I think that every instant survived while walking / And every second of uncertainty / Every moment of not knowing / Are the exact key to that tissue / That I carry under my skin / So I protect you / Here you are still inside / I carry you inside, to the root. 

Natalia Lafourcade

Indigenous people who refuse to be dispossessed of their lands, languages and dialects spoken aloud, ancestral fabrics paraded on haute couture catwalks, bodies that do not ask permission to show themselves... The world seems to live in acts of constant resistance. According to Zygmunt Bauman, identity is presented as a never-ending battle, something that "has to be built from scratch or choose between offers of alternatives and then fight to protect it with an even more fierce struggle".

In times of mass mobilities and displacements, of millions choosing to look at a screen for fear of looking at themselves, the encounter and defense of one's own identity is imposed as a daily gesture. Nationality, wealth, gender, race, sexuality, condition our disparities.

In view of these "shared horizons" proposed by the XV Havana Biennial, NG Art Gallery, Los Carbonell Foundation and Fondo de Arte Joven collaborate in this exhibition that brings together a group of artists from Latin America, Cuba and Africa whose poetics revolve around those identities, marked by their ways of relating to history, society and culture.

A collectivity is not possible without the existence of otherness, of the recognition of a whole in which we can inhabit even from the difference. To the Root. Identities in question The company is committed to the significance today of recognizing that we are human beings, similar, all deserving of a place in this same world.

Sandra García Herrera

November 2024