LEANDRO FEAL AND HIS GREEN HAVANA
The Green Havana project is a captured sample of a time and an attitude, the same one that transits between evasion and hedonism and the social reality of the Cuban capital, a unique and referential site of that almost isolated Cuba and of a popular culture grown in the shadow of political influences.
Leandro Feal (Havana, Cuba, 1986) has produced a series of snapshots that capture this essence and that point to the future of a whole generation of young people, including himself, who have grown up in that dynamic, surrealist city with a distorting capacity, and that turns their memories into greenish negatives.
The allusion and the essential part of the exhibition lies in the symbolism behind Caribe (2020-22), the seminal piece behind these series of photographs and which represents a television set of that brand, an idiosyncratic device in Cuban homes and which, with its island manufacture licensed from the Soviet Union, alludes to that temporary tunnel of memories dyed green just as the screens were painted to obtain a failed sensation of reverie. From that action, other memories emerge from that leisure installed in the generational halo, where recurring characters of the intellectual and artistic scene coexist with social realism and brutalism in social service, creating a pressing contrast.
Although Green Havana is the central axis of the exhibition, it is also the perfect excuse to complement the concept of leisure, of the emotional hangover, of the distraction of a youth, factors represented in La fiesta vigilada, a video photo essay that travels through the city's nightlife as a symbol of resistance and raises that first censored PM to the altars of references, the same ones that also constitute the complementary installation that leads to a critique and a certain nostalgia for the ephemeral nature of the festive moment and its construction in the generational identity.
Green Havana, by Leandro Feal, can be seen until August 3, 2024 at Galería El Apartamento, Calle de la Puebla, 4, Madrid, Spain.
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