Moved by the biennial seminar of the Grupo de Estudio sobre Arte Público en Latinoamerica – GEAP LA, held in November 2023, the artists of the ppll group designed this artistic research, which had the city of Havana, Cuba, as its point of interest and final destination. The city and its surroundings, people and architecture are true lessons in exuberance, Latinity and resilience, which frictionally challenge the Western world of our time. Created during the group’s work meetings last year in Brazil, the project involved raising data, imagination, doubts and anxieties about the possibility of (re) familiarising ourselves with the vicissitudes of that territory and proposing daily actions in the landscape. The final experience in Havana confirmed the distance between the layers of research and praxis. The processual element that has permeated contemporary artistic production shows that the terms and time between these two layers of artistic making are fundamental elements for artists interested in and driven by travelling and urbanity.
Worlds of illusion and reality
sublimation printed fabric on panel
Our way of being
artist’s books, photographs, objects and models for urban intervention
From 15th March
to 17th May 2024
Painel expositivo e Projeto Estante de Livros e Cadernos de Artista
DAP – IA Unicamp
Rua Elis Regina, 50 Cidade Universitária – Zeferino Vaz, Campinas – São Paulo, Brasil
La Habana is full of contradictions, antagonisms, completeness and complexity. When reality couldn’t be more overwhelming, the city reveals vast stretches of nature, a significant part of the seductive experience that makes up the Cuban landscape. Bondia (2002) speculates on the meanings of the term experience and draws our attention to its rarity in a world that lives intensely on information overload. The rare quality of experience in this world, therefore, lies_ according to Bondia and what we were able to perceive on this trip_ in the junction of our everyday lives, in everything that happens to us, and which, absorbed, calls us to attention, to the elaboration of feelings that relate to the way(s) in which experience is established. It was this encompassing of the senses that we were able to experience during this artistic residency in Cuba.
Colours, words, bodies and landscapes directed our propositions from the urban point (1. research) to the nature point (2. experience). This axis defined and revised the work that continued after the visit, back to everyday life at home, generating the final format presented here in both the Bookshelf and Artist’s Notebooks and the Exhibition Panel. It was important to occupy both spaces simultaneously, echoing the shuffling of meanings that accompanied us in this process. The different times of experiencing this landscape led us to the photographic element that makes up the works. These pieces, which include books, objects, photographic diptychs and urban intervention proposals, bring together a broad spectrum of imagined Other-Selves alongside cultural constructions that designate colours as places and artistically make it possible to imagine leaves and stems as ornaments, water tank structures as monuments. The (fake!) pearls are perhaps the best sign for this lived experience: they form lines that induce the drawing of the surfaces of bodies and thus propose their superimposition on their surroundings. Like points of light that demarcate findings on the ground, in some cases, these pearl lines or pearl points mimic the bodies and make the duo of back a single person in a parallel.
