the feast of Saint Lazarus, known in the Afro-Cuban religion of Regla de Ocha (a.k.a Santería) as Babalú Ayé. He is the orisha (deity, saint, guardian angel) of the sick, and every year Cubans honour him at a shrine in El Rincón, 45 minutes east of Havana. The throngs of people who go, dragging themselves on the ground, some with bricks attached to their legs—often bleeding—to make reverence, give thanks, or express penance, is simply astounding.

The pilgrimage is an event capable of moving even a non-believer to awe or tears. Inside the church, Cubans pray, light candles, and make offerings (usually flowers). No doubt, the relationship between Cuba and the United States since 1959 has been ill—almost gangrenous—and perhaps the curative powers of Babalú-Ayé could only help to bring to this ailing state of affairs some relief, and hopefully lead the way to a healthy future. The ailment is born of geographical proximity and historical entwinement, conditions that have led scholars to define the two countries as the “closest of,” or “intimate,” enemies.

Cuba’s history has been lived under the shadow of three superpowers: Spain (for four centuries), the United States (for 60 years), and the USSR (for 30 years). One could argue for a fourth superpower—from below—its African heritage, with its history of enslavement, resistance, and creativity that is tenaciously part of Cuban identity. Consequently, Cubans have long memories.

The island’s relationship with the USA precedes the period 1898-1959. Even before the US intervened in the Spanish-America-Cuban War (1898) it was the island’s largest trading partner and had made several attempts to purchase the island from Spain or annex it using military adventurers known as filibusteros. During the nineteenth century, Americans viewed the island first as a

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FIG. 1 Kcho, Estudio para la regatta (Study of The Regatta) (1994). Graphite on paper. Photo: Robert Bos. Courtesy of the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Vancouver.

THE SPACES BETWEEN: Contemporary art from Havana KEITH WALLACE

In 1997, the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery and the Contemporary Art Gallery initiated an ambitious exhibition of contemporary art from Cuba titled Utopian Territories: New Art From Cuba. The exhibition included twenty-three artists and was installed throughout Vancouver in collaboration with seven galleries: Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, Charles H. Scott Gallery, Artspeak Gallery, Access Gallery, Or Gallery, and Western Front.1 This exhibition, co-curated by Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Juan Antonio Molina, Scott Watson, and myself, identified a new energy within the Cuban art scene as it was evolving in the early 1990s during what is euphemistically called Cuba’s “Special Period in Time of Peace.” This period brought great hardship to Cuba’s people, and was nationally demoralizing as the collapse of Soviet communism and the shift to an apparently democratic Russia severed Cuba’s substantial three-decade-old economic ties to the Soviet Union. The results were immediate, from stark shortages of food, gasoline, and other basic necessities, to recurring blackouts throughout and thus no fans to counteract the stifling heat. Russia’s abandonment of Cuba, something Cuban society did not expect, caused its population to reflect on its own national identity, possible strategies for an impending era of bleak economic survival, and Cuba’s post-Cold War international position. From this vulnerable scenario, a sense of isolation from the rest of the world intensified while the Communist party grappled with its own internal social challenges. Many Cubans tried to escape by sea on jerry-rigged rafts to find the rest of the world, though many didn’t make it across the 145-kilometre stretch of water that separates the island from the southern tip of Florida. Thus, isolation, insularity, and migration were the subjects of much of the art made during this time, not only in terms of Cuba’s new social and economic circumstances, but as allegories for the individual within a local and global context (FIG. 1).

While many Cubans remain preoccupied with the challenges that confront them on a daily basis—institutions, regulations, bureaucracies, and an 23

From HAVANA PORTRAITS FROM AN INTIMATE OUTSIDER1 KAREN DUBINSKY

Over a million Canadians travel to Cuba every year. Most of them go to the beach. Who can argue with that? Canadian winters are harsh, Cuban beaches beautiful. After the attacks of 11 September 2001, when it seemed no one was getting on airplanes, Cuban tourist officials worried about what would become of their industry. That fall, a leading Canadian Cuba expert reassured a group of tourist industry leaders: “Don’t worry. They’ll be here,” he told them. “Canadians are more afraid of winter than they are of terrorists.”2 Over a decade later the Cuban tourist industry is booming and visitors are increasing.

Canada tops the list of tourist-sending nations in Cuba, followed by Germany, the UK, France and Italy.3 But when, on 17 December 2014, Barack Obama and Raúl Castro made their surprising declaration that they would like to try to behave normally towards each other, many tourists must have begun to wonder about how this warming trend will alter their attachment to Cuba.

A cartoon in the Globe and Mail summed it up perfectly: David Parkins drew a Canadian enjoying an empty beach, while just behind him a tsunami of Americans was poised to overtake the uncluttered paradise. “Better make it a double,” the Canadian says to the Cuban beachside waiter.

The image is a great Canadian blend of friendship, arrogance, and insecurity. In Cuba, unlike almost anywhere else, Northerners outside the US can fantasize that these are our mojitos, waiters, and beaches.

