To the Bitter End: Civic Practices in Cuba at the Beginning of the 21 st Century
Invited by INSTAR (Instituto de Artivismo Hannah Arendt) and the operators who conceptualized and are realizing the project “Operational Factography” at documenta fifteen, [NAME] organized To The Bitter End: Civic Practices in Cuba at the Beginning of the 21 st Century—an exhibition that begins to map, with the help of some of the protagonists, a network of independent collectives that emerged in Havana during the first decade of the century. Where the groups gathered in this exhibition are distinct from the opposition that Cuban institutions have faced in the past lies in their refusal of a liberal restructuring of society. Instead, they align themselves with anarchist ideals of statelessness, horizontal structures, mutual aid, egalitarian distribution of social benefits, and the destruction of the value-form. The critical interstice that these collectives managed to pry between old style dissidence and institution, between defunct revolutionary pasts and neoliberal proliferation, is the result of the manner in which they changed the imaginaries of the future by meticulously and collectively working on libertarian (in the anarchist sense) counterhegemonies, by holding fast to the notion that another world is, indeed, possible.
To The Bitter End: Civic Practices in Cuba at the Beginning of the 21 st Century presents bulletins, zines, images, video documentation, articles, and correspondence that serve as proof of a handful of the many practices that took shape during this period. These documents are accompanied by a site-responsive installation by artist Ernesto Leal.
DOWNLOAD exhibition text: To The Bitter End
