IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 3 ENGLISH | Page 94

spaces. This was born out of the criticism that
contemporary artists were voicing about traditions like classical painting and museography.
Performances and other public interventions had
never been used in Cuba in so intense or constant
a way to achieve personal growth and social communication. The group of sculptors proposed the
rescue of public and civic spaces for free expression and socio-cultural dialog shaped by poetic
actions in which performances would be the link
between realty and the nation’s socio-cultural and
religious imagination.
3. Art, the artist’s action, his or her tools, and artistic spaces crafted like tools for the creation of
traditions and to facilitate new ways of thinking
for society and the nation. We have proposed to
ourselves to ideate for Cubans a peaceful nation
filled with spiritual prosperity from the point of
art. To think, to ideate art collectively, meant that
other issues in our society could be thought of in
the same manner, collectively. This is what the
OMNI group has done through collectivities it
created in other institutions that also use performance as a form of social intervention. To think
collectively meant think as a group, and ‘group’
means unity. The idea of using the arts as tools for
social communication in displaced and marginal
communities was novel for Cuban art.
4. An ethical attitude as a form of performance
within Cuban art. The many ways in which the
power elite and market try to buy or silence the
most rebellious and contestatory artistic voices is
very well known. Self-taught artists have bequeathed to the most immediate Cuban art a tried

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and true moral attitude, one that has resisted
threats and censorship for the 16 years the group
has existed.
5. The group’s aesthetic proposes new, formal solutions for how artists should behave within society. Performances, international festivals like the
Poesía Sin Fin Festival Mundial [Poetry Without
End World Festival], which was intervened by
paramilitary forces in December 2010; plus
groups that do public interventions, or rescue or
create traditions, collective and individual exhibits, places for the development of the visual arts,
like Viernes de Performances; much awaited
events like the Pilgrimage Performances to the
San Lázaro niche, every December 17th, which
has taken place for the last 15 years: the publication of multimedia discs containing important Cuban poets and narrators through alternative
spaces, etc.
This is Cuban alternative art’s response to the social pulsations of a nation anxious for change. It
is the social response to a group of cultural institutions that serve only the political in ѕɕ