Layered Lives Audio Tour

I became an artist through a deep fascination with materials and transformation. Growing up in Havana, I was always aware of the fragility of things, the architecture, memory, nature, and even the body itself. I found in art a way to process those tensions and to reflect on the social and environmental realities surrounding me. Paper became my primary language because it is both delicate and resilient. By tearing, cutting, wrinkling, and rebuilding it, I can create surfaces that hold traces of time, erosion, and reconstruction. For me, the physical act of manipulating paper is also conceptual; it mirrors the way histories and identities are constantly shaped, fractured, and remade.

The works from my series Daydreams (2023) emerged from my ongoing relationship with the sea and the growing climate crisis affecting the waters surrounding Cuba. Living on an island means understanding the ocean not simply as landscape, but as a force that shapes everyday life, memory, and survival. In these works, I build layered monochromatic compositions in shades of blue that evoke the movement and depth of water, while also suggesting instability and turbulence. The repeated layering of paper creates sediment-like surfaces, as if each work contains accumulated histories and emotional traces. For me, the ocean is both a symbol of connection and a reminder of impermanence. It reflects the fragile relationship between humanity and nature, while inviting viewers into a space of contemplation and awareness. At the center of several compositions, gold leaf also appears as a fragile remnant, something precious that survives despite destruction and environmental decay.

I would describe my work as a state of meditation: an exploration of silence, an intimate and psychological act. My inspiration comes from everyday experience and from the ways we negotiate with our environment. I am interested in the idea of identity and the masks we wear before the world. That is why I use my own image through self-portraiture. However, my work is not autobiographical. I use my body as a canvas to represent a range of human experiences, especially those of women.

My generation learned to communicate symbolically in order to avoid censorship, and through that language I have addressed political and social issues in my work without becoming overtly ideological. My political expression is more subtle; I am invested in authentic human experience. For me, the material itself is part of the message. Painting a face is not the same as embroidering it. When I pierce the canvas with thread or use real hair, I introduce a layer of sacrifice and resilience. By incorporating embroidery, a medium historically associated with the domestic sphere, I reclaim and vindicate that manual labor. The thread can connect, but it can also tighten or restrict. Likewise, the use of materials such as textiles or metal is never merely decorative; they give the work emotional weight and hybridity.

Being an artist is like carrying a sacred title. I best express myself through painting and drawing, which, for me, are the most ideal mediums. I like to create sequential images that allude to a specific story and construct a narrative that viewers must unravel, like a mystery. A central theme in my work is the concept of power and the abuse of power in interpersonal, social, and political relationships. I like to present real events within surreal atmospheres, playing with metaphors, irony, and humor.

The Night of the Tulips is a diptych that belongs to a series I titled “Beautiful Flowers of Evil.” In this composition, we are looking through a window from the outside, witnessing an intimate scene within the room. The visual relationship between the two panels suggests that a malicious act has taken place. We are left with an unsettling feeling by the fact that we too don’t know exactly what is occurring. In my work, I strive to cultivate a sense of suspense, continually encouraging viewers to question what is unfolding, so that each person can observe and construct their own understanding of the narrative within the diptych.

I started creating art before I even knew what it was called. I grew up on an island by the sea, and from a very young age, the relationship between body and water helped me understand the world around me. For me, art was a tool for processing emotions, memories, and silences that I did not yet know how to name. At first, it was something deeply intimate, almost private. Over time, I realized that the questions I explored in my work were not mine alone, and that many people recognized themselves in them. That is when I understood that art could become a place of encounter, a space to pause and look more closely at the world around us.

Sea Swell was born in Havana in 2018, in front of an ocean that, to me, is not simply a landscape, but a space filled with stories. I have always been interested in the idea that the sea does not erase, but returns things, just as the tide ebbs and flows. The water carries back bodies, memories, and absences that continue to exist within us, even when they are no longer visible on the surface. In Sea Swell, some bodies emerge while others have already disappeared, yet remain as silent traces upon the water. These bodies move between presence and absence, not as opposites, but as states of coexistence.

