IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 5 ENGLISH | Page 142

This immeasurable damage to the human condition, subjected, as it was, to
physical, psychological and cultural
violence, prevented the detection of
negative forces, of their traits, which
compelled ‘Others’ to display manifestations of rebellion and show a lack of
acceptance of their subordinated condition (resistance): loafing, sabotage and
even suicide.

ra on American soils, the one event in
human history with the most unknown
outcomes, to which the highest level of
debt is owed, with the most unhe aled
wounds, and the most complicit silences
on the part of those who produce the
rhetoric.
Belkis Ayón’s graphic work stood out
at that Biennale. She used black and
white art, worldview and esoteric rituals
belonging exclusively to a male brotherhood to transgress: the Ñáñigos or
Abakuas who came to Cuba with the
slaves originally from Calabar. Their
metaphors and analogies are constructed through the representation of dualities: black and white, calm and chaos,
lights and darkness. Using her own iconography, Belkis syncretized her gaze
on women, the omitted, silent women
who are forced to be quiet (they lack
mouths) and communicate amongst
themselves and the world through their
bodies, a symbolic identity. Her work
contradicts the myth because women
populate her pieces yet, these are dark
spaces filled with a desire to find each
other and the impossibility of revelation.

The collective imagery was filled with
ideas about the irrationality and rudeness of black slaves, their morality, the
lust of black and mestiza women, and
even their sadistic sexual practices. This
resulted in the different forms of racism
and prejudices that endure today.

Magdalena Campos Pons. Patria una
trampa [The Homeland is a Trap].
Video performance

Lázaro Saavedra’s iconographic imaginary situates him as a messenger of the
changes created in the realm of popular
culture, behavioral codes, lifestyles,
modes of thinking and, above all, where
the urban and popular are played out. It
reveals the powerful ideological currents at the core its context: sometimes
hurtful and worrisome. Humor supports
popular culture, messages, states of
opinion, the ingenuity and art with
which everyday Cubans express themselves: objectively, plainly, directly,
curiously, transparently, as a comple-

Magdalena Campos Pons’s work moves
along conceptual coordinates that permit an analysis that once completed is
quite far from being an anti-racist pamphlet. Much of her visual art deals with
the issue of race: it is a visceral rhetoric
that is defined by global poetics, and
does so from a female perspective that
alludes to and evokes terms like ‘trade,’
‘traffic,’ ‘trap’ and ‘transculturation.’
Her work is a graphic-visual text about
all the sufferings of the African Diaspo-

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