IDENTIDADES 1 ENGLISH IDENTIDADES 6 ENGLISH | Page 130

Q: What were they?
A: There were strategies we had worked
on within OMNI, for example, how to
use publicity—which is essential to
these social struggles—and some
visualization
techniques
involving
performative and poetic experiences. We
used all the elements people used in their
social
environment
to
defend
themselves, promote their rhetoric,
simply subvert their meaning to an
aesthetic projection and denomination.
All this was documented. From a legal
point of view, we documented all the
answers we offered, and the answers the
authorities offered us. In the end, we had
an expository space with documents,
photos of the house, drawings by our
children, and even of how we coexisted
in that space. It would be like the final
phase of a process, but what interests me
is more procedural, where the forces are
intervening.
Q: Does that process of occupying the
house have a title?
A: Yes. “La casa que no existía” [The
House That Did Not Exist]. It starts to
exist when we began to work on it and
we receive a water service contract, an
electric service contract. “La casa que no
existía” is a poem narrated in real time,
by real protagonists defending from
within a same reality.
Q: How long have you been doing this?
A: More or less since 2011. Necessary
Art also creates artistic resources and
techniques that solve specific problems.
Q: What do you mean by that?
A: For example, we offered the Damas
de Blanco (Ladies in White) a self-

representation
and
self-expression
workshop involving psycho physical
exercises and theatrical techniques.
Their scene is quite powerful: they dress
all in white, carry Gladioli, are women,
and are beaten. It is like a Via Crucis, an
image that impacts public space. Yet,
upon looking at this carefully, we
realized that we were before a
performative condition and theatrical
props.
Q: Who see it that way?
A: My wife Iris and I. When we worked
with them, we tried to help them observe
themselves, to achieve greater selfrepresentation, and we began to polish
their image via a number of psycho
physical exercises and theatrical
techniques.
Q: But, do they think of their activism as
performance?
A: No, but Necessary Art can help them
incorporate techniques for their activism.
The poetic is at the core of my
experience. I am a poet, a user of poetry.
I have used the poetic system in a way
that is entirely against the grain of
Lezama Lima’s view of it. He did not
expect any application value to poetry,
but was looking for “a broadening of it
that might stretch the poetic image all
the way to the horizon.” For Lezama
Lima, the protest in 1930, death of Trejo,
and image of Mella tearing down Zayas’
statue in front of the Presidential Palace
marked the beginning of a history of
“infinite possibilities” in the republican
era.

130