Artist: Leandro Feal
Exhibition title: La fiesta vigilada
Venue: CIBRIÁN, San Sebastian, Spain
Date: March 16 – May 20, 2023
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artists and CIBRIÁN, San Sebastian
Leandro Feal has focused on documenting Cuban communities and alternative spaces that experiment and rethink post-communist aesthetics against totalitarianism and its state fictions.
In these political ecologies, music has always played a central role. But this relationship between music and images has rarely been as explicit in Feal’s work as it is today. The rhythm of the work Ciudad celeste, a black and white video installation in which photographs of La Havana are superimposed like an Eiseisteinian montage of attractions, echoes another musical-based installation on display, Fantasía cromática para una noche con el Chori. In this new work, almost spiritual, Feal shows a bottlephone, activated during a performance on the opening day. Fantasía cromática para una noche con el Chori evokes the specter of Silvano Shueg, the “Chori” (1900-1974), timbalero, mythical showman of the Havana clubs and graffiti artist who stars in P.M.
The work La fiesta vigilada, captures through its one hundred small-format photographs, the mystery, the lightness and the grace of faces and bodies that are very familiar to me. They are, for the most part, friends and people close to Feal, almost all Cuban artists and intellectuals whose lives and works can be read as a form of resistance or fugue against the basso continuo of official discourse.
Not far from these photos, hanging on a wall as if in an arsenal, Noticias del paleolítico shows the batons used in Cuba by the Brigadas de Respuesta Rápida (BRR), literally the Rapid Response Brigades, and other parapolice groups, to repress and riddle peaceful demonstrations against the government. It is another form of rhythm, behind which lies arbitrary politics that violate fundamental rights.
Those batons, more than an abstract symbol, when seen up close, look more like curious pre-political fossils, a form of war technology, between ominous and ridiculous, prior to the invention of iron and citizenship. This work represents the tools of primitive communism, those that, according to certain Marxist manuals, effectively correspond to the paleolithic.
-Michel Mendoza Viel