Representatives of the US Chamber of Commerce, Jay-Z and Beyoncé, and tens of thousands of US college students passed through Havana long before Obama’s surprise announcement. And shortly after “D17” (as it is now known in Cuba) everyone from Netflix to Conan O’Brien to Airbnb arrived to see (and benefit from) just what was so forbidden for 50 years. As the Americans re-assess their animosity towards Cuba since the 1959 Revolution, it's a good time for others to also look again at their relationship with the place we think we know. “Canadians don’t have a Cuba problem. That’s your problem now,” laughs Ricardo, a Cuban friend who has lived in Toronto for 20 years. Canada has over fifty years of person-to-person experience in and with Cuba that Americans have generally missed. But what do we actually know about the place beyond the beach? […]

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SOME THOUGHTS ON THE RIGHT WAY (FOR US) TO LOVE THE CUBAN REVOLUTION RACHEL WEISS

In the seminar that I sometimes lead on Cuban art, I typically start out by asking everyone to articulate whatever ideas they already have about Cuba. I explain the reason for this in terms of the extreme weight of preconceptions that people—especially in the US—tend to impose on the idea of Cuba. Cuba as stereotype, or, if you prefer a more psychological than sociocultural framework, as projection, long has been a feature of the popular imagination in various parts of the world: sex and revolution (either together, or as distinct historical desires), ‘humanism,’ culture as vortex-of-self and cultural politics as crest-of-governance, friendliness, rhythm, and the capacity to effortlessly enjoy life. These are a few of the iterations, and all have come to mind especially in the last few months, because of the way that political events have whipped up a renewed frenzy around at least some of the old ideas. The mania to visit Cuba “before it changes” reflects the extent to which imaginary ideas about Cuba have endured. And so it is interesting to think back to an earlier time, and linger on the voices of those for whom Cuba was, likewise, the seat of strong desires.

I recently ran across Susan Sontag’s 1969 reflection on her trip to Cuba, published in the radical magazine Ramparts—“Some Thoughts on the Right Way (for us) to Love the Cuban Revolution,”1 she called it, although she never really does say what the right way would be. Her main point, rather, is something along the lines of the US and Cuba as over-developed and under-developed countries, respectively, meaning that Americans [sic] and Cubans come at things from opposite positions and that, therefore, the potential for misidentification is high (though she concerns herself only with that misidentification along the US-to-Cuba vector, and not in its reverse aspect).

Anyhow, by “us” she means “Radical Americans” (her term), which was a pretty select grouping, with a pretty particular set of projections they brought to the experience of Cuba—and they also happened to be a group of special interest to Cuban authorities. Reflecting on her experience of Vietnamese people in contrast to Cubans, Sontag confesses that the Vietnamese had been a source of ‘discomfort’ for “a Western neo-radical like myself for whom revolution means not only creating political and economic justice but releasing and validating personal (as well as social) energies of all kinds, including erotic ones. And this is what revolution has meant in Cuba….”2 For the new revolutionary powers in Cuba, meanwhile, that cohort of radical Americans was a lifeline whose approval and enthusiasm could be converted into more concrete resources for survival: acutely attuned to the power of images, the guerrillas-turned-strategists had from the very beginning taken seriously the image that they projected to the rest of the world.

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Luis Manuel Otero Alcantรกra, Miss Bienal (2015). Cuba.

MISS BIENAL INAUGURATES LA PRIMAVERA DEL AMOR: Genesis of a platform for research and intercultural artistic production in Cuba, June 2014-June 2015 CATHERINE SICOT

Curatorial Vision: Intercultural Collaboration, Site-specific Work, and Ethical Production La primavera del amor (The Spring of Love) is an international experimental platform for research and artistic production in Cuba (Havana and suburbs), in development since the spring of 2014 and curated by the author. A floating platform—an artists’ residence without walls—it facilitates the creation of works that generate dialogue with Cuban society. By facilitating intercultural creation, it confronts the diversity of creative processes and questions the ethics of international participation in Cuban political and economic contexts. The different projects of La primavera were financially supported in its first year, 2014-2015, by the Government of Canada, the Embassy of France in Havana, Elegoa Cultural Productions, a group of Cuban and foreign companies and foundations, and by the foreign artists who participated in it.1 It also benefited from a platform of diffusion during the 12th Havana Biennial—Hors-Pistes: La primavera del amor—the first edition of the annual Hors-Pistes La Havane (Havana Off-track) festival in collaboration with the Hors-Pistes Programme of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France), and several Cuban partners.2 The curatorial vision of La primavera del amor rests on desires: the desires of artists, curators, and non-Cuban artistic producers to discover and share with Cubans through artistic creation on the Island; and the desires of Cuban artists, curators, and artistic producers to develop a network in Cuba and abroad to gather the financial and human resources necessary for them to consider artistic creation from new perspectives in their own country, and to expand their opportunities outside of Cuba. Thus, La primavera provides artists with the opportunity to develop projects in situ, and in direct cooperation with Cubans. The platform also allows a participating artist who does research or produces work to contribute simultaneously to an intercultural dialogue.

Specialists in Cuban contemporary art, whether in Cuba or not, agree that an obsession with selling dominates the art made on the Island, and thus influences its form according to the need to enter the space of a gallery or a private collection. Artists need to support themselves and often create in extremely difficult economic circumstances. Cuban art in Cuba is also marked by a political context that makes direct and/or indirect use of censorship, especially in the limits set for interventions in public space. These situations, as well as communication difficulties, reduce

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SECTION 2

Havana 2015 Biennial

BETWEEN THE IDEA AND THE EXPERIENCE 1 JORGE FERNÁNDEZ TORRES

When one biennial comes to a close and work begins on conceptualizing the next, imperceptible traces remain of what, for some reason or another, was never implemented. In this twelfth version of the Havana Biennial, the curatorial team took on an enormous challenge in regard to defining the central concepts of their work. The event also coincided with the 30th anniversary of the Havana Biennial. Together with the anthological exhibitions that we organized to celebrate this milestone, an international theoretical symposium was held with an eminent list of participants.

And this expert audience did not disappoint, presenting the perfect opportunity for reviewing our achievements to date and for rethinking the future.

In a departure from the biennials of recent years, this time our specialists were able to visit some of the geographic zones they had investigated, although the process still calls for a more systematic engagement and longer timeframe for exploring Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Added to these analyses is the pressing need to position ourselves in relation to what use to be known as the “Third World,” which today has become a controversial term. Nevertheless, the dialogue is still pending among regions of the South, for even though these regions embody all of the de-centrings generated in a local and global world, it must at the same time be acknowledged that the vast majority of creations existing on the planet circulate exclusively within their countries of origin.

