Chewing gum without saliva

2021

Paintings

Text by: Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara

My childhood was spent during the crisis of greatest scarcity that Cuba has experienced: the Special Period.

As a child, you would change a steak for a chocolate, but there was no meat either. Then they began to import sweets with colorful wrappers and shapes, but it wasn't for all children either, most of us would only collect in a book (which you didn't even know how to read) as treasures, the wrappers of those sweets that others ate.

The mine of our precious treasures? Luck and looking down the street that most of the time gave you the greatest and colorful 'package of chocolate', which you kept together with the ghostly smell of that chocolate whose only bite you experienced was forgetting the phrase "must not eat what taken from the floor ". One very lucky day your tongue was surprised by a crumb somewhere on the edge of the package.

When your nose was no longer filled with this package, a child would make you a tempting offer to exchange your treasure for another plastic wrapper, which would bring you a new scent of gum or an unknown candy.

This unbalanced traffic and exchange happened because the greedy child hadn't eaten from your package either and he wanted to show off a new smell of chocolate in the classroom as well.

These paintings are an exercise in protest from the anthropological objects of scarcity perspective. It is also responsibility of the ruling system that children have sweets, fantasies and dreams different from emigrate.

* This series was destroyed by State Security (SS) after raiding the artist's house due to the Garrote Vil performance protesting against the censorship of the exhibition. The SS entered his house, destroyed some pieces and kidnapped others while arresting him. Later he was released but his works were not returned to him, so he began a peaceful protest asking for the return, an act that ended up with his arrest and the later involuntary transfer to the Calixto García hospital.