Qué Bolero o En tiempos de inseguridad nacional
Dance and performance
Colectivo Malasangre
2022
We are three creators born in Cuba in the 90's between the fall of the socialist camp and the arrival of the so-called Special Period. In the midst of the crisis of the great story of the Cuban nation and revolution. Our arrival to the world was marked by deficit, invention and massive migration. Today we are part of the Cuban diaspora. We live in different cities in Europe and in 2020 we decided to found the Malasangre Collective. As creators in displacement, we develop a collaborative project from dance, performance and practices strongly connected to the political and social.
Qué Bolero or En tiempos de inseguridad nacional is a piece that from our bodies investigates the notions of identity, territory and exile.
The Bolero has generally been treated from the admiration and the desire to inscribe itself in the history of its interpretations, or even as a safe weapon to decorate the scene. We understand Ravel's Bolero, as an emblematic piece of Western culture, as a cultural and physical territory in itself. We relate to the Bolero from a decentralized sensibility, not purist, that makes sense in the crossbreeding and hybridization, which allows us to present ourselves from the difference. We create a choreographic device where our emotional and corporal memory emerges, provoking a friction with the piece, with the entire West.
(On tour 2022-2024)
Tropical Island
Installation and performance
Created in 2022
Tropical Island is an installation and performance piece on the theme of productivity. My approach to this topic is shaped by my experiences in Cuba, where a specific economic and political system leads to constant reinvention and reuse. I would like to contrast this with the perception of German society on the subject of productivity. The piece makes a connection between Tropical Island (the factory where my father worked) and Tropical Island, the European idea of tropical countries. A notion that presents Tropical Islands as a place of vacation and recreation, but at the same time part of the same colonial capitalist system that creates and feeds this system of productivity. Here in Berlin, for example, there is a water park called Tropical Island, and it is this kind of notion of "escape to the Caribbean" that continues to objectify and exoticize people and territories. A "space of relaxation" can also be economically and semantically a very violent space.
Mund Auf, created and launched in collaboration with Karina Pino, is the beginning of a research to visibilize the stories of Sex Workers in Berlin.
With the support of AdK, we started collecting information and making it available to other people in days where sex work related themes are being banned from social media.
Through developing ethics of community care and protection, we launched a free-access platform that contains interviews and statements about the actual situation of sex work in Berlin.
Mund Auf has also been displayed as a interactive platform and as an online performance in the attempt to create a decolonial archive where sex workers tell their own story.
Mund Auf
Digital platform
2022 - ongoing
Granma. Trombones from Havana.
Documentary theater
Collaboration with Stefan Kaegi / Rimini Protokoll
2019
"En Europa existe una romantización del proceso de la Revolución Cubana"
Performance
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2019-2021
“Diaries of Fear” is a project about the loss of the political will of a nation. An exploration on Fear as a mechanism of domination and Sexuality and State. The piece investigates the relationship between citizens and repressive military authorities, in the context of three events that occurred during the course of a year in Havana. These events included a plane crash, the revolt of Congolese medical students, and heavy police attendance at a local concert.
Diaries of Fear asks: How does fear evolve within a society? How does pervasive political apathy affect the public discourse ? The work explores the physical manifestation of fear itself. In what physical states does one experience fear? Movement as the first reaction to the feeling of fear. Body movement and social movement. When does the sensation of fear first arise? Diaries of Fear offers a simultaneously disturbing, yet uplifting experience, leaving the audience with the question: has the time come to reject fear?
ACUARIO
Site specific performance and demonstration
2018
Site specific performance at the National Aquarium of Cuba. Third piece of a trilogy on the subjects of emigration and captivity.
The second part of this piece took place in August 30th, 2018, in the shores of Havana, as the launching of a book during a pacific demonstration.
This piece has been built in a parallel sense to a research on dolphin’s training process.
They live in captivity in an analogy between the island Cuba is and a pool. This is a piece about stagnation and permanence. Why does a young Cuban feel like an immigrant living in his own country? What is this trainer's work like with dolphins to make their lives better in this reduced space? How does it affect her/them? How to make a life with the other outside and inside our own habitat? This piece is about putting the lights on how a system works by setting our sights and bodies in this performance. We live in a country surrounded by water and the most common path Cuban people found to emigrate through the years has been across the sea, risking life and future, in search of a non-imposed captivity.
