For nearly fifteen years now, Levi Orta has devoted himself to dismantling, with a kind of sickly thoroughness, the clockwork mechanism that is the constitution of the real through disciplinary and educational strategies aimed at normalizing a couple of political fictions, to make them appear natural and univocal. It must be said that he has done it well, not only because by making explicit the ways in which power takes shape beyond pure and hard repression, he points out our participation in the tacit consensus of common sense and the sensible (in the Rancierian dimension of the term), but also because he puts on the table for debate the factual possibility of dissent and opposition. Opening the door is no small thing, the principle of all change is based on the awareness of our role as facilitators of the status quo.    

From his work in the territory of the relations between art, society and politics, we have been able to follow the arc that goes from the exhibition of the symptomatology of power to the intervention -often mediated by cynicism- of that symptomatology, with a view to questioning the legitimacy of the discourses that determine what can and must be seen. Until now, Levi has presented himself as a sort of omniscient narrator and "character" of his pieces, a somewhat bizarre combination insofar as the performer seems to be unaware, or plays at being unaware, of what the author is clear about. This would be given, in the first place, by the investigative, processual and performative nature of his work, then, by the fact that Orta, at all times, has thought of himself as a viable agent of the questionings and criticisms of a community that transcends and contains him. Levi speaks from within and from without, an indeterminate site that is difficult for us to fix on the map.

But that is going to change in this project ("Goodbye Spain") because Levi begins to reevaluate and take charge of his own place within the technology of power: his privileges, his spaces of representation, his origins and belongings. For these exercises he makes use of the same tools with which he dissected the uniform fabric of the reality we have been given, only now the artist himself and his family history become the object of scrutiny. How else, if not, could Orta continue to appeal to the re-qualification of the normalized spaces in which power insists on reproducing itself like a virus? "Adiós España" functions as an intersectional network in which the role of art and artists in totalitarian societies, the frustration and attrition of the generation of Cubans that accompanied the political process of 1959, the cyclical nature of history and defeat, the patriarchal, macho genetic burden of the hard men of the Revolution and their children and grandchildren (our fathers and grandfathers, our brothers) are analyzed in the first person.

It is striking, however, that despite the self-referential turn of the works that make up the exhibition (National Record, The curse of the west corner house y Adiós España), the resizing of the scope of artistic actions to more limited scales, intimate if you will, the project includes different levels of reading (historical, symbolic, dissensual, political) and, most importantly, different propositions about individual responsibility in the face of the dismantling of our privileges and enclaves of enunciation. Who we are and what community we really represent when we speak for others. What kind of fictional model we perpetuate and which ones we dispute from the micro territory of creative praxis, thought and ethical management of those advantages with which the system rewards us.   

"Farewell Spain" operates as a farewell in several senses: first of all, of course, to the country where Levi lived and produced a good part of his work in the last fifteen years; the country, too, where his son was born. It also closes an essential journey, a kind of flight towards the outside of oneself in which man gropes for the answers that will allow him to understand his place in the world. In order to answer these questions, Orta has had to carry out a series of disassemblings that concern him as a Cuban, an artist, a man, a middle-class man and a white man. He has had to turn to his family history and contrast it in the light of the recent history of the Cuban nation. The result of these processes of problematization and questioning would lead him to participate in that change pointed out by Jacques Rancière in relation to the critical art of the two thousand, that is, to move from the parodic pointing out of the devices of power to the perceptive reworking of "the features of our history and the signs of our community". The journey, then, has been back and forth, from the outside to the inside, from the symptom to the structure. From society to man, from man to community.   

Daleysi Moya