Collective exhibition

White Room Gallery, September 14, 2023

Photographers have no city.

"One loves a city, one lives in it with the certainty that we will leave one day, but that house, the grille of this door, the patio uncovered in the middle of the conversation, I know that they will receive another and others will see it". In 1969 Cuban writer Anton Arrufat would dedicate his poem to Havana The river of Heraclitusto which the above-mentioned verses belong. Although born in Santiago de Cuba, the author lived in and was impregnated with this city, which he wished to unite to his body.

To say that the former Villa de San Cristobal de La Habana has been an object of inspiration for all the arts would be a truism. In the same way that a photographic exhibition dedicated to it would not seem to put anything new on the table. Its sonorous name, that style without style and its inhabitants have historically been objects of the lens.

Havana, a palpable soul is an exhibition that brings together a group of very young and emerging Cuban photographers in whose work we find not one, but many Havana. The selection of works tried to flee from common places to transmit, from intangible forms, the ways and looks through which these artists inhabit and unravel the city that they have also made their own. Of course, there is the coastline, the architectural profiles, the columns carpenterianas and the children playing freely in the streets; but no one would speak of Havana without thinking of the vibrant artistic and cultural scene that has filled its decades, without thinking of the music, of its nights of young people who are just discovering life and only care about the present. No one leaves Havana without remembering its people.

Like Arrufat, many of these artists were not born in the city of the malecon, yet they appropriate it daily. Perhaps photographers are destined to belong nowhere. They extend their experience to the image they deliver, with such certainty that they seem to know closely every object, landscape or person they portray. Many choose Havana, like Arrufat, knowing that someday they will not be there; neither will the gates, the bars or the patio; nor the people, nor the corner. But they do have their images, to rebuild it again and again, and hopefully not only utopically.

Sandra García Herrera, September 2023.