In the mid-1990s, I began to work combining my documentary photographs of Havana’s ruins with drawings made a posteriori, which complemented these spaces in forced decay with imaginative variations, restoration proposals and various simulacra. In the past, these diptychs have been called utopian and also prophetic. On this occasion, the drawing is ahead of the photograph, like a dream or nightmare, it foresees or suspects the state of precariousness and deterioration of the urban fabric. Like the notebook of an archaeologist who arrives at a distant and alienated place with the objective of apprehending it, this work tries to capture in a single gesture the contrast -and the closeness- between reality and fiction, or between subject and object, and, incidentally, it keeps within itself a hidden memento of the human presence defenseless to the passage of adversity and time.

View of the series at Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno: CAAM, 2024

Photo: Paco Rocha