Although in recent years we have increased the presence of European and North American artists, the great bulk of our guests still come from Latin America. We have not stopped incorporating creators from strategic locations in the above-mentioned regions, which constitute the main objective of our explorations. The Havana Biennial is reaffirmed as a space that gives voice to those who have no voice, and attempts to support the kinds of work that are not commonly showcased at fairs or in the market, notwithstanding its complexity and the confusion of events occurring around it.

Personally, I support the plurality and validity of all forms of artwork, but I also believe that a project like ours should attempt to take our struggle a step further, even if only as an exercise that will forge new paths into the future that may include a return to formulas that are more common, yet renewed at the same time. The debate about how this Biennial would operate was intense and very polemical. We departed from the investigative method chosen for the 11th Biennial, which consisted of a review of the current cultural scene of each country the curators visited.

Instead, for the twelfth version, we established an observatory to examine what had happened in the world’s leading biennials since mid-2012. We looked at Dakar, dOCUMENTA, Mercosur, São Paulo, Istanbul, Venice, Gwangju, Sharjah, and many others. The exercise prompted us to question ourselves and to rethink everything we were doing from a critical standpoint.

Raúl Morilla, Parque Trillo (2015). Dominican Republic.

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EXPANDED ARCHITECTURE NELSON HERRERA YSLA

The idea of the active role of the citizens in the design of their habitat as alternative to the historical century-old hegemony of architects and urban designers has become stronger in recent years. The topmost moments of this imposition in terms of qualifying human spaces were experienced in early twentieth century, when the most outstanding architects of the world met in Greece to set the bases of the Modern Movement. They left no options: designers were bound to decide, from their efficient working tables, the form and dimensions of what concerned us as “users” of spaces. Doors and windows, terraces, balconies and walls, rooms and offices, including the green areas surrounding our homes, schools, hospitals, industries, restaurants and sports stadiums. Everything in small and large scale, of whatever size and typology, emerged from those modest and excellent architectural studios (where almost all young graduates longed to work) and from the first urban planning agencies without participation of the citizens—humble or powerful—in such important decisions. The most fortunate were some plastic arts creators in the already advanced first half of the 20th century, when they were called “to join” work teams in charge of big projects destined mainly to teaching and urban districts, and whose works were set up on walls, roofs, porches, adjacent areas, or interiors.

Firm in their condition of sacrosanct rulers of the habitat, the architects gained ever more space until the late twentieth century, when they even acquired the status of “stars,” comparable to actors and actresses of the cinematographic industry, and originating a sort of world jet set (which today may be found in popular or specialized publications) crowned every so often with the granting of huge international prizes and sums of money. More has been said about those names validated by advertising (and the indisputable value of his works, of course) than about the real conditions of our houses and cities, streets and squares.

Such a situation, however, has begun to subvert itself thanks to a movement—still modest and silent—that has been operating in the opposite sense destined to favor ever more with each passing day the inclusion of other “actors” in the design or redesign of our environment. The fact of listening to the opinion of all of us who inhabit houses, apartments, industries, offices; who enjoy avenues, places of recreation and rest; hotels, malls, and also that of other experts and professionals who act in fields apparently distant from the world of planes, models and new design software is now growing in awareness. Thus, architecture seems willing to attain a better place in the complex world of contemporary culture and greater acceptance among the men and women who inhabit it at all times of their lives. And to participate fully of the re-articulation of all the 76

HAVANA HERRERA YSLA

Tirzo Martha and David Bade, Habana All In (2015). Traveling project. Curazao.

VĂ­ctor Ekpuk, Drawing Memories (2015). Nigeria.

ENTRE, DENTRO, FUERA/BETWEEN, INSIDE, OUTSIDE DANNYS MONTES DE OCA MOREDA AND ROYCE W. SMITH

The fundamental idea of this exhibition Entre, Dentro, Fuera/Between, Inside, Outside emerged in June 2013 at the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Centre in Havana after a series of fruitful meetings and postponed encounters. We collectively wished to exchange ideas about our professional perspectives in the contemporary art world, as well as discuss our future projects: for Dannys, the theoretical forum for the 30th anniversary of the Havana Biennial (May 2014) and the biennial’s twelfth iteration (May-June 2015); for Royce, the inauguration of the 1st Asunción Biennial in Paraguay (October 2015). These goals united us in a common purpose which we feel was—and remains—an unresolved need to address and critique the rules and luxuries of the art world, represented in and engaged by art events, especially biennials, so that they may be more effective, active, participatory, and transformative agents. During our conversations, the heavy Havana rain forced us inside, made us acutely aware of an intemperate “outside,” and likewise prompted an awareness of the complexities of our “betweenness.” We discovered that creating new worlds is a permanent component of both the history of the Havana Biennial and the emerging promise of the Asunción Biennial, each of which responds to the urgencies and imperatives associated with its own unique series of contexts: for Havana, through a focus this year on process and transdisciplinarity within curation and a search for the ways that ideas perennially blossom into everyday experiences, regardless of their relationship to the art world establishment of museums, galleries, and mega-exhibitions; for Asuncion, by defining new perspectives on the Americas and “Americanism” outside the now-familiar framework of “American exceptionalism,” and examining areas of cultural contemporaneity that do not exalt the traditional canon, but rather establish lasting dialogues between often-overlooked local and global practices.

