Coco Fusco. I Learned to Swim on Dry Land

Entitled, I Learned to Swim on Dry Land – the first sentence of the poetic microfiction “Swimming” (1957) by the Cuban writer Virgilio Piñera – the exhibition’s focal points are the word, the symbolic use of silence and the inversion of language with its historical and contemporary confrontation between artistic expression and figures of authority. A critical place here is occupied by Cuban poetry and literature.

The lives and imaginaries of dissident figures such as the poets Virgilio Piñera, María Elena Cruz Varela, Heberto Padilla and Néstor Díaz de Villegas, among others, as well as artists like Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and the musician Maykel Osorbo – all of whom endured the regime’s repression – interweave an audiovisual, performative and documentary journey that presents post-revolutionary Cuba to us within a complex formulation of ideas about revolution and homeland, among other things.