Art should not reveal mysteries, but enhance them, add mysteries to other previous mysteries. To introduce the strange pincer of his fingers in the depths of thought, of culture, of history, where many treasures have been stuck, and to dig well among all that we have almost forgotten or overlooked.
Sometimes the artist’s hand stretches towards the future, trying to reach the brightness of what is new, of what does not yet exist, or, on the contrary, it stops in the immediate, forced by the burden of daily uncertainties. But rarely are we lucky enough to be taken back to the primordial cave full of bats and dripping, milky walls. Unlike science, which seeks clarity and certainty, the power of art and poetry is its ability to take us into that black hole of the unknown, the blurry, the hazy, and allow us to enjoy the sunrise from the open mouth of that remote cave and not showing its yellow head over the false horizon line.
The mystery is sometimes as simple as a multitude of small guava seeds stuck to a face made of cloth that questions us with the white gaze of death. If, at night, we were to bite into that floury, perfumed fruit, should we not perhaps feel the fright, the startle of the beyond? But what do we know about the inert cemi Maquetaurie, the primordial dead? And what do we do now in front of those four human molars embedded in the open and toothless jaw of a huge turtle? Where does this strange hybridism lead us? We no longer know anything about the four divine twins or that prolific tortoise. However, that imminent progenitor bite encloses nothing less than a concise reflection on the beginning of humanity, on the origin of ourselves, according to those first inhabitants of our archipelago. Nor do we know that the sea that surrounds us, that carries us from one shore to another, that splashes us happily with its waves or drowns us in our voyages, the sea with all its fish, shells and snails emerged from the rough and gibbous back of an Arawak deity called Deminán Caracaracol, our local Prometheus, also thief of fire and cassava, without whom today we would feel cold in our bones, hunger in our stomachs and sadness in our hearts. Now he appears here, transfigured, after thousands of years, showing on his back the fossil spine of a fish as a reminder of his daring exploits.
Perhaps we are not fully aware of how poor we are without the beauty of these myths. That we have not been able to count fully on them to identify with greater clarity many aspects of our sensibility, of the hidden prehistory of our imagination, which could now season our conversations, our customs, to help build with them our current myths, our beliefs, as we have done with those coming from Europe and Africa. It should not matter that our aboriginal ancestors lacked great monuments, temples, pyramids. It is hard for us to understand that not all ancient societies needed them to structure their economic, social, cultural and religious life, just as the hundreds of indigenous jungle communities of continental America, whose lifestyle, often transhumant, nomadic, has been governed by the instability of their natural environment, have not needed them until today. Their fragility, simplicity, and frugality are not a deficiency or poverty, but an adaptive resource. We must, of course, regret and condemn the brutal extermination of our aboriginal societies and the intentional destruction of their cultural artifacts, but, at the same time, we should take advantage and enjoy with pride what colonial violence, carelessness, and the erosion of time left us as a final balance. We should count on what we have and not only yearn for what is missing.
There are indeed relatively few idols or cemies that have preserved their total integrity, the wooden dujos or ceremonial seats, the clay vessels, the stone instruments, the bone and shell ornaments, the quartz and coral beads that adorned their now frayed necklaces, as well as the true meaning of much of that aesthetic, mythical, linguistic arsenal, which includes, if not a structured and operative language, at least a large number of words with which we still identify rivers, mountains, bays, fruits, animals, food, tools. Our local Spanish is full of those sonorous and sweet words coming from the insular Arawak, whose daily use has been blurring their specific cultural identity and turning them into simply Cuban words: guayaba, majá, cocuyo, huracán, hamaca, jicotea, Cajío, Jagua, Cuyahuateje, Ariguanabo. We use them without remembering their true origin, but when we pronounce them, we feel in our mouth, on our tongue, a different, undulating tingle, a distant musicality. And that is why we know they are still here, trying to make themselves heard, to make us listen to them. Isn’t it true? No wonder Sabrina Fanego has used in the title of her first exhibition, not the tape measure of archaeologists, as a measuring system, nor the ruler or the king’s foot, but the mouth, to make visible the importance of savoring the material and verbal trifles that are part of our aboriginal legacy.