Given the current state of Cuban/United States relations, we were drawn to the concept of “affects” and (Latin) American inclusions that speak to our respective cultural differences and similarities. We believe that speaking of these “affects” in a biennial informed by the transdisciplinary could lead to new contemplations of place, territory, and meaning—documenting an emerging cartography of exchanges and flows that are conscious of the specifics of culture. We wish to explore new localities and regionalisms in the wake of the insistence upon a more expansive globalization and, by doing so, to engage in a recuperation of histories and common thinking, and challenge the dichotomies of the “ontological outside” and the “ethnographic inside.”1 Since the 1960s, the concept of “affects” has informed theories relating to gender, cultural studies, receptivity, and postcoloniality. The term has provided a frequently referenced tool for analyzing art that moves beyond the confines of normalizing institutions and instead relies upon an Pedro Lasch, Islas de Tragedia y Fantasía: Las Bienales de Arte y Otros Desastres Globales (Islands of Tragedy and Fantasy: Art Biennials and Other Global Disasters) (2015). USA/Mexico.

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Susana Delahante Matienzo, El tanque (The Tank) (2015). Performance. Cuba.

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HAVANA AUTHOR

Guillermo RamĂ­rez Malberti, Ceda el paso (Yield) (2015). Cuba.

DOSSIER 3

124 HAVANA AUTHOR Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autodestrucci贸n (Self-destruction) (2015). Mexico.

MOUNTAINS WITH A BROKEN EDGE: A DOSSIER GRETEL MEDINA DELGADO AND DIRELIA LAZO

Montañas con una esquina rota (Mountains with a Broken Edge), curated by Wilfredo Prieto, Direlia Lazo and Gretel Medina Delgado, sets out to exist as an accidental exhibition taking place in the semi-ruins of the premises of the Claudio Argüelles bicycle factory. It was a project of interventions through objects and gestures that reconfigure, reinterpret, and converse with the space’s physical, and symbolic features. Through this project, the factory, with all of its peculiarities and irregularities, became the epicentre of creative energy flowing to and from it in order to embrace the dynamics of the city. All the works intimately conversed with the space's conditions —with its precarious beauty. Further, many projects engaged with traveling through the city and beyond by various means of transportation. The largely ruinous state of the factory allowed for the recycling of various elements that were part of the original structure, and which now took on new connotations through the artists’ installations. The space demanded explorations of the aesthetics of chance, the poetics of both what is given and what is absent.

The project was also lived as a creative process from its inception. The curators and artists re-explored the concept of intervention and site specificity, beginning with the discussion of what we thought was necessary to remain untouched. The exhibition was not about converting the space; it was about sustaining a dialogue with it. The pieces adapted to this condition so that they camouflaged in a network. The walk through the space was then an experience of discovery, even of being lost. In that sense, the artists and their poetics tried to dialogue with the particular context of Havana in 2015—a difficult, contradictory, and transforming city where the dream of a space frozen in history blends with a promise of interconnection and development. That is why some projects also took to the streets and inhabited the urban space in an anonymous and silent manner (Michel François and Abraham Cruzvillegas), while others relocated small pieces of History (Pierre Huyghe), or invited people to a dual experience of analysis and knowledge (Helen Mirra).

Mountains outlined a map, a landscape, just by placing specific dots that had to be connected. It was an exercise of thought and construction based on minimal motives launched by the Biennial’s symbolic premise. We hope to have been able to locate ourselves somehow “between idea and experience” (see Fernández Torres for elaboration on the 2015 Biennial’s driving concept).

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SHIMABUKU Cuban Samba, 2015 Holy Place, 2015 Shimabuku re-created an audiovisual landscape in the exhibition space by presenting two different art projects. Using the water that accumulates in the factory, produced by leaks or by rain run-off, the artist brought to life the sound piece Cuban Samba. Likewise, he relocated seashells, stones, and recycled cans into the space to present a sort of oasis among the carcass of this deteriorated building in Holy Place. Shimabuku’s art works were gestures marked by the contingency of the context and the space’s circumstances, its mutating immateriality and appearance.

ROMAN SIGNER Bicycle, 2014 On opposite ends of one of the factory’s interior spaces were two halves of a bicycle. The installation resulted from a previous action. Suspended in the air with great tension, the two parts of the bicycle were in an instant flung to the opposing walls once cuts in half where they stuck.

ARIEL SCHLESINGER Open Piece, 2015 A person keeps a small fire alight. A routine task, whose challenge lies precisely in its commitment and simplicity.

PIERRE HUYGHE Mountains with a Broken Edge, 2015 [Enlarged image to the right] Huyghe’s project relocated a fragment of one of the replicas of the Sierra Maestra from Expocuba to the original Sierra Maestra at the east part of the Island. The expedition and relocation of stones, plant samples, and some insects that inhabited the replica’s ecosystem took place in early May. It was a gesture that activated readings of the confrontation between replica and original, and the return to, and materiality of, the symbolic. In a generous gesture, Huyghe decided to name his multi-located performance Mountains with a Broken Edge, after the exhibition’s title.

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HAVANA MEDINA DELGADO + LAZO

Daniel Buren, Casa Blanca (2015). Intervention at the Casablanca train station. France.

BIENNIAL IN CASABLANCA JOSÉ MANUEL NOCEDA FERNÁNDEZ

The Havana Biennial began in 1984 as an unusual event directed towards the visual productions and geopolitical regions generally ignored by the international art circuits. That great foundational challenge allowed it to consolidate its principles and gain space within the increasingly resonant concert of Biennials and Triennials in the world. Since then, numerous roads have been tested to maintain the innovative spirit of the Biennial.

One of the projects of the recently concluded twelfth edition of the Havana Biennial had the town of Casablanca as its main site. This location, which constitutes a sort of loose or missing link within the complex territorial and administrative fabric of the city, is extremely attractive.

