This text was originally a streamed lecture from Rome by Lucrezia Cippitelli, for a Theory and Practice Class in Los Angeles, at Otis College of Art and Design; the lecture took place on May 1, 2006. The text has been edited for online publication, but an effort to present it as notes for a lecture has been made. Some of the art projects mentioned, in particular music videos, are not available at the moment for viewing.
How does the concept of “new media†function when technology is difficult to find?
Is it possible to talk about hacktivism in geographical, political and social spaces where the lack of technology prevents from developing practices and activities that involve exclusively the Internet?
How does a curatorial practice serve the activity of artists who work territorially on public/no-object based projects, away from art objects that are marketable in the economic establishment of the Contemporary Art System?
These questions and their possible answers are the main focus of this text.
I’ll discuss my work and research with Omni Zona Franca (omni Free Zone), a group of artists and activists from East Havana with whom I have worked since 2003. I spent two months with them in 2005 and now I’m just coming back from another month of collective work. In 2005 we worked together on an editorial project about collective artistic practices in public spaces in Cuba from the 90’s up to now; the last trip was focused in the construction of a multimedia laboratory in their studio.
But let me explain from the beginning:
1-ALAMAR
8 miles away from the tourist and crystalized baroque center of La Habana, offers a scenography of exotic and picturesque postcards for white European and North American tourists; the district of La Habana del Este (East Havana) has about 300,000 inhabitants; 100,000 live in Alamar, a territorial department divided in 25 Zones and constructed in 1978 by the Microbrigadas, groups of workers that for a month the government designated to the construction of buildings for the people in the new urban expansion of the city.
Alamar is also part of the – short and not so intense – history of post-revolutionary Cuban urbanism: rationalist north/eastern European and Soviet architecture and huge living structures spreading across an area near the sea that is essentially agricultural.
As the materialization of the Rationalism in the middle of the tropical vegetation,
Alamar buildings are a sort of little Unité de habitations (living units), which Le Corbusier projected since the third decade of the XX Century: big buildings constructed in peripheral areas of the cities to be dormitories of thousands of people. The practical realization of this rational utopia consists – in Alamar as large part of the so called “Developed world†– of a lack of infrastructure and services, a lack of the classical “city†attributes (public places in which people meet and converse) and a lack of communication with the center.
If in the center of Havana there is always light and water (due to the embargo Cuba has a very strong energy crisis), Alamar has water for 2 hours a day, and constantly lacks light daily.
The neighborhood was also historically the space of Cuban alternative and underground cultures starting from the 70’s (now it is the cradle of a Rap Festival that started in 1995), and it’s a district inhabited by Chilean refugees, Russians, inconvenient intellectuals of the Cuban system, as well as European intellectuals.
2- OMNI ZONA FRANCA
In this social and cultural context, The Omni Zona Franca collective was born in 1997. Sons of the latest collective experience, as the El Quijote group of intervention in public spaces, or the collective of “resistant poets†Grupo Uno, both groups are active since the beginning of the ‘80s. Omni Zona Franca is a group and a life experience collective, emerging from the very entrails of the city, from its streets, scents, cries, music, voices, from its generous and anarchical happiness and its daily problems to solve.
OMNI celebrates ten years of making noise, making trouble; they are not known well enough to have entered the official art system, and not known well enough to cause scandal, or surprise; yet -paradoxically – today they function in a parallel reality with other artists who receive awards and are contextualized as artists that “produce†“cute works†for an international art market that loves the “Cuban reality†but are not involved in real political and social problems.
A small parenthesis (example): the internationally well-known artist Kacho is the supreme example of this interior and international cultural politic. He started to become well known in the occidental market from the ‘90s for his “boats†that represent the escape from Cuba of the “balzeros†people that try to navigate the ocean to join the USA coast in Miami. After his international accreditation, Fidel became his best friend, and now Kacho is not only represented but also pushed and aided by the official art world. Now, his work is only the continuation of the “kacho†esthetic, consisting of objects (something like the “Arte Povera†model) void of any political and social investigation: They are only good objecs that the International Art World sells and buys without any problem.
