{"id":264794,"date":"2023-02-09T18:07:33","date_gmt":"2023-02-09T23:07:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/?p=264794"},"modified":"2023-02-09T18:07:33","modified_gmt":"2023-02-09T23:07:33","slug":"exodus-an-artistic-denunciation-of-the-migration-drama","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oncubanews.com\/en\/culture\/visual-arts\/exodus-an-artistic-denunciation-of-the-migration-drama\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cExodus\u201d: an artistic denunciation of the migration drama"},"content":{"rendered":"

Migrants who run, who desperately scale the border walls, who travel on the roof of \u201cLa Bestia,\u201d the death train. <\/span>Migrants<\/b><\/a>\u00a0who jump into the sea, who sail crowded in fragile boats, who escape when they reach the promised land. Migrants who cry, who suffer, who die before the impassive eyes of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

All of this and more is emotionally condensed in \u201cExodus: Causes and Consequences,\u201d a video art focused on the issue of migration, on the denunciation of its dramas and pain, and which combines the talents of three well-known Cuban creators: artist <\/span>Michel Mirabal<\/b><\/a>, audiovisual director Alejandro P\u00e9rez and maestro Frank Fern\u00e1ndez, National Music Award.<\/span><\/p>\n

The piece, barely five minutes long, had its premiere this Tuesday at the theater of the National Museum of Fine Arts, in Havana, and will be part of the artistic project that Mirabal will exhibit as of May at the Venice Architecture Biennale.<\/span><\/p>\n

As part of the exhibition, entitled \u201cArchitecture of a system,\u201d the video will be shown constantly in front of seats installed in one of the rooms of the Venetian Institute of Sciences, Letters and Arts, in the Loredan Palace, from May 18 to July 23. Several rooms of this historic Venetian building will be occupied by the works of the Cuban artist during the event, curated by the experienced Nelson Herrera Ysla.<\/span><\/p>\n

Precisely, \u201cExodus…\u201d also reveals moments of the creative process of another of the pieces that will be exhibited in the famous city of canals. In it, Mirabal has intervened with splashes of paint \u2014 red, white and blue, like the colors of the flags of several countries, including Cuba \u2014 a group of passports fixed on a canvas, in another direct reference to the immigration theme, the common thread of the project.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is, logically, no shortage of references to the Cuban migratory scene, beyond passports and allegorical colors. In the archive images used in the video art, passages of the departures through the port of Mariel in 1980 can be appreciated, and also of the crisis of the rafters a decade later. But, as its creators insist, the piece extends its gaze to emigration as a painful contemporary phenomenon that spans the entire planet, from America to Africa, from the Caribbean to the Mediterranean.<\/span><\/p>\n

And in a visual analogy, the artist \u2014 and with him, the spectator \u2014 contemplates ants moving around the globe, traveling in a caravan, seen from a higher plane. Ants that represent the anguishing walk of migrants.<\/span><\/p>\n

From an overhead perspective, migrating humans resemble the path of ants searching for food and shelter. For an indolent observer, looking into the distance, they are nothing more than points in the immensity of the territory; points that move as a group.<\/span><\/p>\n