It should be said that the knowledge of many of these cultural and aesthetic values has remained practically enclosed in the specialized publications of archaeologists, and a minuscule part has circulated in an abbreviated way in school textbooks and other publications of popular scope. And although many cultural and artistic artifacts of our first settlers have long received the attention of specialists, and have been protected and studied, they remain almost beyond the visual reach of the public, well-guarded in archaeological cabinets and scarce, inaccessible museums. We must also regret that the ethnological and archaeological gaze has been obviating or disregarding the artistic gaze. The Cuban aboriginal art still does not inaugurate, as it should, the biased history of the art represented in the Cuban halls of the National Museum, which unfortunately begins its journey with our western and colonial heritage, and continues dragging the antiquated and excluding epithet of Fine Arts. Very rarely are we eyewitnesses of their physical characteristics, of the contouring of their volumes, of the irregularity or esthetic perfection of their shapes, of their textures, of the traces left on them by the hands and the rustic instruments of their creators, replaced by graphic and photographic images, when not by simple verbal descriptions. Far from our direct perception, those inheritances that could have had a very productive impact on our sensibility, on our aesthetic formation, are diminished, extinguished, forming part of the Cuban unknown, and making more painful the reality of the “myth that we lack” that the poet José Lezama Lima lamented many years ago.
But neither should we forget that the unknown is the half-open door of discoveries and rediscoveries. The seductive, provocative door. And sometimes the flicker of a ray of light from inside those mysteries is enough to try to move forward.
In Cuban art, there have been few who have approached that luminous crevice. Without forgetting the works dedicated to the subject by the multifaceted Thelvia Marín and other less publicized artists, the most important in contemporary art was undoubtedly that of the prodigious one-armed man, Jesús González de Armas, who produced an extensive graphic and pictorial oeuvre dedicated exclusively to the Indo-Cuban universe. His work began in the 1970s and lasted until the early 1990s. It was based on research and fieldwork he carried out as a speleologist throughout the island, advised by important archaeologists from the Cuban Academy of Sciences. In terms of his artistic work, Jesús de Armas managed to transcribe, study, and compare a large number of aboriginal pictographs and many other evidences, recording them directly in their original locations and in a large number of caves throughout the island, endowing them with meanings that always went beyond their original mythical and symbolic contents. His inspiration and devotion to this theme made him an undisputed pioneer in the exploration and artistic reworking of Cuban aboriginal culture. Other contemporary artists who later produced highly original works based on this Indo-Cuban universe are José Bedia and Ana Mendieta, although they soon diversified and expanded their sources of reference to other scenarios and issues.
The sudden appearance of these first works by Sabrina Fanego is therefore promising, because she enters with absolute certainty into this subject, but along unprecedented paths, not previously cleared by her predecessors. Surprisingly, there is nothing immature here nor derivative. Not even when you consider it is her first attempt. She has managed not to turn her head around, and that is a rare merit in a thematic area so neglected by our creators. Her interests have been essentially the same, but her gaze is very different. Well informed in the Indo-Cuban myths, in the characteristics of each mythical character, and in the materiality and spirituality of their culture, through study and visits to caves and other settlements, Sabrina has not resorted to literal descriptions, nor to narrative or decorative devices that facilitate her understanding. Her artistic methodologies are complex, intricate, where the reference data are so condensed that in some cases the works are absolutely hermetic. I don’t think there is anything pernicious in hermeticism. And hers seems justified to me because she has not started so much from visual verifications and comparisons based on the formal, but on the conceptual, the philosophical, the poetic. On these sources apparently distant from the archeological, she has dusted off and put into practice what Lezama Lima argued in that Coloquio con Juan Ramón Jiménez in 1937 where the issue of “insularism” and “insular sensitivity” was discussed, and on the need for poetry (in whose definition he included art) to maintain “the minimal secret strength to decide a myth” but “without going directly to stumble upon the myth.” Sabrina has been able to solve it here with that “minimal force” through the intelligent use of an objectual and installative poetics. And I am sure she will not stumble.
* This text accompanies the exhibition piedras que caben en la boca (“stones that fit in the mouth”) by Cuban artist Sabrina Fanego, curated by Liatna Rodríguez, and displayed at ONA Galería in Havana at the beginning of this year.