In my work, I explore universal themes such as identity, connection, and survival. I am drawn to the tensions between isolation and belonging, as well as between individualism and interdependence. To articulate these ideas, materials such as paper, clay, textiles, and metal are essential to my practice. I understand them as active collaborators that shape both the creative process and the final outcome.

This relationship becomes especially evident in my work with clay, where material transformation is made explicit. Clay, initially soft and fragile, gains strength and permanence when subjected to high temperatures. Fire does not destroy it; it transforms it. This transformation also operates as a metaphor for human experience in the face of extreme conditions. Like clay, crises change us, reshape us, and strengthen our inner core.

The works presented in this exhibition are intimate in both scale and content. The series titled Tools for Coping is, in a sense, an archive. My intention was to create objects that represent different situations and challenges life presents, as well as the mechanisms we develop to adapt and survive them. Rather than offering solutions, these objects acknowledge our capacity for creativity within the everyday act of survival.

Although the subject matter is rooted in my personal experience, these works are not intended to be confessional. My aim is to create a space for shared recognition. The materials, scale, and handwork become an invitation for viewers to project their own experiences of loss, care, resilience, and recovery.

Taken together, my works in this exhibition offer a landscape of emotional tools, fragments, and traces. They reflect on how we carry what has happened to us, how we find ways to move forward, and how meaning can be slowly constructed through attention, care, and the act of making itself.

My interest in art was born, above all, from a need for communication. Since I was a child, I was a very shy person, and it was often difficult for me to express emotions or thoughts directly. Art appeared as a space where I could still communicate, using images, actions, sounds, and experiences instead of words. It was a way to find my own voice and to create connections with others from a more intuitive and sensitive place.

I also grew up in an environment heavily influenced by art. My father was a theatre director and my mother an architect, and both had an especially important impact on my training and sensitivity. From the theatre I inherited an interest in presence, the body, the scene, and the emotional dimension of experience. From architecture came my attention to space, structure, and the way in which places hold memory and history. These influences were fundamental to understanding art not only as an object, but as a living and transformative experience.

From my first works I understood artistic practice as a form of presence and connection, a space where I could explore emotions, social tensions and internal states that are difficult to express in words. In general, what inspires me is the possibility of creating an experience where art functions as a bridge between the personal and the collective, between memory, the body and the environment.

When I was a child, I loved going to my best friend Wendy’s house. Her grandmother was a painter. The smell of oil, the bright colors on the canvases, and the subjects that emanated from her portraits and landscapes opened the door to a new, creative world. Unlike Wendy’s household, I grew up in an environment that privileged empiricism over creativity since my parents were scientists, specifically chemists. Thanks to Grandma Gloria, I began studying at the Elementary School of Visual Arts in Havana when I was 12 years old, and from then on art became my primary language, my particular voice through which I express myself. I am, with my story, an entity of change in this shared world of ours. Later, I was lucky enough to study in San Alejandro and at the Institute of Arts in Havana, where I was part of a new generation of artists who, through engraving, painting, installation and performance, advocated for an open, alternative way of thinking, which allowed for freedom of expression in the 1990s Cuba during the “Special Period,” a moment in history defined by economic embargos imposed on Cuba by western powers.

As a Cuban artist, my work explores memory and history through various media and popular characters such as the Pioneer Girl, Abela’s “El Bobo”, and Liborio. These references allow me to portray the political contradictions and social difficulties of life in Cuba. My vignettes are inspired by comics and political satire common in the visual culture of the Cold War period. Etching prints such as Growing Miracles, Tornado, and Pandora’s Box satirically examine how political power and indoctrination are imposed through education, shaping and defining people’s lives in totalitarian regimes. Art has been for me a way to expressing dissent, raise my voice, seek freedom through creativity, and analyze the complex relationship between Cuba and the United States.

Art is how I have expressed myself for as long as I can remember. I was not born into a family of artists. As a child, I filled notebooks with drawings, trying to represent my family, my toys, and my world. As soon as I learned to read and write, I wrote and illustrated simple tales using my own handmade books. Initially, my creativity was an innate impulse born within me, and inspiration from other authors/artists came much later. Thus, my work is full of stages, just as my life has had stages. For me, inspiration is not a ceremony or a premeditated act, but accidents caused by the everyday. Through the quotidian, I find the impulse to create.

