“The sea will give every man new hope, as sleep gives him dreams.”

Christopher Columbus

Between romantic alleys, baroque churches, and the elegance of swans, the Löwen galerie is located right in the heart of the Swiss city of Lucerne and its director Andi Schnelli has created the Cubart festival that will also take place in Zurich, Poidoux and Flawil . The festival includes the screening of films, dance and music presentations, as well as the holding of four group exhibitions of Cuban art. The exhibitions involve both the interpretation of the island of Cuba and its circumstance from testimonies of different visual artists, to the challenge that includes island art crossing the Atlantic and taking a space in the land of Pilatos Mountain.

In each of the cities there will be an exhibition and they have been structured into four thematic cores or chapters: I Skipping Switzerland, which covers a compilation of personal visions about the contingent that range from the figurative style to the abstract; II Within other skins, a testimony woven from the use of the animal as the main guide to share visions not only of nature and Cuban fauna, but of human relationships themselves; III The blue hour, a commentary on the context from the postulates of the landscape and finally Island in transit, a visual mosaic on the need for translation that becomes more imminent every day.

Chapter I: Skipping the Swiss

The opening exhibition – as in every symphony – seeks to offer an introduction, a visual map of the main circumstances that shape and define social identity: the persistence of the sea, the demarcation of a territory, the characters who bear witness to a present where not always A safe harbor is seen and a land where on many occasions the individual has had to overcome the unfinished dream of a social project. From this point of view, the exhibition presents a regression, from childhood dreams, the relationship between the sea and always having one’s feet on the land, daily practices such as the moment in which the family sits down at the table and faces a cactus or force portraits using dripping to confess an emotional state. The sea that explodes in black and is no longer so blue, challenges us from microscopic formats about a fickle reality where we are all sailors and it is necessary to defend the naivety of those years rocking on a swing because now it is imperative that each step be a pump. total adrenaline, a strong pulse to continue the journey.

Chapter II Inside other skins

The need to adopt a changing, chameleon-like nature, which is open to resilience, in order to survive and accept changes is the common thread in this chapter. Hence, works that take animals as metaphors for situations and attitudes in which humans are normally involved are privileged. The power to face adversity and overcome it, to get back up, self-improvement or simply the human bonds that are created between creatures. Both between animals and between people, rituals and ceremonies are practiced and made necessary until sometimes everything seems pure theater, an exchange of roles that continually overlaps as part of the making of a social structure as complex as the chain pyramid itself. food.

Chapter III The blue hour

For the inhabitants of Europe, especially, the blue hour is a very popular phenomenon. It is when everything is bathed in light with sparkling indigo tones, at the moment the entire city seems immersed in a cinematic, alienating and overwhelming calm. Poidoux, even outside of this moment, has the strength to transmit that vital energy, by placing itself in the middle of a landscape that effortlessly enraptures as it is marked by its location on the outskirts. For this reason, the chosen works focus on organic materials, on the narrative possibilities of the landscape, on the retinal seduction that a genre like that continues to maintain within Cuba. It is also a way of appealing to the Cuban sky that has motivated so many songs and poems, and of ratifying that Switzerland is a new place of destiny, as it is popularly said when a door or opportunity is conquered: “your time has come.” So under that entertainment, but without losing for a minute the seriousness with which the genre is worked by its cultivators, a space is given within this visual journey to the landscape (both in its pictorial form and expanded from the installation) as a carrier of identity. and a historical moment.

Chapter IV Island in transit

A rebirth, a regeneration, a movement. This entire section talks about it, the transition from the island to the continent. Pieces that talk about the immovable, the same almendrones or engines of old cars on the island and the need for progress, expansion of its margins and its art beyond its borders as futurism proposed at the time. The urgency of new paths, a rewriting of these by other Adames and Eves, the embrace of risk that is not that it has not existed before, but that at this moment constitutes an indispensable action.

Let this be the first edition of many others, and the fusion of both geographies a great allegro or a good son, a square like that of the lion or that of poetry that contains all art. A breath of life and communion, a harmony between our childhood and adult life, fulfillment and commitment. Consequently, a spiritual union that lasts under the good energy that dreams contain.

Estela Ferrer