The Other Dimension I: Incapable Fantasy / La otra dimensión I. Fantasía incapaz

In the Cuban context, everyday life has an astonishing dispersion. Time sometimes passes in leaps, and at other times with an oppressive slowness. In this country, not only do objects and structures from the past persist, but also—and above all—inherited ideas that continue to organize and condition people’s lives, their perception of the present and the future, as though we were eternal.

A large part of daily life is consumed by the basic tasks of survival, and these end up displacing the time meant for spiritual, creative, and reflective development. Somit, bodies become diffuse, lights drag and distort, and urban settings, though recognizable, seem to belong to another plane.

Obsidia 66 began with a fear, a speculation: in recent decades a virus has infected the country. It has broken our willpower and our capacity to oppose what is senseless. Amid devastated cities, we move in search of daily food like zombies in a dystopia.

I have called this virus Obsiddia 66 because I discovered it through my obsession with probing the states of obedience and apathy that are habitual to us, and also their opposite: the nuclei of resistance.