Charcoal portrait of Schrödinger's cat

2022

Artistic action

Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara has been in prison for more than a year. Said like this, it seems that the word prisoner indicates a place, some restrictions, a series of new laws. And yes, it does as well. But “prisoner” is sometimes only a space of a few meters. Imprisonment, sometimes, is the overwhelming passage of time that outside could go as quickly and even go unnoticed, and now it is like a block around the neck. Prisoner is the precariousness of the experience precisely because it happens in such special conditions that it turns everything it touches into an extreme.

From that precariousness Luis Manuel insists on taking everything very seriously. In the end he just wanted to be free and they are threatening him to destroy his life and affect his mind. He is at war. And at the same time he is at peace. An artist in such conditions becomes more of an artist, which in this case is to become more human, even obsessively savoring every breath of humanity, only to later bring it out as a scandal; because in addition to surviving, a prisoner needs not to be forgotten. What humanizes it inside, exceptionalizes it outside.

In this exceptionality, Luis builds a new piece of “selling time”. Each day in prison has a price (48 USD). Every day in prison is different. Each imprisoned day covers him with a time that he may have to purge throughout his life. As if he were removing layers of life or death, that in the end it is time that already happened.

In 1935 the Austrian Erwin Schrödinger launched into the world what is now known as the Schödinger Cat paradox. Frivolous versions of the experiment focus on what ultimately happened to the cat, whether he was dead or alive when the box was opened. Ad hoc imitations of the eternal obsession of what is the truth, passed through the human gaze. Actually, the most useful thing about the paradox is to recognize that there are two systems that have their own laws and where the same event or process exists and is interpreted differently. In the quantum system (the ideal inside of the box) the cat is dead and alive at the same time. In the classical system (outside the box, the "real" world) the cat can only be dead or alive.

The concept of definition thought of as a single state is not absolute. It comes hand in hand with the transition from the quantum to the classical system and is called decoherence.

Our certainties about what happened to the cat are decoherence. Our certainties about what happens with Luis Manuel imprisoned, are decoherence.

In the end they do not touch.

The difference is that Schrödinger's cat is language while Luis is a body. Or is it not only that anymore?

One thing is clear: the time you buy will be Luis's time, just because he wanted to declare it that way.

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*Work developed from the maximum security prison of Guanajay, Artemisa.