The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Havana, 1968) has walked naked with a lamb slit around her neck and has eaten dirt evoking the collective suicide of the Cuban indigenous people so as not to succumb to the Spanish conquerors (El peso de la culpa, 1999), He has given workshops on how to make Molotov cocktails, he brought two policemen on horseback into the Tate Modern to exercise control maneuvers among the museum’s spectators and on his right arm he has a tattoo of a skull pointing a gun at his temple , alluding to one of his most disturbing performances, Self-sabotage (2009), in which he played Russian roulette in front of the public at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and at the Venice Biennale. Art, activism and politics are not issues that can be unraveled in the work of the 2021 Velázquez Prize, which has become one of the main scourges of the Cuban government. Arrested and interrogated a thousand times, permanently watched and defamed, she lives in exile in Cambridge, where she works as a head of media and performance at Harvard University. From there she traveled to Barcelona last week to participate in a conference on art and power at the CCCB.
Will you return to Cuba?
They have let me know through a fellow activist that they are not going to let me in. But I always come back, no matter what it costs me at whatever level it is. I’ll try it in August, take note.
The same month that two years ago, he agreed to leave the country in exchange for the government releasing some twenty prisoners, among them the rapper Maykel Castillo Pérez or the artist Hamlet Lavastida. They must have been very desperate to see her out of Cuba to agree to her barter.
They were. There was one protest action after another and they felt weakened. Many saw the departure of the artists as a defeat, but from that moment it has been the people who have taken the initiative in the protests. And that’s fantastic. But we did not leave, it can be said that they deported us. The Cuban dictatorship has reactivated a category that has not been used since colonial times.
Exile has always existed.
Yes, but no Cuban wants to leave Cuba, that is the truth. It is important that people update their vision of Cuba, because it is very violent for us to continue talking about Cuba as if the Revolution had just triumphed and was doing everything it promised. I never thought that we would reach such an impressive degree of moral, political and social impoverishment. Those who lead us are so mediocre and are so afraid that they are not even capable of sitting at the table with people who think differently.
Does Decree 349, a law that legalizes censorship, take away artists’ right to organize their own exhibitions or independent concerts, is it as much as recognizing the power of art?
The paradox that art matters to totalitarians and dictators is very interesting. And do you know why? Because it has been a weapon that they have used for 60 years to make propaganda. Art has been his way of entering people through the emotional part, to create affection, to manipulate people and to become a banner for something they are not. Here everyone remembers a song by Pablo Milanés or Silvio RodrÃguez from that time. Of course they understand the power of art, and when artists use it to show reality, they are brutally held back. Our greatest revenge is that dictatorships pass and art remains.
You have been persecuted and retaliated against, you have spent almost nine months in house arrest, practically incommunicado, you have suffered post-traumatic stress… How do you overcome your fear?
It is that one does things with fear. It is always there, like a breath. Sometimes the anger at injustices is so great that it evaporates a bit. You are afraid five minutes before or after carrying out an action and you say to yourself, oh, mother, how did you do this? What the dictatorship has not calculated is the power that comes from feeling that they are being unfair to you or to someone you love. That is a force greater than fear. And I’m going to tell you the truth. A few years ago I did many things alone. But now there is a whole generation ready to fight.
His school of Art and conduct has created a school.
Yes, and now we have the Artivism Institute in Germany, which is like the second part.
What has been the most difficult moment you have experienced?
See how on the day of protests on July 11 they imprisoned 18-year-old adolescents. It was terrifying. A few days ago they questioned a seven-year-old girl, the daughter of a woman who is protesting. What level of political abuse and violence is that? And everything is to punish the mother.
By choosing performance as the fundamental material of her works, it is her own body that is at the center of everything. There is no escape.
Sometimes they are collective performances, but when you are in a totalitarian state you know that this will have consequences and many times you prefer to do it alone. If something happens, let it happen to me. What I like about performance is that it is a plain language, accessible to everyone. It is a medium that is very close to theater because it uses a narrative, some bodies, but at the same time it opens a space for the unthinkable to happen and for the spectators to have a chance to influence what happens.
Tell me about ‘Self Sabotage,’ in which you played Russian roulette with a real gun.
Oh my mother! At that time, 2009, I wanted to call on artists to be more active, to wake up, to do something and take it to its ultimate consequences. I would read a text about what for me was political art and from time to time I would stop and play Russian roulette. He also spoke of the limits of art. What is the performance limit? What is the pain limit? Will it be death? It was like a question I was asking myself. And a shout out to my colleagues. Let them know that she was ready to die. Political art is to take things to their ultimate consequences. Until the end.
His artistic practice compromises his own life, he risks it in each new action.
I said I wouldn’t do ‘Self Sabotage’ again but in a way I did it again. When in 2014 I went to the Plaza de la Revolución in Havana with the intention of putting up a microphone so that any citizen could speak freely about the future of Cuba, it was in a way like putting a symbolic gun to my head. He was aware that there would be consequences, that he would never be able to exhibit there again, and that the confrontation was escalating. The performance, Tatlin’s Whisper
This interview will be read. Are you worried?
Well, read it. They watch my Facebook, how ridiculous, and there are also people who are dedicated to bullying me on the networks. They are the ‘cyberclarias’ (the clarias are predatory fish that leave nothing behind), an army of young people who create false accounts and spend the day slandering them online. They are more sophisticated for repression than people can imagine.
Was your birth as an artist linked to your disenchantment with the Revolution?
The Cuban government is the best and largest factory of dissidents in Cuba. They are the ones that make you that. In my case, I was a young, naive artist who didn’t know what to do with my work, and I decided to pay homage to Ana Mendieta, a Cuban artist who had just died in a terrible way [she fell from the 34th floor of a building in New York, allegedly murdered by her partner, fellow artist Carl Andre]. What did I know about dissidence? The only thing I wanted was to get to know her better through her work and make her known in Cuba, as if it were an exercise in cultural archaeology. But they saw it as a criticism. They questioned me. ‘Stop that,’ they told me, as if it were advice. I ignored them. Then I started an independent newspaper, Postwar Memory. And for the first time they threatened me with jail. They called me back with each new work, and every time they censored me I felt ashamed, I believed that the problem was me. Because they, like good manipulators, establish a parallel between censorship and bad art. They don’t censor you because the work is critical but because of its artistic quality. Things and more things began to happen to me, and I wondered: but what have I done wrong? Until I realized it wasn’t me, it was the system. It’s very wicked.
