The Cuban artist Tania Bruguera (Havana, 1968) has walked naked with a decapitated bee around her neck and has eaten soil to evoke the collective suicide of the Cuban indigenous people in order not to succumb to the Spanish conquerors (The weight of guilt, 1977 ), has given workshops on how to make Molotov cocktails, brought two mounted policemen into the Tate Modern to do demonstration control maneuvers among the museum’s spectators and has a tattoo of a skull pointing at himself on his right arm to the temple with a gun, alluding to one of his most disturbing performances, Autosabotage (2009), in which he played Russian roulette in front of audiences at the Jeu de Paume in Paris and the Venice Biennale. Art, activism and politics are not matters that can be untangled in the work of the Velázquez 2021 prize, which has become one of the main scourges of the Cuban Government. Arrested and interrogated a thousand times, permanently monitored and defamed, she lives in exile in Cambridge (USA), where she works as head of media and performance at Harvard University. From there, he traveled to Barcelona last week to participate in a conference on art and power at the CCCB.
Do you still want to go back to Cuba?
They let me know through a fellow activist that they won’t let me in. But I always come back, no matter what it costs me, at whatever level. I will try in August, take note.
Two years ago he agreed to leave the country in exchange for the release of twenty prisoners, among them the rapper Maykel Castillo Pérez and the artist Hamlet Lavastida. They must have been desperate to see her out of Cuba to accept the bargain.
They were At that time there was one protest action after another and they felt weak. Many saw the departure of the artists as a defeat, but from that moment it was the people who took the initiative in the protests. And that’s great. But we didn’t leave, you can say we were deported. The Cuban dictatorship has reactivated a category that had not been used since the colony.
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 what was promised. I never thought we would reach such an impressive degree of moral, political and social impoverishment. Those who lead us are so mediocre and so afraid that they are not even able to sit at a table with people who think differently.
Decree 349, a law that legalizes censorship and takes away from artists the 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 they have used for 60 years to make propaganda. Art has been their way of entering people through the emotional part, to create affection, to manipulate people and to become a standard for something they are not. Everyone here remembers a song by Pablo Milanés or Silvio RodrÃguez from that time. Clearly they understand the power of art! And when artists use it to show reality, they are brutally held back. Our great revenge is that dictatorships pass and art remains.
She has been persecuted and retaliated against; she spent almost nine months in house arrest, practically incommunicado; has suffered post-traumatic stress… How does one overcome fear?
One does things with fear. It’s always there, like a breath. Sometimes the anger at injustices is so great that it evaporates a little. You are afraid five minutes before or after carrying out an action, and you say to yourself ‘oh, mother, how did you do it?’ What the dictatorship has not calculated is the power that injustices give. It is a greater force than fear. A few years ago I was a bit on my own, but now there is a whole generation that is very active.
Choosing performance as the fundamental material of his works, it is his 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 flat language, accessible to everyone. It is a medium very close to theater, because it uses a narrative, some bodies; but at the same time it opens up a space for the unthinkable to happen and for the spectators to have the possibility to influence what happens.
Tell me about Autosabotage, in which he played Russian roulette.
Oh, my mother! At that time, in 2009, I wanted to appeal to artists to be more active, to wake up, do something and carry it through to the last consequences. I was reading a text about what for me was political art and from time to time I would stop and play Russian roulette. He also talked about the limits of art. What is the performance limit? What is the limit of pain? is it 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. The political art is to take things to the last consequences.
