The project that matured Hamlet Lavastida captured in Villa Marista

The project that matured Hamlet Lavastida captured in Villa Marista wins an award in Spain

Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida won the prize of the real estate company Idealista from Spain for his project “prison republic”which he himself called autobiographical, having matured in captivity at Cuban state security headquarters, Villa Marista, before being expelled from the island.

The 2022 Idealista Contemporary Art Prize, in its fourth edition, includes a monetary award and the artist’s intervention with his work of the Idealista spaces at the real estate fairs in which the company participates.

Beginning this week, he will be showing his work at the Madrid Real Estate Exhibition (SIMA), taking place May 26-29, ArteInformado media reported.

As Lavastida told DIARIO DE CUBA, “Penitentiary Republic” “is a comparative analysis of the political prison in Cuba.”

Dedicated to everyone Cuban political prisonersspecial to Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, Maikel “Osorbo”, Louis Roblesas well as the youth of 11ythe artist recalled that even after the massive protests of July 11, he had become another number on the list of Cuban political prisoners, which now numbers more than 1,000.

On June 20, 2021, Lavastida returned to Cuba after completing an artistic residency in Berlin. After being forced into isolation due to the pandemic, he was arrested by state security for an artistic idea that he never realized and threatened with criminal prosecution for alleged incitement to commit a crime.

Although he was never tried, he was released in September 2021 on condition of exile for himself and his partner, poet and activist Katherine Bisquet.

“A system that seeks to discipline any collective exchange through punishment, a system based on its legislation, its political power, its writing, its memory, its history, and even its aesthetics. We could almost speak here of a hypothetical scientist, or why not, of the existence and genesis of a new social hierarchy, homo paenitentis,” wrote Lavastida in the text work supporting his project.

The central core of the project is a series of works that are reproduced in the plan Cuban prisons such as Manto Negro, Valle Grande, Villa Marista, 100 and Aldabó, Kilo 8, among others.

According to ArteInformado, the project “has to do with a fundamental thesis, which is historical memory. It deals with understanding Cuban history, but also with its links to the world of socialism, to the Soviet Union and all these links that are Remembering Cuban socialism It also tries to talk about the Cuban government that has existed for almost 70 years and to fight against cultural stereotypes that do not reflect reality In the cultural sphere the repression has been enormous and harsh and someone has to comment. I’m doing it from an artistic point of view, I think it’s a way of doing a visual essay about these other stories that haven’t been told or announced yet.

Hamlet of Lavastida (Havana, 1983) is one of the most recognized Cuban artists in the field of international contemporary art and one of the most influential artists in his native country. He studied at the San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts (Havana, 1998-2002) and at the Higher Institute of Art (Havana, 2003-2009) and at the Conduct Art Chair (Havana, 2004-2006). ), directed by the artist Tania Bruguera.

As of 2018, he was among the artists who declined to do so Decree 349criminalizes independent art, and before its promulgation, the San Isidro Movementhenceforth the target of the greatest persecution and harassment by the regime’s apparatus of repression.

Lavastida has exhibited in institutions and museums such as Documenta, Kasel (Germany, 2022); Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid (Spain, 2022); artists’ house Bethanien; (Germany, 2021); The 00 Biennale, Havana (2018); among other things.

The recognition for Lavastida coincides with the inauguration on MReina Sofía National Museum of Modern Art Madrid the exhibition “Graphic turn. Like the ivy on the wall” in which Cuban artists such as Lavastida, Tanya Bruguera, Ezequiel Suárez, Reynier Leyva Novo, Léster Álvarez, Leandro Feal, Julio Llópiz-Casal and the San Isidro Movement. The exhibition runs until October 13 at the Madrid Museum.