Tania Bruguera, one of the greatest representatives of contemporary Cuban art, known for her opposition to her country’s regime, answers EL PAÍS through an encrypted messaging system from Harvard, Massachusetts, where she has lived since the end of August after arriving in an agreement with the Díaz-Canel government that, in exchange for their exile, allowed the release from prison of some of the political prisoners imprisoned after the protests of July 11. This way of communicating, even if he is outside his country and when the topic of conversation is good news, since he has just received the Velázquez Prize for Plastic Arts, awarded each year by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, endowed with 100,000 euros and considered the equivalent to Cervantes in literature, it gives an idea of the persecution to which he is still subjected thousands of kilometers from the island.
For this reason, his first words are for the artists and for the rest of the Cubans who are still in jails awaiting trial. “This award comes in the context in which independent Cuban artists are saying no to participation, no collaboration, no promotion of the 2021 Havana Biennial, because our brother artists are imprisoned, because the Cuban people He is in prison ”, writes Bruguera (Havana, 53 years old) in reference to a campaign that a group of artists has started to try to boycott one of the most important cultural events in the country.
In its statement about the artist after announcing the awarding of the award, the Ministry of Culture has highlighted precisely “her defense of freedom of expression through her performances or their protests ”, which“ has led her to direct confrontations with the established power on different occasions ”. In this case, the Castro regime and its ironclad and restrictive idea of culture encapsulated in Fidel Castro’s phrase: “Within the revolution, everything, against the revolution, nothing.” In that space out of nowhere, Bruguera has built her artistic heritage.
Bruguera has destroyed the barriers between art and politics since in 1993 he created a newspaper with artists’ texts for an exhibition. He calls this way of conceiving his work artivism. Is a artivist Since he was 12 years old, when after a season in Panama because of his father’s work, he learned about the reality of an island that was not the Cuba that he had been told, imagined and idealized. One of the first consequences of that reality bath was that newspaper that led to his first interrogation. It was her father, founder of the Cuban Communist Party, who led her to testify. More would come later. Until she was detained on several occasions, the last time under house arrest for almost nine months (during which time the Government cut her internet connection to keep her incommunicado). In late August he agreed to go into exile in exchange for his release and now works at Harvard, Massachusetts.
“All the Cuban people have a friend, a son, a husband, a well-known person who is imprisoned for having left on July 11, for having said that he thought differently,” the artist continues her story. “The Cuban government has been filling its mouth during all these months in a supposed democratic move to say that they do understand that people can think differently. Yes, but when a person thinks differently, and manifests it, then he is penalized ”.
The artist was trained in Havana, studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited in the cathedrals of contemporary culture, from the MoMA from New York to Tate modern From london. Its main tool has been the performance, with a clearly political narrative line. “This award speaks a lot about the fact that the world has awakened and is beginning to see Cuba for what it is: a dictatorship,” he emphatically ditch.
Bruguera does not forget either her predecessors in the award and that strictly artistic aspect that this award means to her. “This award also allows me to be next to artists whom I admire, whom I love, some are my friends like Antoni Muntadas, Doris Salcedo, and people I admire a lot like Cecilia Vicuña”, he confesses. “Also the fact of having a personal exhibition at the Reina Sofía is a great satisfaction because for many years that had been a dream,” he anticipates about an exhibition that will be held in the Madrid art gallery soon as stipulated by the award. “And a desire to be in that museum where I have been so much and from where I have learned many times what contemporary art is.”
#Cuban #exile #artist #Tania #Bruguera #receives #Velázquez #Prize #defense #freedom