There has been great tension between art and politics for a long time, which I think is related to the fact that there's a kind of battle over who is going to manipulate who. Does the artist manipulate politics or does politics manipulate art? I think this battle often makes politicians prevent artists from being active citizens, with an opinion, with a way of expressing themselves, which could be true or not, it could be appropriate or not, but it is their relationship with society, their social experience as something that perhaps other people can see that it isn't specific to them, rather it's also happened to others.
And create an awareness that something is happening systemically rather than to one person. I'm interested in seeing things that are unresolved, things that are a contradiction in themselves. And that's where I see the capacity of politics.
I think the political work is that which invigorates the viewer and gets them engaged in a situation in which you have to take part or at least say, "I don't know what to do," admit that you don't have the tools to deal with certain circumstances that have been orchestrated by others and not by you. When I discovered performance I thought it was perfect, because it's the language that is used in society, the language of gestures and actions, body movement, how you put culture into your body, how you have put all your ideas of the world into your body and you share them with others. It seemed great to me, everyone will understand what I'm doing.
And performance also enables me to become closer to reality. Artistic processes are often based on how far apart you place reality and what you are doing. I'm interested in closing up that gap as much as I can.
To a point that it is reality and not a work of fiction. I see art as a very specific moment in which certain things are crystallised which bring meaning to something, something moves people. I understand art as a moment, which will later become culture, therefore it continues to be appreciated, it continues to be valued, but it no longer has the same impact as it does when it is art, where you have to have a process of self-discovery with regards to the work.
I have done several projects which kind of create parallel institutions because I was keen on doing an institutional criticism that wasn't merely pointing out what has been done wrong or saying or putting the institution in a position of social or collective embarrassment. To make social changes you have to be persistent over time, because social timings are different from artistic timings. An exhibition might go on for a month, but to make a social change you might need five years.
I'm interested in saying, "Institutions must exist, because they are the basis of democracy, but they must exist in a self-critical manner. " I'm interested in creating parallel institutions to show in some cases how they could function in places where there doesn't seem to be another option, for example in Cuba, creating a department of Art and Culture in Cuba, creating parallel education in a place where education is controlled completely by the State and the government, where you can even be sent to prison. In Cuba there's a dictatorship that not only wants to control people's lives, it also wants to control the meaning of things.
So, being an artist, where artists are always interpreting the meaning of things, there is friction, inevitably. So, what happens is in Cuba we have got to the point. .
. after 64 years of the same kind of government, what they call "continuity", we've passed the moment of hope, that first moment where everything seemed possible, where justice was going to be the guide to all political, social and personal action. We've been through that, which gets anyone's hopes up, and artists just love revolutions, and we have come to a point now, 64 years later, where we are experiencing a state of terror, because people don't even have the option of imagining another option.
And art right now, is playing a very important role in Cuba, because it's a space where people can place their dreams, where people can place their hopes. It's like the only space where reality could be a different reality. Political artists or those who create art which they want to be political, we must be extremely modest, because we will create the artworks we want but in real life, it's the people who make the best political gestures, the best works, the most sincere and most impacting things.
We are experiencing a state of fear of the State. We're in a situation in which the State has grown to fear the citizens. So, it's quite a thing, because when a State is afraid and it can resort to violence, well.
. . I've been in prison and I've been interrogated.
. . more than 200 times.
. . and I've been under house-arrest, I've had my passport taken off me so I couldn't leave Cuba.
They've done so many unbelievable things like withdrawing the police outside and the police by your door so that you think you can go out and when you go out, a car pulls up, four men dressed as civilians grab you and shove you into the car, they take you to a house in the middle of nowhere, you don't know where because they push your head down so you don't know where you're going. I am an artist who sometimes creates words or concepts, not because I think it's the "adequate" concept, but because I'm interested in creating a barrier between the critic and the idea I'm dealing with to eliminate that automatism that we often have, critics have them, and as an artist yourself you have them, towards certain problems and understand that we're often lacking the words to understand processes. So I'm not saying "artivism" is the correct term or that "useful art" is the correct term, but it's my way of starting up a conversation.
And personally I see the creation of these concepts as a performative gesture. We aren't being given the chance to think about what hasn't happened yet, we're being put in a position, not only in Cuba, all around the world, in which you can only imagine the present. Or imagine certain paths that are already set out.
So I think it's a battleground that has to be regained. I strongly believe in education and when you see totalitarian governments who have used education to manipulate people, you understand that it's a mechanism that you must learn in order to unlearn. And it's a mechanism that you must make more democratic and it's a tool that people must have in their hands too.
In the beginning, I came into education as an alternative to the marketplace. There were two options: I either became a commercial artist, I'd always had a terrible fear of that, or I did. .
. Or I gave lessons. Over time, you come to understand that being a teacher isn't giving conclusions, it's simply sharing your doubts with others.
So I think, later as an artist, having been through this whole process and understanding what that process was I was interested in appropriating education or that system as an artistic operation in which I was appropriating a power of the State.
