Havana Spaces

Alejandro Acevedo (Camagüey, 1988) photographs Spaces. Small galaxies presumably inanimate of Havana.

The human being, even if present, is here above all a good guess. Someone has left or someone has not yet arrived. Or else that someone is a massive object —his silhouette defining an impenetrable event horizon— but humble and silent in the infinitesimal quality of the photographic frame.

What do these Spaces tell us, however, about this time? What conjectural Huns have swept through here?

What people from the future will arrive to depose the icons, tidy up or burn the stationery, tear down or whitewash the walls again, take down and wear that dress, or turn it into scraps?

“I am interested in the scene manifesting itself, so I visit the spaces day and night, at different times, until I find the atmosphere, the right person, the cars, the reflections, the look that, without editing, tell the story,” said Alejandro Acevedo.

To whom from the past or from the future is the dog barking at? Which face is still going to look at itself in that mirror? Who was, and whom did this shadow love?

How is it that we are being thought of, outlined, defined by these spaces? And how have we become these impeccable ghosts, this lost memory of the future, these stubborn absences?

About this first personal exhibition —October/November 2021, in the hallway of the CRAI of the University of Alcalá, Madrid— Direlia Lazo has written: “Acevedo, self-taught, began this series as true things begin, without a plan. The images resulted from moments of introspection, when the serene gaze weaves together the multiple visual textures of what surrounds us. […] The repetition, going back to the space, inhabiting it for a second and a third time, discovers the skin of the unspeakable, what remains in the imaginary of reiteration, and suddenly someone says: ‘It’s Havana.’ And the loops, the contained stories, expand.”