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by Alison Nordstrom (Author)
In 2019, Cuba celebrated the 60th anniversary of the revolution. In 1959, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevarra ousted dictator Batista and the country entered a utopian future. But Soviet communism and the American embargo forced Cuba to survive because the country remained fundamentally committed to the socialist values of the revolution.
Against this background, an extensive photography project was set up with four Cuban and four European participants. Taking the current reality of the island as a starting point, they each developed a project, which together provide a nuanced picture of the complex country. The eight projects pit the photographic interpretations of the local artists against those of the Europeans. The project starts from 'heritage' in the broadest sense of the word and focuses on the past, present and future of Cuba. Cuba Photography Missions proposes an approach to reality in the country from the personal poetics of our artists and their European counterparts, assuming Cuban contemporaneity as a topic of reflection, among universal aspects that specify the thematic and formal coherence of the exhibition. Participating photographers: Ossain Raggi Gonzalez, Bert Danckaert, Linet Sanchez, Charlotte Lybeer, Liudmila & Nelson, Ulla Deventer, Ricardo Elias and Simon Roberts. Text in English and Spanish.Author Biography
Ossain Raggi González is a photo-based artist and professor living and working in La Habana, Cuba. In addition to his own artistic work, since 1997, has been active as a highly committed professor of photography at the Cuban University of Arts (ISA). He is currently Head of Photography Department and chairman of the admissions jury of the Visual Arts Faculty. Simon Roberts is a visual artist based in Brighton, UK. Widely recognized for his large-format, tableaux photographs of the British landscape, his practice also encompasses video, text and installation work, which together, interrogate notions of identity and belonging, and the complex relationship between history, place and culture. Bert Danckaert studied photography at the Academy for Fine Arts and the National Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp. He is head of the photography department at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Charlotte Lybeer received her PhD in visual arts (Lifestyle Supermarket) at the Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, where she's teaching photography. As a photographer Lybeer combines the curiosity of the journalist researching actual phenomena - symptoms of the global, capitalist crisis - the empathy of the detective infiltrating enclosed worlds, and the sensibility to capture the way fiction transforms reality.
