Cuban Digital Art & Exhibitions: Hunger, Resistance, and Resilience

Free to use image of Katerine Bisquet

Katherine Bisquet is a poet, artist, and documentarian.  She was a co-organizer of the controversial #00Bienal de la Habana in 2018. She was a member of the 27N movement, a group of Cuban intellectuals and artists who began a sit-in in front of the Ministry of Culture (MINCULT) in Havana in solidarity with the protesters of the San Isidro movement.  Bisquet was a participant in the collective hunger strike in Cuba. Due to her activism, she was under house arrest for her involvement in the 2021 mass protests during the Covid lockdown.  After being released, she was exiled to Spain.  Bisquet utilized digital footage to create the short film En San Isidro, Colectivo CCC, 2023. And is the co-founder of the digital project Cine Cubano en Cuarentena (CCC) 2020. She has been an artist in residence at Künstlerhaus Bethanien, 2021/2022, Berlín, DE. Winner of the Premio Ciudad de Alcalá de Poesía 2022, Spain, for the poem Esquizopatria. Bisque has been granted a Mellon Foundation Fellow for Threatened Scholars at FIU.

Digital Documentary

Bisquet created an award-winning documentary, "Inside San Isidro," utilizing the only tool available to her within Cuba's context of technological scarcity, a digital camera.  Where in the global north access to digital technology and software is relatively ubiquitous, within the context of Cuba, access to these, to connectivity, and the ability to show/exhibit/disseminate works due to restrictions such as Decree Law 349 is not readily available.  As such, Bisquet's digital work is produced without access to the traditional infrastructure through which documentary films are produced.   Bisquet's digital documentary is visually stunning.  The use of digital technology results in a visual product aesthetically distinct from traditional documentary filmmaking.  The pixelated quality of the work produced by electronic digital sensors within the digital camera translate light into electrical signals stored as tiny bits of data in bitmaps, tiny bits of data that form the images downloaded onto computers, allowing Bisquet via the use of scarce editing software, to manipulate images in ways that redefine and move forward what is a distinctive post-1959 Cuban aesthetic of hunger and resilience within national and international art. Digital technology provided Bisquet with creative freedom previously unavailable, allowing her to edit and create visual collages and redefining the creative process.

San Isidro Documentary: Trailor

Cuba en Corto (Cuban Shorts):

Commentary by K. L. Cespedes

Within the digital exhibition “Arte en Resistencia,”  Bisquet’s digital photos provide unique access to the living and artistic space occupied by the San Isidro movement.  Her work merges the ethnographic and the testimonial with the artistic; it creates art from the intimate personal space of the San Isidro movement and the religious material culture within the space.

The following images are form the digital exhibition “Arte en Resistencia."

All images are presented here with permission from the gallery.

Commentary by K. L. Cespedes

Untitled 2020

From the series “Voices of San Isidro.”

25 x 30 cm (h x w)

Fotografía. Impresión en papel Hahnemühle fine art baryta 325 gsm

(Photograph. Printed on Hahnemühle fine art baryta 325 gsm)

The image by Bisquet centers the religious eleke (religious necklaces) specific to the Lucumi tradition.  The dark and light beaded necklace is specific to the male warrior gods and is in the image intermingled with a divination necklace. Both would be utilized for protection and ancestor worship. The image by Bisquet is part of a series “Voces de San Isidro” produced during Covid lock-down and in the midst of severe food shortages.  The image is among the few existing digital works by artists daring to incorporate material culture specific to Lucumi religious praxis and philosophy. The image conveys the importance of religious practices during times of hunger and quarantine. More specifically, the image provides information about the philosophical tradition at the core of the activism performed by the San Isidro movement. 

Luis , 2020

25 x 30 cm (h x w)

Fotografía. Impresión en papel Hahnemühle fine art baryta 325 gsm (Photograph. Printed on Hahnemühle fine art baryta 325 gsm)

De la serie “Voces de San Isidro”

(From the series “Voices of San Isidro”)

The close up and intimate image of Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara is taken of the artist during a hunger strike. Bisquet’s close-up conveys the artist on a hunger strike during Covid lockdown and a severe food crisis. Bisquet’s image of Otero Alcantara would become one of the most influential images of Otero Alcantara.

Untitled 2020

25 x 30 cm (h x w)

Fotografía. Impresión en papel Hahnemühle fine art baryta 325 gsm (Photograph. Printed on Hahnemühle fine art baryta 325 gsm)

De la serie “Voces de San Isidro”

(From the series “Voices of San Isidro”)

The image conveys the feeling sense of surveillance, of being watched by a security camera.  Bisquet aimed to produce a juxtaposition between being surveilled via digital technology and the private, personal, intimate space of artists cohabitating during the food scarcity of Covid lockdown. The piece is both immediate and historical, as it chronicles the environs from which artists engaged in the mass protests of 2021.  The work merges art, ethnography, and surveillance. The image captures both the absence and the presence of the activist artists.  It begs the question, where have the inhabitants of the space, some of whom are on hunger strikes, while others under house arrest gone?  And, why?

Digital poetry uses the unique properties of the digital medium to create new forms of expression. Digital poetry is recorded as digital video and disseminated online. Artists, create and exhibit their work digitally.

Here is a video of Katherine Bisquet reading her poem, "En tiempos de paz" as part of the digital art exhibition “Arte en Resistencia.”

Sin Titulo (untitled) included in the interview "Nos estábamos jugando la vida porque estábamos convencidos de algo (We are risking our lives because we are convinced of something…”

Poem: “No nos sirve de nada el miedo” (Fear does us no good)

No nos sirve de nada el miedo
en la misma medida
en que no nos sirve de nada el dolor.
Las cosas invariablemente van cayendo
al margen de nuestras voluntades.
No nos sirve el dolor de los otros
y la angustia de los otros
enquistada desde el arranque
no nos sirve.
Paleamos las franquicias
de la masa
lejos de la masa.
Y nos compadecemos.

Katherine Bisquet: "Hago activismo desde mi individualidad, an interview about her life and work"