Located on the other side of the city, across Havana Bay, it can be accessed by land and also by sea via a short boat ride that takes no longer than five minutes, but which stands out as the traditional communication route between the old part of the city and both Casablanca and Regla, the municipality to which the neighbourhood belongs. Casablanca is known as “The Balcony of Havana” or “The Havana Trinity.”1 Casablanca’s “out-of-the-way,” or as some prefer to say, “overbay” location, its beautiful features, and its four-centuries association with a sea-based economy and port industries all contributed to the feasibility of selecting this particular place to develop an art exhibition. Its symbols, memories, and active traditions cemented in the popular imagination, plus the sufficient solvency of the socio-cultural substrate of the town, were also key elements taken into account when selecting the location. Within this edition of the Biennial, oriented towards transdisciplinary and intermedial processes that imply both research and pedagogical collaborations, it was important to emphasize the possibility of feeling the city and its people through art. It was also important to involve popular and professional communities with their micro-politics and microsocial spaces.

The idea of working in Casablanca gave continuity to an incipient journey that started during the 2nd Havana Biennial, and was nurtured and reinforced in later editions by a greater emphasis on the arts of social integration, and on relational or collaborative experiences.

Casablanca hosted projects by 22 artists from 15 countries. These were related by a number of factors. One element worth highlighting is a will to build bridges between the two shores of Havana Bay, exemplified in Peine de agua (Water Comb) by Elizabeth Cerviño (from Cuba) and Adrift, a piece by Afghan artist Aman Mojadidi that involves an accumulation of suitcases.

This latter project alludes to the jail system maintained by the government of the United States at their military base in Guantanamo Bay at the easternmost end of the island of Cuba. Both art-

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La Curtiduría, Gráfica móvil (Mobile Graphics) (2015). Mexico.

CĂŠsar Cornejo, Puno MoCA Presents: Museum of Contemporary Art in Havana (2015). Peru.

ECLIPSE Yornel Martinez

FE DE ERRATAS Julio c. Ll贸pez

ASUNTO DE POETICAS Rito Ram贸n Aroche

SOLO SOL Yornel Martinez

COMO TODO LO QUE QUIERA Mario Espinosa

CLAROSCURO Mario Espinosa

RESULTADO INFANTIL/ FIN DEL DIBUJO DEL NINO INSISTOR Ismael Gonz谩lez Casta帽er

BOOKMARKS: Visual poetics YORNEL MARTÍNEZ ELÍAS

This selection of visual poetry for bookmarks is a project in collaboration with some Cuban poets and visual artists. The project was presented as part of Intervención en la librería (Intervention in a Bookstore), a curatorial show of artists’ books that I curated during the 12th Havana Biennial. The intervention aimed to turn the Bookstore into a working platform for artists. The main intention of the exhibition was to stimulate the circulation of texts that respected contextual formats and logics to provide the reader with an insight into the book as a whole beyond its function as a literary object. Thus, the work also functioned as a space for social participation, and benefited from the regular visitors to the bookstore, to confront the reader with the limits of the literary text. The readers who entered the bookstore had the possibility to choose the bookmark they wanted when buying a book from the shelves. Participants in the bookmarke project were: Ezequiel Suárez, Rito Ramón Aroche, Francis Sánchez, Julio C. Llópiz, Jorge and Larry, Tamara Venereo, Ismael González Castañer, Mario Espinosa, and Yornel Martínez Elías.

To select the visual poetry for these bookmarks it was necessary to investigate and choose which poems could work for the format. The text layout and overall design was important, as because in many of the poems the image takes on a double meaning: what is read and what is seen. The visual poems contained oin the bookmarks play with typographic resources that alter the written discourse. Then, more than mainly temporal, the text becomes spatial. With this project, I was interested in diversifying the distribution of poetry as well as in socializing the poetic text by using the bookmark as mediator and taking advantage of its function.

Translated from Spanish by Zaira Zarza.

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Poster image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.

SECTION 3

Havana: 1959–1968

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Emilio Castro, Havana: The Metropolis It Was

Small projection room on the bottom floor of the Expo ‘67 Cuban Pavilion. Short films by Santiago Álvarez, Pastor Vega and other filmmakers were shown here continuously. At the same time, the screen seen in the background projected spots outside. The photographic murals that covered all of the pavilion’s interior can also be seen. Photo by Mario García Joya (Mayito) 75

HAVANA, IRREVERSIBLE SUSAN LORD

It’s December 2015 in Havana. The Havana Festival of New Latin American Cinema is on and atypically anglofied: US producers and stars in the lobby speaking only English, English subtitles on all Spanish-language films. The lingua franca of the “creative economy” has arrived. The first film I see is Épica, a short fiction by Eduardo del Llano, starring Luis Alberto García as Nicanor, a character del Llano invented through a series of episodes shown not on Cuban TV but on Youtube. In Épica he appears as a time traveller, returning to the epic 1960s Cuba looking like Che. Nicanor arrives in a bar and buys a Hatuey (very local beer) for a man drinking tea and sporting heavy black-rimmed glasses. As we discover, it is none other than (spoiler alert) Virgilio Piñera. Piñera was one of Cuba’s most important writers who lived in exile in Argentina before the Revolution, returned in 1959, engaged issues of marginality and difference, and suffered from the Revolution’s persecution of difference: “While others left the island, he remained, abandoned by literati and cultural institutions alike. At the end of his life, he became marginalized to a degree that he could never have imagined.”1 Piñeras’ identity is not revealed to Nicanor or to the audience until near the end of the film. Through the 25-minute running time, we are treated to a probing comedy about the dangers of 1960s nostalgia, about those whose lives were destroyed by a few “Words to the Intellectuals” and a lot of bureaucracy, and about the bold desires that motivated the belief in the Revolution—for poets, students, gays, workers, peasants, women, Blacks, and the poor. From the point of view of a world in which he does not want to live, Nicanor narrates post-1959 Cuban history, projecting himself back to what he believes were the halcyon days. But the moment when Piñera reveals his identity, Nicanor’s view is transformed; he tells Piñera the outcome of Castro’s palabras and the poets’ anguish leads to pleas to be taken by Nicanor far into the future. Nicanor’s critical view of 2015, including the extinction of species and the magnitude of human suffering wrought by the globalization of capitalism, is punctuated with just the right touch of comedy: a view provided to Piñera through Nicanor’s smart phone of what 23rd Street has become (we assume the images of WIFI-connected people congregating at hotspots). The film’s playful tone, its easy humour, and its tidy drama make it hard to imagine the risks this film reveals. The film is a sober lens on the blindness of fantasia roja, as Iván de la Nuez has called certain investments in that moment.

