We are not memory: curing fear

Abstract

In January 2021 I curated the exhibition of contemporary Nicaraguan art in Havana We are not memory made up of works produced after the April 2018 demonstrations in Nicaragua. It was the first time that young Nicaraguan artists were presented in Cuba outside the state sphere. A few months earlier, on November 27, 2020, hundreds of young artists and intellectuals had staged the largest public demonstration in front of a ministry after the triumph of the Cuban revolution. Those same young people were the main audience of the exhibition We are not memory. Here I am interested in thinking about the curatorial practice as an opportunity to enable strategies in the face of the fear of “speaking” and the desire to “speak” about fear itself, outside the state space -in a context where the stateization of life is considerable- but with the State as the main protagonist of artistic practice.

Keywords:
anthropology; Cuban art; politics; Nicaraguan art