Some people train or condition their minds with a simple prayer: everything is going to be all right. According to certain theories, perhaps that helps them attract what is good. It may also be that excess optimism prevents them from preparing to face negative events.

But the person who has faith accepts the existence of something greater that escapes both understanding and personal will. Whoever has faith lets go a little of control over life, receives help, and opens more fully to the mystery of human existence.

Faith manifests itself in many ways. There are those who pray, those who plant or embrace trees, those who light candles, those who doubt themselves and later recover their self-esteem, those who go to sacred places, those who clean the oceans, those who make sacrifices and promises, those who connect with the spirit of the dead, those who meditate with crossed legs, and those who, terrified by everything, take refuge in their children and continue to trust in human betterment and in the usefulness of virtue.

But on September 8, Cubans devoted to “Cachita” and the children of Oshún come together in celebration and harmony. Many only long for health and strength to endure the present.

A year earlier, Charito Tiratiros had been released from prison. He slept in arcades and stayed for several nights with friends until he found this half-collapsed building in the historic center of the city of Matanzas.

Around 1870, the building had been the prestigious Sacred Heart of Jesus School, “for boys only,” founded and run by the Order of the Vincentian Brothers. With the triumph of the Revolution, it was intervened and turned into a language school, serving in that role for more than 50 years until part of its century-old structure collapsed and it had to be closed.

After occupying the building, and over the course of several weeks, Caco cleared rubble and planted ornamental plants until he turned those ruins into something quite close to a home. Washing and cleaning comforted him. He hated cooking because of the smoke, the soot, and the lack of a proper stove and decent pots. He collected empty beer cans and sold them as raw material, and with that money he managed to put something in his mouth each day.

For more than six months I documented Charito’s life. At one point he told me that he wanted to tell his story, filled with his father’s lack of understanding of his sexual orientation, with abuse, and with antisocial behaviors of his own, punished by law four times. I witnessed his attempt to survive, to reintegrate into society. I took photographs of him and made a short documentary from part of his experiences. He wrote my name on the wall, next to those of others he considers his friends. On June 26 I stopped by to see him, as I had done so many times. But he was not there. He had been arrested after allegedly committing another offense.

“Thanks for the Fire” captures Enrique Eugenio Zayas Batista’s grateful memory of the building that served as his home for a year and a half—the Sacred Heart School, “for boys only”; and it is also my own gratitude toward him for the meager meals we shared while we talked, and for the friendship.

The video organizes this material in chronological order, confronting the viewer with a double parallel evolution: that of the subject who ages and that of the technologies that observe him. Both look at each other. Neither serves as the background of the other.

The piece belongs to the tradition of the expanded self-portrait, yet it displaces creative agency: it is not the artist who constructs his image, but the set of devices that have captured him over time. The portrait exists because technology has produced it.

This work is conceived as a process-based project. The documentation and research into the archive’s data continue, opening the possibility of new layers of meaning as the archive itself keeps growing.

Because they say that emigrating is like loosening the rope that binds your imagination, while at the same time feeling that every day you must balance like a juggler on a tightrope.

And yet, perhaps everything is an illusion that lives in your memories. Perhaps that Island must be rebuilt from scratch.

The second shore is where dreams dwell. Celebration, the joyful house, love, and prosperity.

The third shore is the sofa in your home, the seat in your office, the mattress on your bed… that real place you occupy in the world, from which you look at this photograph.

The works brought together in this exhibition move through different moments of his trajectory—from his earliest critical and experimental pieces, through the gilded insects of Prelude to the Nimbo Universe, and arriving at The First Tree. Yet all of them speak to one another with a coherence that seems not so much constructed as discovered. Cockroaches, moths, and beetles coexist with the anonymous mass of disoriented bodies in the city, with the torch among ruins, and with the solitary tree in a dry forest. They all share the same question: what resists, what remains, and what is sacralized in order to survive time.

Here, gold leaf is neither decoration nor luxury; it is the opposite. It is the resource that grants presence to what is fragile, what allows an insect or a freshly cut tree to establish itself at the center of memory. Ink anchors them to the world; gold draws them out of it just enough.

This exhibition is an invitation to follow that light wherever it may lead.

The works brought together in this exhibition move through different moments of his trajectory—from his earliest critical and experimental pieces, through the gilded insects of Prelude to the Nimbo Universe, and arriving at The First Tree. Yet all of them speak to one another with a coherence that seems not so much constructed as discovered. Cockroaches, moths, and beetles coexist with the anonymous mass of disoriented bodies in the city, with the torch among ruins, and with the solitary tree in a dry forest. They all share the same question: what resists, what remains, and what is sacralized in order to survive time.

Here, gold leaf is neither decoration nor luxury; it is the opposite. It is the resource that grants presence to what is fragile, what allows an insect or a freshly cut tree to establish itself at the center of memory. Ink anchors them to the world; gold draws them out of it just enough.

This exhibition is an invitation to follow that light wherever it may lead.

The works gathered in this exhibition move through different moments of his trajectory—from his early critical and experimental pieces, through the gilded insects of Prelude to the Nimbo Universe, and arriving at The First Tree. And yet, they all speak to one another with a coherence that seems less constructed than discovered. Cockroaches, moths, and beetles coexist with the anonymous mass of confused urban bodies, with the torch amid ruins, and with the solitary tree in a dry forest. All of them share the same question: what resists, what remains, and what is sacralized in order to survive time.

Here, gold leaf is neither decoration nor luxury; it is the opposite. It is the resource that grants presence to what is fragile, allowing an insect or a freshly cut tree to establish itself at the center of memory. Ink anchors them to the world; gold extracts them from it just enough.

This exhibition is an invitation to follow that light wherever it may lead.

Under the suggestive title Sibyl, this work invites reflection on the unceasing search for meaning within the human spirit. In classical antiquity, sibyls were sacred vessels of revelation, women who, in contemplative silence, deciphered the arcana of destiny. Here, the depicted figure becomes the prophetess of our time, suspended in a moment of stillness before the luminous oracle of modernity: the smartphone. It is an attempt to redeem and sacralize the most mundane of scenes, a young woman with her mobile phone, discovering an act of profound inwardness precisely where the eye is usually distracted. The technical execution is entirely subordinated to this mystery. The reverential treatment of light is not academic display, but a tool that clothes the scene with an aura of eternity, granting what is common an almost liturgical dignity.

Sibyl is, in essence, a pictorial epiphany. It is a reminder that the deepest sense and beauty do not require us to flee our own time, but to look at it with the eyes of the soul, because even through the everyday, the human being still waits, with serene majesty, for the echo of a voice that speaks of the eternal.

In the photograph, the plastic bucket is already broken. That is to say, the pitcher. And the spring: contaminated.

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. Thus, 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.

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. Thus, 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.

In the photograph, the plastic bucket is already broken. That is to say, the pitcher. And the spring: contaminated.