The Tenth Havana Biennial

LOCAL, NATIONAL OR GLOBAL ART? CHALLENGES AND POSTURES OF THE COMMUNITY BEFORE THE WORLD (I)

By Yudelsy Fundora Martínez

Interview with artists Raúl Estrada and Alexander Beatón, from Guantánamo, who will participate with their works in the Tenth Havana Biennial. Beatón will present the installation “La raza permanente” (sculpture in wood and steel, digital photo on paper and video projection). Estrada, in turn, will bring the ensemble “Familia olímpica” (nine sculptures woven with guaniquiqui and wood).



The existing verticality between the north and the south at global level is expressed in horizontal form in Cuba . The artists of the capital, or closer to it, enjoy greater privileges than those of more distant zones. If the feedback is difficult within the Island itself, the dialogue with the foreign production should be even more difficult.

How does this phenomenon influence your production?

Alexander Beatón: The attitude of preventive acknowledgment of our distant and “isolated” reality had a decisive influence on my works that, without abandoning the experimental halo of the initial times, emphasized in a more conscious and committed manner the purpose of influencing upon the national and international artistic scene from inside. The discourse started to become less and less self-referential and I became interested in more universal group problems and experiences that were common to my reality, now seen far from provincial dichotomies and national resentments.

Raúl Estrada: To me, living far from the capital is emblematic. I feed back my work based on the cultural process of Guantánamo, and do not expect the foreign production to determine in my work. I investigate some traditional techniques on weaving with vegetal fiber and find support in these studies, in anthropology and sociology, in texts that exist in the country, but the information I receive from the context I live in continues to be important in my work.

The concepts of local art and global art are being handled presently. Many insist in creating a dichotomy between both categories. You were born in Guantánamo, you live and create in your native province, which, in addition, is part of the geography of an underdeveloped country of the South. How do you classify your art?

Alexander Beatón: My production, in general, is located within the term “local art”. It is the result of a group of processes of social, economic and technological assimilation of my territory, without any legitimizing contact from abroad up to the present or media force that imagines and domesticates it. In this regard and to be a little more local or localized, I think that it is an endemic art with bullet wounds and local seams, a crossbreed production that, though distant from the centers, is a mobile target in the silent viewer of global interactions.

Raúl Estrada: To be “from the provinces” has enabled me to observe the Cuban fine arts from outside without being included. I still have not solved the problem of local and national, but if living in Guantánamo implies making local art, my challenge is to live far from the capital, the hierarchical center that determines who is inside and who outside.

What are the responsibilities of this so called local art and what challenges does it face ?

Alexander Beatón: Among the challenges is that of approaching more one another, whether or not cultural actors, to understand and participate more actively and efficiently in the complex and dynamic contemporary experience; to reuse the assets and benefits offered by the new technologies, establishing networks of local communication among multi-disciplinary groups to allow us to find more specific solutions to social, cultural, political and economic problems; to work in the creation and distribution of alternative works of art and thought, driving the individual initiative to the institutions with the purpose of making official, making viable and budgeting those that prove their efficiency; to discover and develop new tools to allow us to interact with new contexts, new fields of exploration that have been traditionally distant or parallel to our role (entertainment shows of mass impact, mobile radio, interactive journalism, budgeted units, etcetera); to identify and evaluate new methodologies of communal, territorial, national and international work that prioritize the registration and experimentation of the renewals of the social, religious and cultural imagery of the locality.

Raúl Estrada: Globalization has nothing to do with me up to now; centralization does have. I am an unknown artist that to some extent utilizes the mechanisms of promotion and selection that exist in the country; that is why I do not have prejudices that determine my local work. My region is a reservoir of cultural expressions where the national has nourished to become universal: an artist like Ángel Íñigo has granted a universal seal to this place. This dichotomy of the global and the local does not tarnish the essence of my work, which emerges from something real that has not been invented.

Painting becomes less naïve with each passing day. The creator increasingly thinks of the intention of his piece. Why are your works a part of an event with the motto “Integration and Resistance in the Global Era”?

Alexander Beatón: The work in question pretends to create and share an instant of conscientiousness for the definition of a permanent race that searches the causes that define it in the dynamism of its interpretation. We are speaking of a race whose aspect and appearance are determined not only by its blurred ethnical or geographical references, but also by a complex and difficult evolution chain of economic, political and social genes; a race whose profile is being daily modeled by the different levels of labor, educational and cultural qualification, a necessary capacity to decode, understand, integrate and participate of a contemporariness ever more homogeneous and contradictorily more excluding.

The conceptual premise on which this work is based consists in the creation of a geological and multi-cultural landscape where there is an attempt to reconstruct, through the dialogue –electronic processors (forms of speaking, dialects and local phrases) – of the digitalized images (characteristic portraits of different groups of persons, customs and ways of facing life) and testimonies –video projection (personal and group stories) – a possible sediment of our identity.

The intentions are clear: the validation of a discourse of resistance in which the human and technological material is readjusted to new needs of representation. The biological set of instruments is programmed to preserve within its semantic germination those genes of authenticity it will later need in order not to get lost in the midst of its inevitable integration. From another point of view, the action will end in a co-creation cycle that originated with the new promotional design of the Provincial Council of Fine Arts of Guantánamo, an institution that conceived the idea of creating a multi-disciplinary group with the purpose of doing away with the national and international silence on our cultural production on the basis of a peculiar logistic construction of the territory. The group was formed by the president of said institution, two specialists in that field, one from the Council and the other from the Provincial Art Center ; an audiovisual filmmaker, five artists and one art critic and curator with international experience. The complex system of materializing the project was executed by the provincial delegation of the Ministry of Culture and other governmental institutions in the province. More than a symbolic cultural action unique in the territory, the project was a creative exercise of experiences for future strategies of consolidation of the local value.

Raúl Estrada: The strategy of my project is to make tradition remain in a desired way within the contemporary. It may be regarded as a challenge to the symbolical processes disseminated by the new technologies. The technique and the materials I use represent the intense work, speak of a more tolerable past, point out the slow progress experienced by our society; the fabric binds, produces the union. This is its pertinence to be included in the curatorial strategy of the Tenth Biennial.