One of them is more real and the other more
illusory, but it is hard to say which one is which.
from abroad or who work in the tourism industry and earn
hard currency (including perhaps jineteras) from those who
do not, a division that, in practice, means that Cubans have
different degrees of freedom and even citizenship.
In the works of both Villares and Delgado, photography
provides a setting. The drama occurs in the intervention.
In both cases, the image would not work by letting photography do what it always does: capture the reality present in
front of the lens. There is no lens wide enough to capture
what is absent. In both cases, the comment on Cuba is only
in part a comment on the medium itself. The failure of
photography to capture desire and anxiety cannot be attributed solely to the exhaustion of the medium, but rather
to the fact that reality is full of holes. The intervention does
not operate in terms of the added element questioning the
photograph, but rather in the way they together explore a
fantasy.
Liudmila + Nelson
One of the first things tourists note about Havana is
the lack of advertising. With the exception of a few billboards sporting revolutionary slogans and photographs of
a very young Fidel Castro, the city is completely deprived
of publicity. In their series Hotel Habana Series (p. 38) the
duo of artists Liudmila + Nelson (est. 1993), composed of
Liudmila Velasco (b. 1969, Russia) and Nelson Ramírez de
Arellano (b. 1969, Germany), play with this aspect of the
city. Their images, however, are about both fantasy and the
passing of time.
This is how Liudmila + Nelson work: First, they find
in the archives an old image of a Havana street scene that
is in the public domain (it probably helps that Nelson is
the director of the Fototeca de Cuba, the National Gallery
of Photography). Then, they locate the same spot in the
city where the photograph was originally taken and take
new photographs, trying to recreate the archival image as
much as possible. After that, the artists digitally superimpose advertising (Coca Cola, Hard Rock Café, MTV, and
the like) that reflects Cubans’ fantasies and fears about the
future. The whole process usually takes months.
The image itself is a complex operation that is dominated by the superposition of two temporal stages onto the
same space. One of them intervenes in the other, recontextualizing the other without erasing it. One of them is more
real and the other more illusory, but it is hard to say which
one is which. In addition, a world of advertisement, currently non-existent, is added digitally, alluding perhaps to a
non-distant future. The word “Revolution,” cast in the logo
of Coca Cola, suggests the commodification of the utopian
project that has already taken place. Likewise, the super19