Still life. Turning violence into art.

2021

Drawings

When Luis Manuel left the hospital on December 1st, 2020, after a week of hunger and thirst strike, the security camera was already there.

The post that supports it, right in front of his house, has the serial number UB_694.

Faced with this aggressive act that invades not only Luis Manuel's intimacy, but also that of his neighbors and friends, Luis decides to “transform violence into art”. In this way, he begins a series of pencil or pen drawings, where he weaves from different dimensions, the relationships between surveillance, power, the harassed artist and his emancipatory desires.

Titled, "Still Life" the series could be divided into two spaces. The first, when the camera (UB_694) comes to life and establishes a romance with Luis Manuel (they go through all the typical phases of romantic love: they meet, they send seduction messages, they have sex, children, there are moments of pain when Luis is caught, etc). And the second space is when Luis demands the camera, the power behind it, to fulfill his functions. That it guarantees children's candy and leisure, that it be concerned about food, that violence against dissidents cease, that it fights against femicides, that it responds to the demands of Cuban society, etc.

Luis Manuel has been a victim since the beginning of his artivism of all forms of surveillance and harassment. Remember that on August 8th, 2020, the Cuban State Security violated the privacy of his mobile phone and without authorization and published photos and videos of cybersex with his partner. It should be noted that sexual violence is not limited to rape with forced penetration, or hitting a being, it also includes the "dissemination, disclosure, publication, transfer or marketing of images, audiovisual materials or audios with sexual content of any person without their authorization". In addition, the content (stolen and published) has a political purpose, being headed by a retrograde text that incites patriarchi, homophobia and a moralistic vision of sexuality.

Using personal and everyday scenes from Luis's own life and from Cuban reality, this series, made as a diary, works both as a space of resistance, as a document and denunciation of an era. A separate comment deserves the group of images, from the same series, taken when Luis Manuel was detained for 29 days and by force in the Calixto García hospital in Havana, after having carried out a second hunger and thirst strike in April 2021 .The drawings of this moment have the mark of the isolated, the confined. The absence of information about what was happening outside the four walls of the hospital generated in Luis a para-reality where all the dark and confusing imaginary of being watched emerges.