The Ecstasy of Isidro

When Memory Turns to Dust constitutes, for me as an artist, a reflective process in which the empirical, the psychological, and the critical converge. I conceive the chance-driven gesture between the selection of a specific photographic document and the preconception and construction of different narratives as a practice of rescue, in which what appears disposable, old, or residual bears the weight of a memory that emerges as a pretext for recontextualizing and re-signifying the history frozen within photographic paper.

I appropriate found testimonies spanning from the 1920s to the late twentieth century; I archive them, classify them, and transmute them into new metaphors. I manipulate consciously, meticulously constructing other realities—juxtaposed, assembled, mutilated—without attempting to conceal the traces of time on the paper or the seams produced by these photomontages.

I consider myself an insistent forager, a visual archaeologist who operates both technically and discursively on the elasticity of reality’s record: an original narrative that I reactivate through the conception of an aesthetic ontology encompassing ideological, social, político, religioso, and familial dimensions. This series functions as a kind of constructed and resurrected testament, distilling meanings and mixtures drawn from a culture such as the Cuban one—hybrid and singular—that continues to dwell in nostalgia and in the sustaining of a worn yet astonishing ideal.

I assemble landscapes, portraits, vernacular scenes, and abstract motifs in order to reformulate individual and collective memory; to enrich this found heritage—often located within the confines of the Cuban family—and to propose a possible interstice that reminds us of who we are and how we see ourselves within the framework of contemporary artistic debate.