Green Havana is a personal project by photographer Leandro Feal that takes place over the last nine years and takes place in Havana, to be more precise in the Havana night. The exhibition unveils the most recent production of an artist who moves from the most traditional photography to experimentations and proposals that in themselves pervert the most orthodox sense of the medium.

The title in question takes its name from a series produced between 2020 and 2022 that explores the possibilities of a Havana that is at once ancient and contemporary, surreal, intimate, mestizo, domestic. A contradictory and empty place, where the party is escape, evasion. In Leandro's city it is almost always at night and here lies one of the keys to the project because Green Havana is a succession of episodes, of risky angles, of heroes and objects, of desires and frustrations in a continuous intention to represent an instant in which the illusion of its protagonists played at becoming reality.

The photographs here do not correspond to the tourist paradigm that reflects a Caribbean city designed for pleasure and fun, visually prostituted in its most reproduced cliché. Feal's Havana is a city stopped in time, at times ghostly and waiting for an unlikely miracle, essentially dystopian and scarcely functional, where pleasure and fun reach a clandestine category. The night sheltered the construction of a utopia.

One of the elements that reinforce the intention of representing the city as a scenario of distorted realities is the use of negative images and the use of tonal shifts, a process of changing tonalities generated through digital mechanisms. Here the color green acquires a leading role in most of the images, as in the case of the black and white television sets of the Caribe brand, produced in the former Soviet Union, but assembled on the island. The images of Green Havana resist in some way to this persistence of monochrome, as did the Caribbean televisions, whose screens many families decided to paint with colored stripes to see a world in color through the screen that the terminal was unable to offer.

The exhibition closes with a 55-minute photo essay titled The guarded party and which takes its name from the novel of the same name by Cuban writer Antonio José Ponte. Following in the footsteps of such solid referents as PMa documentary filmed in 1961 by Sabá Cabrea Infante (younger brother of Guillermo Cabrera Infante) and Orlando Jiménez Leal which reflects the Havana nightlife of the early years of the revolution in just thirteen minutes, Feal's party has something in common with the party of PMBoth ceased to exist, the danger and provocation that the party itself represented for the island authorities demanded its end. There is no innocent party, they must have thought.

PM(Pasado Meridiano) has the sad merit of being the first object of the revolutionary censorship and its subtext is directly linked to the central body of Feal's photographic essay. Only two years later, in 1963, the French filmmaker Agnès Varda traveled to Cuba to film Greetings Cubaina half-hour photomontage that nicely, and with a certain inclination to exoticism, traces the revolutionary changes. Both the short film by Sabá and Orlando Jiménez and the photomontage by Varda underpin the structure of Leandro's photo essay, although the countercultural photography of Nan Goldin, the early rayograms of Man Ray, the ironic cinema of Chris Marker or Havana Solothe experimental film by Juan Carlos Alom, are leaving a fertile track through which Feal moves with balance.

At Leandro's nightly party there is a continuous parade, at times frenetic, of consecrated artists, aspiring artists, artists without work, musicians, sensitive men addicted to sex, celibates, desperate young people who don't seem to be so, local celebrities, art critics, entrepreneurs, heroes and villains. On this plural army that in itself is a miracle, there are four voices with more presence than the rest of the mortals of his great night: Tania Bruguera, Hamlet Lavastida, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara and Carlos Manuel Álvarez.

In its last minutes, the party ceases to be a party, the party ends and an empty and deserted city appears announcing the end and Carlos Manuel's voice-over reveals that he was kidnapped and interrogated after leaving the party on any given Saturday and taken, against his will, to his provincial city.

Just like the PM night, the night of The guarded party It hardly exists anymore, it was almost an optical illusion, a mirage, a place we remember, but to which we cannot return. The party succumbed to pessimism and fragmentation, the party was dynamited because the improvised mixture of its protagonists was the germ of a society that frightened the authorities and the vast majority of its protagonists decided to take a voluntary exile or suffered a forced exile. The portal that represented the party was extinguished, it remains to reinvent it unattended.

Osbel Suarez