The artists participating at the OMNI group (poets, painters, singers, sculptors, performers, writers, photographers, rappers, cultural activists, filmmakers) are well known in their own the community.
They regularly propose critical interventions on the streets, at the bus stops, at the shops and markets, talking with the people who wait for hours and hours for a bus, who wait in long lines for the bread, angry for the omnipresent smell of the garbage on the streets ant the lack of seats at the bus stop.
The idea of the collective work of the group is “to activate the individual and self-constructed consciousness†of the people.
For that, since the early ’90s the group organized public lectures of poetry at the bus stop, providing people with the seats; organizing activities to expose the lack of a system to dispose of the garbage in the neighborhood. (Don’t forget that the father of the country, José Marti was first of all a poet; in the Island poetry is the normal and immediate way to communicate not only as a rhetorical exercise of good writing)
Due to some activities, many members of the group were jailed, but their social action in their local reality, in the context of the real problems and necessities of the people, could not have been easily explained as “dissident activities against the government†as we are happy to say in the Occident.
The revolutionary history of the Island is part of its own formation (as the Afro-Cuban culture in part as well), but, for them, the continuous process of criticism against some part of the official structure is a possibility to get out from the dictatorship without accepting the capitalist model and without erasing their own contemporary history and culture, that is a shared and accepted.
Now we can see some of the actions organized in the streets during the last ten years: Fantasmas civicos (Civic Phantoms) are the people who do not have any visibility or voice in the society.
The Graffiti are the paintings realized during these years on the public spaces: no permissions, no financial aid, no “artistic†intentions. With the help and collaboration of the community OMNI tries to change the face of some decadent areas of the neighborhood. Also the activities conducted in the project Espacios Publicos, during the last Biennal of La Habana (March-April 2006) where the group participated officially because of my introduction of them to the curatorial collective of the Habana Biennale and the aid of a local curator, Dannys Montes de Oca: only in this circumstance Omni Zona Franca worked in the public areas of Alamar with permission. In these photos the action of painting a square was the occasion for the installation of music and the participation of the people of the area to an afternoon meeting in the square.
In the same context of intervention in public spaces we can mention the participation of the group at the Hip Hop International Festival of LaHabana, a festival born in 1995 that takes place in Alamar, in an former abandoned open theater that Omni restored and painted to recuperate it for the community. At the festival, Omni participated since its first years, organizing performances and poetic events that were also stopped by the police.
The use of the spoken word to communicate with the community is also part of another activity (Maquina): the street slam poetry performed with typewriters by the artist David Escalona, who started to participate in the group activities with this attitude: moving around his neighborhood with his 40 year old typewriter and improvise rhythmic slum poetry for the people on the streets.
With Abuso de confianza (abuse of trust) Omni was invited in Cienfuegos at a festival of performance, October 2001.
“En las ciudades más felices el hombre no deja de morir con tristeza/ ningún sistema nos salva del horror de la ciudad/ sus manos lanzándonos de lo más alto/ a lo más bajo. /HUMANIDAD: a seca por este discurso el hombre es apedreado y amarrado y degradado, hasta encontrar su propia liberación†This is the original presentation of this performative project.
In Modos de Izarse (way to haul): 8° Bienal de La Habana, Noviembre 2003, Alamar. In a tree covered by trash, a man hangs himself as a trash.
With Pan con poeta (bread whit poet) the performer sells sandwiches with the grilled body of a poet. The person who eats will’ have the “gift†of poetry.
And finally, the action Komunikate, that has been developed in different ways: action (the one you could see in the images) “An altar to God TV, the god that drives our mindâ€, Omni says. The action, realized with a similar mystic and Afro Cuban ceremony, the performers give offerings to the TV; the medium that is the “principal obstacle to the self consciousness of mind and the ability to face up with individual and free mind from the realityâ€.