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PABELLÓN CUBA: 4D – 4Dimensions, 4Decades LISA SCHMIDT-COLINET, ALEX SCHMOEGER, FLORIAN ZEYFANG

The book PABELLÓN CUBA: 4D – 4Dimensions, 4Decades* was conceived and edited by Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alexander Schmoeger, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, and Florian Zeyfang. The publication succeeded an exhibition project by the collective Rain, consisting of the fours editors, Susi Jirkuff, and Siggi Hofer, developed for the 8th Havana Biennial in 2003. 4D – 4Dimensions, 4Decades included a special architectural event conceived for the Pabellón Cuba. The architecture opened the space for the 40 international artists Rain invited together with the Biennial’s organization to Havana, asking them for answers to the question, what remained 44 years after the revolution’s original impetus. Concerts, programs with films from the last decades, and video programs that originated in the countries of the invited artists, were part of an extensive 2-week long program. The publication, published some years after, was based on a conference held during 4D – 4Dimensions, 4Decades, and extended the idea of the exhibition by texts and artists’ contributions around La Rampa, the architecture of the pavilion, and the important conferences and exhibitions that took place there in the 1960s and 1970s. The book sheds a light on the architecture and culture originating in Cuba around those years, such as the Art Schools, the housing politics, and Cuba’s designs for the Expo ’67 in Montreal, and contains texts about the history of the Havana Biennial and Cuban art of the last decades.

Reprinted here are images from Rain’s installation at the 8th Havana Biennial in 2003, pages from the book representing the Pabellón Cuba on La Rampa Havana during the 1968 Exposición del Tercer Mundo, and pages from the archives about Expo ’67 in Montreal.

* Lisa Schmidt-Colinet, Alex Schmoeger, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, Florian Zeyfang (Eds.) PABELLÓN CUBA: 4D – 4Dimensions, 4Decades Paperback: 448 pages (March 2008) Berlin: b-books; english/spanish; 34,00 € ISBN 978-3-933557-72-8

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HAVANA SCHMIDT-COLINET, SCHMOEGER + ZEYFANG

Rain Collective's installation in Pabell贸n Cuba at the 8th Havana Biennial, 2003.

WHEN WE WERE MODERN VÍCTOR FOWLER CALZADA

Years later, we review in books the erudite formulation, argued with a heavy load of references, ideas, and positionings that at the time were nothing more than a weak indication or quick intuition. Attempting to attribute a precise origin leads to an infinite regression, as each supposed starting point leads to an even earlier influence. Still, there are occasions on which the enormity of history weighs down on the fabric of cultural communication with such force that it causes a rupture, after which the entire system needs to be reconstructed.

For Cuba, a small Third World country and single-commodity producer and exporter dependent on the banks, imports, and export markets of the United States, and a country with a relatively recent colonial, slave-trading past (and all that implies for the ideological fabric into which its customs and traditions are woven), a country that endures the constant tension (expressed in different ways) between its Hispanic roots and US omnipresence—for such a country— the Revolution is that kind of rupture—unique, ultimate, and total.

And thus, with surprising speed, after 1 January 1959 an enduring developmental moment opened in Cuba’s history (that moment is the Revolution itself) that laid the foundation for solving, in one fell swoop, the many conflicts outlined in the paragraph above. In other words, by rethinking the issue of neo-colonial dependence in all spheres (economic, political, cultural, and military), and thereby proposing a break with the last vestiges of the old colonial circuit, the Cuban socialist Revolution established itself as the locus of true modernity in the country.

A world like the one I have just described, albeit in rough outline, calls out at the same time for a declarative, collective document (of a party, a generation, or simply a group) that formulates and sets down a position. The act of radically breaking with the past not only produces a long list of details clarifying what has been decided, but also invites participation by presenting a catalogue of projects, attitudes, and dreams that embody the new. In this way, while the journey to the past becomes a kind of voyage into the depths of the disease (where the particulars are laid out like a list of symptoms afflicting the putrid cadaver), the future is understood as the very image of hygiene, loving dialogue, plenitude, and healthy development.

Few spaces in the literary field are as suited to, or as comfortable with, the kind of dynamic I am taking about than literary journals. In the paragraphs below I will analyze the editorials of several Cuban publications of this kind that appeared throughout the 1960s—publications that can rightly be said to be “of” the Revolution, or at least to belong to the same place and time.

Jesús Forjans, 1967. OSPAAAL. Poster image courtesy Lincoln Cushing / Docs Populi.

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Mural from the 24th Salon de Mayo, made collectively in Havana, 1968. From the catalogue published by the MusĂŠe d'art moderne de la ville de Paris.

PRACTICES AND COUNTERPRACTICES: Toward a reconstruction of the imaginary of 1960s Cuba DANNYS MONTES DE OCA MOREDA

The 1960s in Cuba has emerged as the golden ages of the Revolution, providing the cultural lens through which the management of the political has developed since. Social transformation in favour of the dispossessed, marginalized, and excluded, as well as cultural promotion, were not only important signs of the time, but also represented an emerging alternate modernity in the emancipatory debate.

