Havana Dispatch: Espacio Aglutinador

Sandra Ceballos has succeeded to run an alternative art space in Havana. It's named Espacio Aglutinador: not a cultural space, nor a boutique or a foundation. It does not claim to be elitist or part of the vanguard, nor populist, nor belonging to the past: it wants to be (or come close to being) fair. Its only obligation is to art (ArtLog).

The latest show at the Espacio, ¡¡¡ Curadores, go home!!! has quite a story: Sandra Ceballos had allegedly invited American visitors inlcuding no more no less than President Bush! These rumors led to the potsponement of the opening.


Actually she had not invited Mr. Bush, other Americans neither, only a punk rock group (from Havana), the Porno para Ricardo: el grupo de punk rock más controvertido de Cuba! Eventually the show opened without them.

Roberto Carlos Medina - Ocasiones

Just a few more words about Sandra Ceballos: she is a performance and installation artist; here her statement:

These works unveil my silence, they are speeches without applause or the sound of printing. They are documents, stories, signs; works that dissolve feelings under a fetishist finery, tumults of voiceless screams and moments of nonconformity. They are collected objects that trigger my state of calm. It is a chronicle of my passage through life. The matrix is the mind. The mind that zealously guards feelings, events that accumulate excesses and chimeras, anxiety and happiness, frustrations and passions, adulating mouths, cursing eyes, spirits that caress or numb my face when my head sinks into the wadding of the pillow at night.

Sandra Ceballos - REM and I, 2002
mixed media, dimensions variable

(Contemporary Art)