As follow-up, Komunicate became also a series of documentaries realized on the community with very little equipment (for a longtime the group worked with a digital camera that provided very short mpeg videos – 30 seconds). With this medium, they realized the first documentary in Alamar.
At the last Biennal, OMNI presented in a market of Alamar Komunicate. A new version; here, after the usual ritual ceremony for the “TV God,†the group started the projection of a video: his own documentary shot in Alamar with the people of the Neighborhood. The message was clear: don’t be abused by the TV that controls your mind. Let’s make our own TV, Komunikate, use the media to construct your own communication.
3- THE NEW MEDIA BET
This position mentioned in Komunikate was incredibly near the position of the activists of Europe and the United States that from the ‘90s started to work involving the free use of mass media in their works, especially with the idea “Don’t hate the media. Become the mediaâ€.
This attitude was well known by the artists of OMNI, who during one of my first interviews with them, in 2003, told me: “We know that in the world this idea of the network joins thousands of people connected with a cable and a computer. For us it’s the same method of action: we need to construct networks within the peopleâ€.
Without a real internet network working on the island (a basic internet connection costs 6 to 10 dollars an hour, about half the average Cuban salary, in a country were Fernando Perez, the best known and important cinema director still living gains 60 dollars a month). OMNI worked (or networked) with a really similar attitude of a lot of interesting experiences in the Occident.
For them the network is the city, the streets; the relationship between the peoples.
Their first movement towards the use of New Media was the creation of a CD: Alamar Express (see the photo).
The project, edited and in Havana last October, is the first collective realization of a multimedia project. Sound and text gather the visual and sonorous seven years history of the civic action group. It moves into the Cuban culture as a virus, changing the critical thought in action of the artist, inside a social community.
Alamar Express is the collection, the aural representation of the Omni activity. Which during the years the project brought structural changes, built social spaces and realized events that prove that the arts can still ameliorate human life. Omni started using words and bodies as economical instruments that are hardly controlled by censorial practices.
Made up of more than 35 tracks, the CD “Alamar Express†gathers urban poetry, district noises, rap, analogical remixed sounds (for example the typewriter of David Escalona and his rhythmical base for his poetical readings). From the angle of the quality it’s an incredible project, most of all the “self-produced tapes†that we can find, if you think that people who created the product have at their disposal nothing more than a PC and a digital camera. “Alamar Express†is the story of a trip in the district. You can see the images in the two videos (integrally filmed, edited and post produced by the group) realized as tracks sound/visual/poetic of the CD, as well as in the video-installations that the collective realized in the spaces of the district, including illegal night screening of images taken in the urban space.
The use of digital media and their forcing are definitely hacker practices that bring communication and interactivity. The creative use of digital media, in the Island available only from the black market if you’re Cuban and have no official reason to buy it) make the work of OMNI an action of critical, conscious and highly ethic hacktivism, which brings together all the media you can use, to experiment without limits and conditions.
Maybe the old theoretical question about the use of technologies is solved in Alamar. Naked from every superstructure, technology becomes one of the greatest ways to realize social action.
4- THE LABORATORY
This last idea pushes me to work with OMNI. Before, as an art critic working to realize a publication about OMNI’s work in the community in the context of a more general movement in Cuba that involves artists and public spaces; and now, from January 2006, with the creation of a Multimedia archive and laboratory, constructed with very little money from the European Commission and in cooperation with an activist Italian group, INVENTATI.
We bring equipments (cameras, video cameras, laptops, video projectors, mixers audio and video, screens and all the equipment of the good “media activistâ€) and for a month we share with them (and not only offer to them) competencies, ideas, instruments, process, methodologies, fear, happiness.
Now the laboratory (called Alamar Express as a continuity with the CD) will work alone as an archive and dynamic space for creating, sharing and disseminating ideas with other artists.
At the end of the year we’ll be one more time in La Havana, trying to see how a “one year†activity developed and impacted the social reality of the city.
www.alamar-express.net is the web site that we will develop during the next months where it will be possible to download videos and music.
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