By Mike Fuller
Jun 9, Havana (Prensa Latina) Havana visual artists and scholars leveled their gaze at social communication this month in a juried show and debate on understanding contemporary Cuba through mass-media.
"All that is solid vanishes into air," quoted Havana University Communications professor Rainer Rubira from the Communist Manifesto at the 17th City Salon of the Provincial Center for Visual Arts and Design.
The panel member said that today's "unions of disunions are uncertain, adventurous and potentially destructive," but the collection of nine finalists managed to creatively represent a coherent critique of the local and international media elite.
The Center director Ana Gonzalez told Prensa Latina they promote the "youngest, most emerging artists, the most polysemic," and this exhibit was the result of 108 submissions by capital creators, with considerable cash awards from the gallery and several local institutions.
Multiple meanings abounded in the selections, and grand prize winner Yaniezki Bernal submitted a video of separately photographed Jose Marti busts, each digitally blending into the next in a continual chain of readings.
Marti is considered a national hero of the struggle for Cuban independence and was also a journalist who said ideas were stronger than stones in a battle.
Rubira explained much of the curriculum planning at the University is framed in a context of ideological battle, and in the same debate Lazaro Rodriguez said culture is an important source of power for citizens.
Coordinator of the Juan Marinello cultural policy think tank, he said the media must form a part of culture, and bemoaned the "absence of inclusive, organic and coherent guidelines to empower active citizens here."
Last month the Cuban legislature unveiled a civic education plan to "reaffirm citizen consciousness, form values and raise general knowledge of society." The leading Commission members are Assembly delegates and professionals who work in the fields of science, education and culture.
Rodriguez spoke about media and socialization, the vacuity of imperialism, audience formation and reception studies in a profound review of contemporary cultural logic in Cuba.
Artist Lisandra Ramirez had a digital animation in the show called Paulito and Manolo, with colorful plastic figures in scenes of daily existence including a trip in the car, stop at the house, eating dinner and evening television with brutal news scenes and ads for household appliances.
Panel member and local television journalist Meysis Carmenati commented on symbolic violence in the media, and spoke of "art that disturbs western hegemonic culture and alternative discourses to globalized media."
She urged for a greater institutional role in opening spaces for debate and praised this exhibit of "art that the media does not promote."
Artist Jesus Hernandez agreed from the audience on that note, complaining about media silence, which was the underlying theme behind his multiple prize winning piece Reports from Real Life.
Disguised as a mainstream Cuban news spot with the same music and format, Hernandez submitted what appeared to be serious reports of a successful transportation initiative, captured violent criminal and control of a reappeared disease, which were never covered by the top channels. Hernandez is a student at Havana's Higher Arts Institute, and a professor from that institution spoke on the panel.
Abdel Hernandez traced the paths of contemporary media in social spaces and its complex mediation of ontologies between multiple audiences. He spoke of television as the "harmonization of heterogeneity," and fragmentation of the internet, where "the decoders become the new producers."
The ordering of separate pieces of information was key to the installation by Marcel Marquez, who in History Will Absorb Us pasted on a black panel hundreds of cutouts from the Today in History newspaper column.
The painstaking labor of that piece was equaled by the efforts of the gallery, and co-curator Hector Frometa told Prensa Latina their work was consensual, thus complicated.
We spoke after the theoretical event, which he said tied together two exhausting years of conception, jury calls, controversial selection processes and technological struggle to provide a glimpse of "an emerging art that bears the seeds of a new vocabulary."
"Maybe next time we'll do landscapes," he said with a smile.
* Mike Fuller studied visual arts for seven years in US universities and has worked twice as long in Cuban media.
Jun 9, Havana (Prensa Latina) Havana visual artists and scholars leveled their gaze at social communication this month in a juried show and debate on understanding contemporary Cuba through mass-media.
"All that is solid vanishes into air," quoted Havana University Communications professor Rainer Rubira from the Communist Manifesto at the 17th City Salon of the Provincial Center for Visual Arts and Design.
The panel member said that today's "unions of disunions are uncertain, adventurous and potentially destructive," but the collection of nine finalists managed to creatively represent a coherent critique of the local and international media elite.
The Center director Ana Gonzalez told Prensa Latina they promote the "youngest, most emerging artists, the most polysemic," and this exhibit was the result of 108 submissions by capital creators, with considerable cash awards from the gallery and several local institutions.
Multiple meanings abounded in the selections, and grand prize winner Yaniezki Bernal submitted a video of separately photographed Jose Marti busts, each digitally blending into the next in a continual chain of readings.
Marti is considered a national hero of the struggle for Cuban independence and was also a journalist who said ideas were stronger than stones in a battle.
Rubira explained much of the curriculum planning at the University is framed in a context of ideological battle, and in the same debate Lazaro Rodriguez said culture is an important source of power for citizens.
Coordinator of the Juan Marinello cultural policy think tank, he said the media must form a part of culture, and bemoaned the "absence of inclusive, organic and coherent guidelines to empower active citizens here."
Last month the Cuban legislature unveiled a civic education plan to "reaffirm citizen consciousness, form values and raise general knowledge of society." The leading Commission members are Assembly delegates and professionals who work in the fields of science, education and culture.
Rodriguez spoke about media and socialization, the vacuity of imperialism, audience formation and reception studies in a profound review of contemporary cultural logic in Cuba.
Artist Lisandra Ramirez had a digital animation in the show called Paulito and Manolo, with colorful plastic figures in scenes of daily existence including a trip in the car, stop at the house, eating dinner and evening television with brutal news scenes and ads for household appliances.
Panel member and local television journalist Meysis Carmenati commented on symbolic violence in the media, and spoke of "art that disturbs western hegemonic culture and alternative discourses to globalized media."
She urged for a greater institutional role in opening spaces for debate and praised this exhibit of "art that the media does not promote."
Artist Jesus Hernandez agreed from the audience on that note, complaining about media silence, which was the underlying theme behind his multiple prize winning piece Reports from Real Life.
Disguised as a mainstream Cuban news spot with the same music and format, Hernandez submitted what appeared to be serious reports of a successful transportation initiative, captured violent criminal and control of a reappeared disease, which were never covered by the top channels. Hernandez is a student at Havana's Higher Arts Institute, and a professor from that institution spoke on the panel.
Abdel Hernandez traced the paths of contemporary media in social spaces and its complex mediation of ontologies between multiple audiences. He spoke of television as the "harmonization of heterogeneity," and fragmentation of the internet, where "the decoders become the new producers."
The ordering of separate pieces of information was key to the installation by Marcel Marquez, who in History Will Absorb Us pasted on a black panel hundreds of cutouts from the Today in History newspaper column.
The painstaking labor of that piece was equaled by the efforts of the gallery, and co-curator Hector Frometa told Prensa Latina their work was consensual, thus complicated.
We spoke after the theoretical event, which he said tied together two exhausting years of conception, jury calls, controversial selection processes and technological struggle to provide a glimpse of "an emerging art that bears the seeds of a new vocabulary."
"Maybe next time we'll do landscapes," he said with a smile.
* Mike Fuller studied visual arts for seven years in US universities and has worked twice as long in Cuban media.
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