THE BAY, we were thinking how to perform a nuclear action
A project developed in Nuclear City, Cienfuegos, Cuba. Nuclear City was supposed to be home for many engineers and technicians that were to operate the Nuclear Power Plant -the work of the century, has been called before.
The construction of this huge monster stopped at the beginning of the 90’s with the fall of the socialist block, and the idea of what Nuclear City was went through a hard reform. For young generations is well known as a ghost city, a mysterious place. This town that never suffered the effects of a catastrophe such as Pripyat did, fall into the abandonment. Half of the city was not finished and the original inhabitants left in search of new tools to repair their broken dreams.
Nuclear City was, and indeed it still is, a place for migrants of Eastern Cuba to pass by, stay for a while and try to improve their economic situation. At the bottom of the landscape, the facilities and a nuclear reactor hunting presence are the spotlight of the unforgettable. For the new inhabitants, the fact of being unlinked to the reality of Nuclear City in the 80’s meant to live with the sensation of being in a ghost place. And even though it could give that impression, Nuclear City is not so different from every Cuban small town. The Bay was a site specific long term project over two years where Alessandra Santiesteban began to work with the community. I joined her on the de-labeling process, removing tags, finding out what do actually means this place to Cuba today, and specially to help the young people get rid of that ghost spirit. On the premise of debating the (sort of secret) construction of a hazardous waste dumpster in one of the nuclear reactors, we did a movie and a play to show it there.
TEN WAYS TO CALL A DEAD DOG
Theater and performance
2018
A playwright begins an investigation on the mysterious sinking of Remolcador "13 de Marzo" in the bay of Havana in 1994, and faces the risks of carrying out an investigation of this nature in his country. Meanwhile, he registers the relationships he holds with different physically distant people. Based on these records, he creates a map of affections that constitutes the piece.
A balsero (rafter), a lover who left, friends who are far away, testimonies about the hidden history, dialogues that are hold with the audience on stage, the analogy between the sea and the theater, the space we inhabit and how we inhabit it at the moment ... These are elements that make up the piece. This performance is the occupation / installation of living tracks and materials in a theater building. We invite the audience to come and listen, come and tell, come and act in this walk through the building.
The popular Cuban phrase "dead dog" refers to something that stinks and we do not want to see, or something we cannot stop talking about.
A rough examination of emigration in Cuba. How to subvert the history written by the government? What does it mean to make art and activism in Cuba today?
Ten ways to call a dead dog is the second part of a trilogy about emigration, started with the video performance Track 01, and finished with Acuario.
Track 01
Videoart
2017
I recorded the first tones of Cuban national anthem and throw them to the sea, as a message in a bottle. A call for those who lies underwater.
January 2017. USA government derogated Dry feet wet feet policy.
This policy stated that every single Cuban arriving to the USA and touching –literally touching- USA land, had the right to stay and request political asylum.
For many years, this law was a sort of refuge for Cuban rafters.
My father was one of them.
Then I felt a chapter was getting to its end in the book of Cuban emigration, and the paths were changing to what today is La ruta del sur.
Track 01 has been screened worldwide in different cinema and arts festivals such as Miami New Media Festival, San Mauro International Film Festival (Turín, Italia, 2018), FIVA – International Videoart Festival of Buenos Aires, IV Festival of Independent Latin American Cinema MIRA in Germany, exhibition America Late in Madrid and Festival de Cine sobre Medio Ambiente in Barcelona.
A strength pushing me down
Performance for public spaces
2017
An experience to measure in your own body the size of your will. Border measurement / victory measurement / ephemeral measurement / crushing, imposed, absent measurement / self and reckless measurement
In this performance we invite the audience to give a speculative declaration that becomes anthropological study on the social imaginary of certain spots of the city.
It’s designed to achieve a new state of consciousness about space and self-commitment. This is the virtue of performance to generate a new gaze.
Performative program:
1 Occupy a public space.
2 Find a place to stand with a counterweight.
3 Arrange in situ: a) how to lift the counterweights b) for how long c) how to measure that time (for example, in the actions of the others, a timing device or something happening around)
4 Carry out our decisions.
5 Stay there until everybody finishes the process.
6 Assist people who wants to join.
7 Do not respond to violence.