Ariel Orozco prefers to avoid certain political, formal and commercial radicalism prevailing in contemporary visual production. Although he left Cuba in 2005 to make career in Mexico City, this artist seems unable to oppose anything; nor he provides signals to replace that romanticism, common in Beuys, of his beginnings by cannibalism as a false ideology, in a Santiago Sierra way. He rather often explores a poetic, effective gestuality when chance is beyond calculation between enjoyment and disobedience.
Línea discontinua (2015) is perhaps the most extensive and less visible piece present at the 12th Havana Biennial. As part of the collateral project Detrás del muro: en el medio de la nada, the intervention consisted of multicolored festive flags flying over an urban perimeter, without a special occasion for patriotic celebration or folkloric relief. This indiscreet line broke the boundaries between public and private, making its way through the city and its people, refusing to violate the chaos of daily stagnation.
Getting in and out from Havana humble dwellings reveals a desire to abolish collective tensions in favor of individual peace; antiwar metaphor of common sense, where the density-idea is replaced by the lightness-image of a actions governed only by deviation. The piece seeks to dilute the boundaries between inside and outside, by representing a fluid path in which the symbolic voyeur enters and leaves hidden or affordable sites with the ease of an equivocally police record.
In the artificial beach conceived by Arles del Río to Detrás del muro… those who rested in chairs turned their backs horizon and stared at the environment. By getting a tan in the limbo of a walk, the walkers lost touch with the infinite and got focused on ¨not-watching¨ the palpable paths. Thanks to a plastic eventuality, again the sea was no longer that great promise that refuses to deliver what predicts.
Anyone would judge this installation divertimento as a pose of simplistic evasion; however, it becomes a type of artistic proposal that Cubans from here or there would like to transform into reality: forget everything and find in their native nation material and spiritual comfort, fantasy to realize the metamorphosis of all possible illusions.
In the move to direct other clouds, the transparency of these alternatives attempts to mitigate the fire of contradictions in the eternal insular summer: a sure way to get involved with reality, while the ethical-aesthetic is an emblem of the simulacrum, contextual panic where strategies expire by lack of mystery.
Línea discontinua is a soft sculptural draw similar to Japanese sumi-e painting, Zen Buddhist style that gives so much importance to pictorial feature and vacuum. In this intervention by Ariel Orozco, the tenant who opens its doors and windows must design or complete the course of this diaphanous line; antidote for unexpected outbreaks of paranoia in an area which misses the flexibility and expansion of its contours.
The action ends by itself and never by the collaborative rejection of those who foster a spontaneous outpouring of reliability. In this case, accepting others’ claim involves a sign of tolerant complicity between someone’s idea and the experience of many, as reluctant as the author of this tropical filigree reproducing social antagonisms. Because it’s already history that living from the pain of others is a unique story.
