Pretending to Say

Elite, yes, art is elitist. We artists are discriminators with delusions of grandeur. Some of us ensconce ourselves within our own elites and rely on the comfort of irreverence. Others opt for an attitude of inconformity and dissent.

To provoke is to antagonize with incredulity and irreverence. And that is the spirit of Agglutination, the independent art space in Havana, Cuba, that I founded and have directed since 1994.

During its two historical phases—first, as Agglutination Space and then as Agglutination Laboratory—the place has been a vanguard experimental hub, with successes and failures, with doubts and uncertainties, with self-importance and arrogance, with modesty and altruism, and with utopian inclinations.

All photos by Sandra Ceballos Obaya.

The shows and actions that are gestated here are usually provocative. They assume extreme aesthetic, conceptual, and moral positions in relation to art. Our projects function in opposition to what is usually shown, to what is usually permitted and established by official cultural venues. At times, the ideas that have emerged from Agglutination have influenced projects taking place in official institutions.

The performance Paquito's Corner Store was conceived by Samuel Riera and supported by Agglutination Laboratory. Riera and I took on the project as a provocative art gesture. We combined our egotism as artists with the social practice of hoarding as a means of survival, to which today's Cuban is accustomed.

Within the framework of the project the work of art took on another value, less lucrative and more altruistic, human and real.

What comprised the Paquito's Corner Store performance?

We sold artworks at a corner store, a little food market in a working-class neighborhood of the Cerro District of Havana. We sold the artworks at the store the way its grocer distributes foodstuffs: according to their weight. Food has been sold to the Cuban populace through the "family ration book" since 1959. Artist Samuel Riera, Paquito (the grocer), and I were the salespeople. The neighborhood residents, people interested in art, and a few artists who attended, were the customers.

This performance involved 23 artists who exhibited and sold their work there with conviction. The work consisted of: paintings, photographs, sculptures, drawings, videos, and other objects.

It is important to note that young people from the area took it upon themselves on the eve of the opening to make their own artistic intervention on the walls and furniture of the bodega. So, in addition to the unusual performance, we enjoyed the exquisite installation that surrounded the discrete works.

The artworks, made both by emerging artists and the internationally known avantgarde, coexisted in this moment with people who would never have the means to acquire one of these pieces in a gallery or an art auction.

The Audiovisual Tournament, conceived of by the young independent curator Giselle Victoria Gomez, is another one of Agglutination's recent heretical events. This was a competition for videos less than one minute long. On the surface it may have seemed like just another art event but its singularity lay in its activating four performative systems to give awards. The event was a ludic critique of the Cuban tendency to determine aesthetic value through competitions and prizes. A similar project took place at Agglutination in November 2009, called The Morro Is Strong, Who Am I? in which awards were determined by a raffle.

Gomez thought up two of the ways of awarding prizes: first, the artists were asked to play video games with cell phones to determine their prizes. Second, a jury was created to give a prize to the worst video. The members of the jury deliberated as they feasted on a banquet provided by the curator, organizer, and patrons of the event. As they ate, they debated and reflected, and the public in attendance could observe them via a projection that was on a screen in the garage at the site.

I suggested a couple of other competitive games for awarding prizes. One was arm-wrestling, as...