"Lo que es, es lo que ha sido", a personal exhibition by Reynier Leyva Novo, is an exercise in reflection on the structural elements (symbolic, historical, discursive) that make up the living body of the Cuban nation. Segmented in consecutive stages, the project plans to unfold along three fundamental episodes. The first one "Neither marble nor sighs (The foundations of the nation)" dismantles the figure of the hero and his instrumentalization within the teleological and authoritarian narrative of today's Cuba.

 

This first stage rescues the sculptural modality of the bust and its connotations in the cultural tradition of the West. Based on this, and through a counter-reading of patriotic symbolism (in which heroes occupy an essential place), Novo challenges the closed sense of identity fetishes and puts on the table the unfinished, organic and constantly readjusting nature of the nation and its symbols. Two installations make up the project, two works that connect and complement each other from different operative points of view. "Ni mármol ni suspiros" uses the alibi of virtual fabulation to represent and dynamize the figure of important patriots and generals of our wars of independence: Ignacio Agramonte, José Martí, Antonio Maceo, Calixto García and Máximo Gómez. "What is, is what has been" is circumscribed, on the other hand, to the first hero, the cornerstone on which the emancipatory text of the Cubans rests. A bust of José Martí is subjected to layers and layers of paint, the result of this endless retouching will be the denaturalization, through wear and tear and emptying, of the man behind the image.

 

A nation, Benedict Anderson would say, is an imagined community. Only the act of constant imagination can save a country from aging and disease.

 

Daleysi Moya