10 Volumes: Fragments of a Shared Landscape

What does it mean to see—not only with eyes, but through the porous lens of memory, uncertainty, and the residue of lived experience? What becomes visible when we are no longer looking for resolution, but for resilience?

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10 Volumes: Fragments of a Shared Landscape assembles ten artistic voices whose work resists the urge to resolve, explain, or conclude. Instead, they dwell in ambiguity, speaking through implication, repetition, silence, and form. These are fragments that invite attention, reflection, and a willingness to dwell in the space between meanings. The exhibition proposes no singular reading, but rather a constellation of interpretations that shift with context, proximity, and time. It is a field of questions—a polyphonic terrain shaped by suggestion and simultaneity.

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These ten “volumes” presented here can be thought of not as a chapter, but as a kind of vessel. Each artist contributes to a shared yet fragmented landscape, one that is at once personal and political, intimate and collective. These works are shaped by the tensions of daily life in Cuba, yet they move beyond documentary or testimonial forms. Instead, they engage a poetics of inference: they suggest, allude, conceal, and reveal, often simultaneously. Symbolism, spatial intervention, reclaimed materials, and references to the everyday act not as mere aesthetic choices, but as tools of quiet resistance and coded expression.

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To underscore the layered complexity of these narratives, the exhibition unfolds in a maze-like grid. This spatial configuration—revelation and concealment, becomes a metaphor in itself: for the often obstructed paths artists must navigate within Cuban society to speak their truths, to create space for ambiguity, critique, or dissent. But the maze also implicates the audience's own act of traversal. It draws viewers into the same process of maneuvering—of negotiating meaning, retracing steps, adjusting perspective. Each turn becomes a micro-decision, each artist's presentation a shifting terrain, echoing the complexities of both artistic survival and interpretive engagement under constraint. This spatial choreography reflects a broader condition: in the language of material and movement. One in which direct speech is not always possible, and where art becomes a place to encode and protect experience.

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10 Volumes is about how art carries us—across borders, through memory, into questions of belonging and dislocation. The political lives here not in slogans, but in textures: the choice to use a reclaimed material, the evocation of a threatened landscape, the refusal to render trauma legible. These gestures, quiet as they may seem, are not neutral. They assert presence, insist on complexity, and push against the erasures of dominant narratives.

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Crucially, this is not a landscape of isolation. Though fragmented, the works build a dialogue—sometimes quiet, sometimes dissonant—across forms and experiences. The notion of a “shared landscape” is presented as both a hope and a provocation. Who shares it, and under what conditions? What solidarities can form between fragmented lives? How might art trace or imagine new paths across borders, both literal and symbolic?

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The idea of a "shared landscape" is both aspirational and unstable. It gestures toward common ground—yet also asks: shared by whom, and at what cost? In inviting multiple interpretations, the exhibition recognizes that meaning is not fixed. It shifts with perspective, with language, with memory. The viewer’s own experiences inevitably color what is seen—and what is missed.

 

Ultimately, this project invites a kind of intimate politics: one grounded not in grand declarations, but in the act of careful attention. To linger with these works is to accept not knowing fully, and to find meaning in that openness. In a time when certainty is often demanded and nuance diminished, 10 Volumes proposes another rhythm—slower, softer, but no less urgent.

 

This is a landscape of fragments. And like all fragments, they call us to piece together—not a singular truth, but a constellation of relations.

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Curated by Malin Barth

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