The Consejo Nacional de Cultura (National Cultural Council) (CNC), created by the new political leadership, generated and deliberated new points of reference for internationalization, albeit ones fostered by the cosmopolitan spirit of an originally hybrid culture made up of an insularity not yet entrenched, and a costly dream of universality upheld in the decades preceding the revolution by the artistic and intellectual vanguards. The legacy of those vanguards, and of European and North American modernisms, was transformed, their function as mandatory aesthetic referents and their permeability were nuanced by many other contextual experiences derived from a new Cuban position in the international dialogue. I am referring to Cuba’s connections with national liberation movements in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, with the cultures of the Third World, and with the Non-Aligned Movement, relations with the international Left, as well as to its alliances with the Socialist Bloc as the presumably ascendant model.

This turn is consistent with a cosmopolitanism of decolonization that, in analyzing its Cuban implications, reveals a polemical, yet at the same time, blinding situation. The purpose of this text is none other than to outline a series of developmental lines, transversal narratives, and modes of enunciation pertaining to the model of Cuban culture that emerged in the 1960s around such notions as “cosmopolitics,” “cosmopolitanism,” and “decolonization.”

Cosmopolitanism, so David Harvey tells us, is the perspective from which we define universalizing projects capable of reviving cosmopolitan ideas and forms of government, or regimes and ways of life, with an international scope based on universal rights of emancipation. For Harvey, cosmopolitanism emerges from roots in human experience, in practice, and not from ideals or ideologies that somehow prop up or precede these roots. That experience promises and brings us closer to the desire—projected in actions—of achieving a sought-after liberation. Understood thusly, the practice of cosmopolitanism leads to the cosmopolitan in its generally accepted sense, but also links to a (decolonizing) practice that counters the effects of colonial domination in the societies and contexts involved. Consequently, inherent to cosmopolitanism is the dynamic or

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HAVANA AUTHOR

RADICAL POETICS OF THE SIXTIES IN CUBA: The case of Ediciones El Puente and its revolutionary existentialism MARÍA ISABEL ALFONSO

Introduction After his visit to Cuba in 1960, just a year after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Jean-Paul Sartre commented in his Hurricane Over Sugar: “This city, so easy in 1949 when I visited it for the first time, has left me disoriented. I was at the point of understanding nothing.”1 At the time, Sarte was trying to make sense of a situation that struck him—even visually—as incoherent. It was a unique time in Havana as the bourgeois ethic imported from the United States faced off against the new revolutionary spirit and irreverent fervour of the bearded revolutionaries and their fresh adherents, recently arrived from Cuba’s eastern mountains, who had managed to put an end to the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. This article deals with Ediciones El Puente (The Bridge Publications) (1960-1965) in the context of Havana’s cultural dynamics during this first post-revolutionary decade, and is motivated by the same healthy sense of disorientation Sarte manifested in Hurricane Over Sugar. Only with the contradictory spirit of those years as a premise is it possible to attempt a coherent explanation of events in the cultural and literary spheres that led to the premature disappearance of Ediciones El Puente.

El Puente’s catalogue constitutes a forgotten chapter in Cuban literary history. The publishing house, headed by José Mario and Ana María Simo, brought together poets such as Nancy Morejón, Reinaldo García Ramos, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Gerardo Fulleda, and Miguel Barnet, among others. El Puente published a total of 37 literary texts: 25 books of poetry, 8 short stories, and 4 dramas. The publishing house abruptly shut down in 1965, and several of the books it had in print were confiscated, which explains in part why this chapter in Cuba’s literary history remains obscure.

Many of the texts El Puente published were subjected to criticism with critics claiming they failed to comply with the new political climate. Attackers pointed to a recurring intimist aesthetic, arguing that it was not in keeping with the epic character of the times. Curiously, some of the authors El Puente published made clear in the prologues to their books that a non-sloganeering and anti-propagandistic stance by no means implied a lack of commitment to the Revolution.

Other objections, however, focused on the perceived poor quality of the texts. Furthermore, although critics have discussed the fact that many writers were Afro-Cuban, no critic directly mentioned the numerous gay authors published by El Puente—that José Mario was sent to the UMAP2 after the publishing house closed down in 1965 shows the discomfiture with the sexual preferences and racial politics of these iconoclasts.

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WHEN THE DOVES OF LEIPZIG FLEW TO HAVANA IN THE HANDS OF SANTIAGO ÁLVAREZ JENNIFER RUTH HOSEK AND PEDRO R. NOA ROMERO

Cyclone and the First Golden Dove In 1964, Santiago Álvarez, the man who was to become the most important documentary filmmaker of revolutionary Cuba and its government won his first Golden Dove—so named for Pablo Picasso’s famous, and famously political, peace dove engraved into the silver and golden medallions of the Festival from 1962—at the Internationale Leipziger Dokumentar—und Kurzfilmwoche (International Documentary and Short Film Festival) in Leipzig, Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR—East Germany). Just two years later, Álvarez’s Cyclón (Cyclone) (1963), about the landfall of hurricane Flora in eastern Cuba that same year, heralded the start of the artistic avant-garde in documentary of the new Cuba due to its montage, camerawork, and narrative ruptures, all of which—in the language of film journalism at the time—made this documentary cinematic. In particular, the film eliminated the voiceover, entrusting the full weight of storytelling to the editing, the image, and the sound instead.

