La piel del otro

At some point in our lives we have entrusted our skin to the desires of others — exposing it to the chill of nakedness, the relative warmth of clothing, the weight of discrimination, the touch of pain, silence, and demand. At some point we have been someone else's skin, and others have become ours. In this, art resembles skin. Its pores admit exchange, loan, risk. Art transpires like skin and needs constant "cleansings" or renewals to remain healthy and to improve with time. Traditional manifestations such as painting, drawing, sculpture, and photography have absorbed, without prejudice, certain procedures from other practices without affecting their own language. From that openness emerges a need to turn to photography — to the instant indissolubly captured, to the recreated situation, to the instruments conceived to thaw a moment of our lives and let us become "participants." Cuban photographic production has inhabited representation as a communicative and experimental mechanism, becoming the catalyst of the responses that most concern us. Since the 1980s, both technical experimentation and conceptual premises have moved the photographic scene along a more loosened path — the revelation of unusual subjects, the divorce from the document, the cracking of the limits imposed on representation, and the ontological search for the object that becomes a represented subject. Many of these artists have flirted with the image at microscopic extremes to obtain textures unnoticed by the common gaze; they have chemically subverted the developing process for symbolic value; they have stitched the support as the spine of an identity discourse; they have appropriated the canvas, the light, social networks, and the spectator. With La piel del otro we attempt to offer a view onto a photography that speaks to the great themes of the history of Cuban art — gender, race, identity, political and social topics — and to the demystification and socialization of photography as a daily document of self-affirmation. How do we take on otherness in order to reveal the questions that concern human nature? Perhaps through a change of roles: to question time's passing on our own skin, to give voice to a vertiginous silence, to expand the disconnected detail of a half-finished puzzle, to express ourselves with the image of one who does not see. Perhaps then we would not need to speak for others — only a simple change of roles, to inhabit, for an instant, the skin of the other. Featured artists: René Peña, Reinaldo Cid, Lidzie Alvisa, Jorge Otero, Daylene Rodríguez, Cirenaica Moreira, Alejandro Ulloa, and Adrián Fernández. Curated by Claudia Taboada and Yudinela Ortega.