Exodus: Alternate Documents
Centro Cultural Español CCEMiami presents | An Open and Interactive Community Art Project by Aluna Curatorial Collective
Artist: Willy Castellanos | Guest artists: Coco Fusco and Juan Si González
Through October 31st/2014
About the project:
“Exodus: Alternate Documents” is a reflection on the human displacements phenomenon and their impact on the cultural understanding of the concept of nation. The proposal is based not only on the celebration of an art exhibit, but in the creation of a scenery that displaces the limit of documentary photography and transforms it into an open exercise for the recovery of Miami’s immigrant community collective memory. This projectis an homage –in the 20th anniversary of the crisis- to all those who, in the most diverse latitudes of the world, embark each day in that uncertain path of emigration searching for peace, equality, and well being so necessary for life.
The project takes as a starting point the presentation of first-hand historical material: a collection of 70 photographs taken by Willy Castellanos in Havana during the ‘Exodus of Los Balseros’ of 1994. These photos could be presented as an exhibition Per Se, but the projectintends to develop the thread of history beyond the photography and its conditions of space and time. The main concept points towards the creation of a new type of information –an alternate content to the original document – that function as a roadway to unprecedented directions of the story. Certain installations will be built atop the base of representing which photos could not represent; others, will function as evocative objects establishing different keys for the comprehension of success.
After an extensive investigation among the original negatives, Aluna Curatorial Collective (Adriana Herrera and Willy Castellanos) has localized several subjects of those photographed in 1994. To this date, 6 of them has been interviewed and filmed, while the arrangements are made with the remaining ones. This material will also be exhibited. Additionally, two installations by invited Cuban-American artists Coco Fusco and Juan Si González will be presented.
Coco Fusco, And the sea will talk to you.
Coco Fusco is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist and writer who has performed and curated throughout America and internationally, and currently is full-time faculty in the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. Her work combines electronic media and performance in a variety of formats. Her installation “And the Sea Will Talk to You” invites audience into the physical and emotional experience of journeying from Cuba by sea. Participants relinquish their worldly possessions (handbags, money, phones, watches, etc.) before entering a darkened theater. Traditional seating is replaced by the inner tubes that serve as sea crafts for Cuban rafters. The video combines images of the Caribbean Sea and skies with poetic and testimonial commentary on the sea.
González, Rosa Nautica, 2012.
González is a visual artist that works in a variety of different mediums, from drawing, photography and installation, to video and performance. His installation is composed by a salt screen on which a selection of videos with empty rafts found a drift on those days, would be projected. “Rosa Náutica/Compass Rose” talks about these “rafts that are alternative nautical inventions, created clandestinely and without the possibility of material or technological resources”. González actively participated as a volunteer in the expeditions of “Los Hermanos al Rescate”, filming and photographing the operations of finding the rafters in the Straits of Florida. “This installation is dedicated to the Cuban people, my people, and their dreams of change”, says Juan-Sí González.