Habitar Cuba

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Inhabiting the world from which young people speak and take risks says a lot about the courage, but above all about the authenticity of an entire underground culture, deeply attached to ordinary people, to their often precarious realities and, at the same time, to the often ephemeral but concrete solutions they build to survive and give meaning to their world. In a totalitarian context like the Cuban one, rap and the entire hip hop culture are almost automatically placed in front of official art and are also almost automatically stigmatized and monitored. 

This exhibition seeks to highlight the public communication gesture of three urban artists, belonging to three different areas of the country and with a career within the world of graffiti. Yasser Castellanos, from Havana, resident of the Alamar neighborhood, has a long history of collaborating with emblematic projects such as Grupo 1 and the Alamar Rap Festival, Omni Zona Franca and, more recently, with the San Isidro movement. His work presses the tendons of the social power of art, but from a deeply humanist perspective that delves into the existential dilemmas of man. Dayán Melián, originally from Camagüey, although now living in Havana, creates indefinite beings, halfway between the anthropomorphic and the animal, birds perhaps, which disconcert passersby and remind them that we inhabit a shifting and strange terrain: the Cuba of the present. Finally, Luis Miguel Pérez, who lives and creates in Santa Clara, with a fundamentally feminine universe, makes you feel as if you were entering a motherland instead of the homeland, and beauty welcomed you in its arms as a consolation and protection from a not so kind world outside. His humble origins and the recent arrests he has suffered, as well as the other two artists, remind us that in Cuba no one is safe from state violence. For the three of them, art has been a cry and a balm in the face of a climate of social suffocation, but above all it has been language, a vocation for dialogue and understanding in a context of growing alienation. 

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