The contemporary Cuban film critic Jorge Luis Sánchez argues that Cyclone was created on the editing table.1 While such an assessment may be common to documentary, in the case of Cyclone, the massive collaborative human effort involved attests to popular enthusiasm for the newly decolonized Cuba. The work of selecting and rejecting material that fell to Álvarez and editor Mario González, assisted by Graciela Monnar and Standard Torrado, was titanic for a film that began as a weekly newscast. These circumstances make the final results even more admirable.

The quality of the raw footage delivered to the newscast team was exceptional and made choosing particularly difficult. All the forces of the young country—including all of the audio-visual media resources available—had been mobilized in an attempt to remedy the catastrophe of Hurricane Flora. The credits list 15 camera operators and six assistants from the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry—ICAIC), seven operators from the national television news (EICTV), and one from the film section of the armed forces (FAR). The immense amount of footage shot and delivered contained in abundance the excellent images and well-conceived sequences that made Cyclone possible. What today is considered one of the best documentaries in all of Cuban and Latin American cinema would never have been more than a newsreel without this wealth of footage from which to select, because images cannot be created on the Moviola, and much of the drama

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HAVANA HOSEK + NOA ROMERO

Y...and half a year later, there was a lot of concrete (2015) LISA SCHMIDT-COLINET, ALEX SCHMOEGER, FLORIAN ZEYFANG

Within the exhibition conceived for Lumiar Cité Y...and half a year later, there was a lot of concrete, Schmidt-Colinet, Schmoeger and Zeyfang’s interpretations of a pre-fabricated concrete element appear as representations of two different yet equally important states of architectural, cultural and political development in a society that tries to invent itself from zero.

The exhibition at Lumiar Cité sheds a light on both the initial, euphoric momentum right after the revolution, when everything seemed possible, and the later shift towards more pragmatic solutions, when manpower and technological resources had to serve these goals under precarious economic condition.

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HAVANA SCHMIDT-COLINET, SCHMOEGER + ZEYFANG

Reviews

EXHIBITION REVIEW DINA GEORGIS

AKRAM ZAATARI, ALL IS WELL Curated by Vicki Moufawad Paul, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, 23 November 2013 – 30 March 2014

All is Well collects works from Lebanese-born Akram Zaatari’s nearly 20-year career. Highlighted here is the theme of letter writing, a relational, bodily, and queer activity. Uninterested in the generalizable, Zaatari’s exhibition is defined by the queerly singular and an insistence on keeping the memory of the past simultaneously alive and ambiguous. In his oeuvre, much of what is represented is the discrepant, the discarded, and the quotidian remains of the Lebanese civil war.

Neither melancholic nor sentimental, what he

Akram Zaatari, All is Well (2013-2014), installation view with Letter to Samir (2009), DVD, 32:00 (left), and Tomorrow Everything Will be Alright (2010), DVD, 11:48 (right).

Photo: Paul Litherland, courtesy of the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston.

unearths are buried histories to make visible the past’s mark upon the present. In All is Well, four of Zaatari’s videos are screened and a selection of photographs and letters line two exhibition walls.

In the four videos presented, letters of several varieties are featured, in each case exchanged illicitly or dangerously. The erotic and explicitly queer Tomorrow Everything Will be Alright (2010) sets the tone for the exhibition. The film is simple: a conversation between former male lovers reconnecting and instant chatting on old-fashioned

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happening. This approach partially draws on the aesthetics of some of the earliest war photography, which displays the scene of ruins after the bombs have fallen and the bodies have been removed. The twenty-first century resurgence of late photography creates a number of tensions between aesthetics and ethics as it usually refrains from any direct depiction of human suffering. Without the human element in the frame, late photography avoids accusations that have been made against the work of documentary photographers that might objectify or aestheticize the body of the vulnerable Other. At the same time, late photography often aestheticizes landscapes of destruction or dereliction, turning uncomfortable tragedies into sublime artworks.

Although there is little discussion accounting for the possible reasons that late photography has become so popular in recent years, a number of the authors develop ideas in relation to the image and its communication of lingering and spectral traces, uncanny fragments that leave what is past and future to the imagination, generating a dissensus for the viewer in the present.

Ultimately, Kennedy and Patrick’s collection succeeds in engaging with some of the most recent developments in international conflict and visual culture. The Violence of the Image is essential reading for students and scholars interested in emerging shifts in technology and media platforms and how these shifts continue to influence the complex relationships between photographer, the human or non-human subject in the image, and the audience’s individual and collective reception of a given photograph.

Chris Vanderwees is Professor at the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences, George Brown College, Toronto.

NOTES 1 Liam Kennedy and Caitlin Patrick, ed., The Violence of the Image: Photography and International Conflict (New York: I.B. Taurus, 2014), 3.

2 David Campany, “Safety in Numbness: Some Remarks on Problems of ‘Late Photography,’” in Where is the Photograph, ed. David Green (Brighton: Photoforum, 2003), 124-125.

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PUBLIC 52

REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEW CHRISTINA GRAY

RETRACING THE EXPANDED FIELD: ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN ART AND ARCHITECTURE Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, Eds. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014, 272 pages

Where does the line between the work of artists and architects lie? How precise can this distinction be? How has this line shifted over the last 30 years? And, when trying to establish clear boundaries in such a seemingly ambiguous terrain, is the most effective capturing method conversational?

The recent compilation Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters Between Art and Architecture, edited by Spyros Papapetros and Julian Rose, examines these uncertainties while raising methodological questions on the value of conversation, transcribed discussions and anecdote as the ideal form for addressing so indefinite a topic.

Conceived as an homage to the roughly 30year anniversary of Rosalind Krauss’ 1979 publication of her seminal article “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” this volume seeks to revisit the original accomplishments of the text as well as question its persistent relevance in a contemporary context. Developing from the medium-specific influences of her mentor Clement Greenberg, Krauss wrote the text as a response to what she

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