In 2007, I created a character that accompanies me to this day. At first glance, she resembles an illustration from a children’s book, especially given its shades of pastel and flatness of the form. But my art is a game of simulation. If you look closely, you will always find a splinter, an uncanny detail out of tune. It is a foreboding shadow that crosses the garden. In my work, I am obsessed with capturing the flight of innocence just before hitting the ground; that instant in which the world ceases to be a children’s game and transforms into adult truth. This character is my mirror and my refuge. I have poured my fears into her so that I may face them and release my anxiety through my work. In the drawings you can see how child and dog become shadow and body, reflecting the complex and beautiful relationship that artists have with their craft.

I am interested in architecture as a container for our lives, given that built environments usually survive the passing of time. On the other hand, I’m inspired by the fact that memory and experience are not the reflection of a specific reality, but of a personal construct. I craft these spaces using cardboard or wooden models, which I later photograph or film. I am interested in these media because they emulate the way we document our daily lives giving the models a sense of ambiguity –a mixture between veracity and fiction, which demonstrates how we often blur the lines between what we experience and how we remember.

My desire to become an artist stemmed from my family. My mother was an instructor of classical ballet, and my father was a sculptor. These two manifestations are what I felt the closest to. I studied classical ballet during my childhood and adolescence before studying visual arts. My experience on stage influenced my interest in certain visual forms, especially how I perceive spaces devoid of human presence and/or movement. Inspiration to make my work comes mainly from memories, as well as frustration and obsession with the past. I constantly return to those moments that are most uncomfortable to remember and that I cannot modify.

Can you tell us about your trajectory as an artist?

I use the printmaking technique called collography because it is the most suitable for expressing what I want to say. Collography consists of creating images with collaged materials and then inking them to create relief in the final print. I like it because it is the technique that allows me to work in large formats, and its textured, layered craftsmanship fascinates me. Clothing is the skin I give to my figures depending on what I want to express. I enjoy the process tremendously.

In terms of subject matter, I use more personal narratives. However, characters such as Sikán, the fish, the goat, and the snake remain recurrent motifs in my work. To develop these characters, I use crumpled paper to evoke the same symbolism from previous works. It is the exact same figuration that I use when I refer specifically to a scene or detail from Afro-Cuban mythology, even if I may reinterpret them to say something different. But they are fixed elements in my work.

There are also things in my work that I cannot explain. For example, the latent tension in many of my compositions… I did not design it, it was not preconceived, it simply emerged. I say that I am always accompanied by something like a good sign, a good companion: intuition. Perhaps my work is that—things I have inside that, once externalized, represent burdens that I cannot live with or carry with me.

The eyes in the faces of my characters leave a huge impression on people; they are what intrigues them. The eyes look directly at you, the viewer. You cannot hide; wherever you move, they are always there watching you, being complicit in what they are seeing.

How did your interest in Afro-Cuban culture and mythology arise?

Many things drew me to Afro-Cuban cultures. This interest arose from recommendations I got from professors to read writers such as Lydia Cabrera, as well as topics on the African diaspora, especially mythological stories and history, such as those of the Abakuá fraternity, which originated in Cuba from West African roots in the early 19th century.

In my grandmother’s house there was also a poster of the film One Way or Another (1977), directed by the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez. It may also have been the fact that my uncle had among his books “Los Ñáñigos” (1982) by Enrique Sosa and a catalog of the retrospective exhibition held in Paris of the surrealist master Wifredo Lam, which made me realized that most artists who were Afrodescendant worked with themes such as Santería, Vodou, Spiritism, and Palo Monte.

In particular, the narrative of the Abakuá secret society seemed very visual and vivid to me, as if it were unfolding before my eyes. I imagined faces appearing and disappearing, even though in the Abakuá society there is no figurative iconography. Then I saw that there was a possibility—an entire world that I could perfectly create, based on the original stories.