KOW

For over three decades, Marco A. Castillo (founder of Los Carpinteros) has addressed the failure of Cuba’s socialist utopias while emphasizing that history goes on, that change remains possible, that a political transformation of the country is still conceivable. “But that’s over now,” he says in conversation, speaking from Mexico, where he has lived since Havana has grown too dangerous. “The regime responds with such force,” he argues, “that there’s no room for political engagement anymore. Nor is there room for critique. All we can do right now is try to get some people out of prison. They’re arresting creative artists and protesters by the dozen.”

Is there a message he’s trying to convey with his exhibition at KOW? “Yes. Leftist intellectuals in Berlin, like their peers in Havana, are still prone to romanticizing the Cuban situation. And the international press doesn’t do adequate reporting. There’s not a spark of utopian socialism left in the country. It’s turned into a brutal dictatorship. But many people still refuse to say that out loud, in part because then they’d have to agree with those who’ve always been opposed to the Cuban way: that this is in reality a corrupt system, run by a bloated bureaucracy that forces people to their knees, arbitrarily imprisoning them if necessary.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Castro was still able to enlist artists and intellectuals in the project of building a revolutionary middle class. The modern and progressive design of the period became legendary—and constitutes the point of departure for Castillo’s exhibition at the gallery. “But all of that has been perverted and deformed,” he says. “There was no work on a middle-class project. In today’s perspective, we can see that it was nothing but propaganda and betrayal. And now the frustration is so immense that we hardly know which words to use to express it. In Cuba—and in other Latin American countries, too—that leaves a leftist position pretty speechless.”

Castillo’s most recent works take the deformation of concepts and ideas that are or once were regarded as progressive and enact it on a literal level. Sculptural picture-objects—three-dimensional “sketchbooks” and “posters”—are made of numerous layers, with shapes and letters cut out of them such that one term constitutes the foreground and a second term the background, undergoing conversion into one another in the space between them. A shared continuum links “Chavez” and “Caviar,” “Antifa” and “Kuklux,” but also “Power” and “Black.”

For another series of low reliefs, Castillo has cut geometric drawings into stacked layers of paper, their crisp lines and immaculate designs reflecting historic endeavors to formulate a modernist and utopian aesthetic and reprising traditions from Cuban and Latin American graphic art of the 1960s and 1970s. The word “Dictatorship,” in this register, is transmuted into a virtually indecipherable abstract-ornamental typographic composition, a play of forms that recalls the various euphemisms serving to designate today’s totalitarian systems.

In “Generación,” a film running to just under seven minutes, Marco A. Castillo unequivocally sums up the point he is trying to get across in his exhibition: Well-dressed and handsome people—middle-class creatives and intellectuals, it appears—flock to a building that exemplifies the best of Cuban modernism for a relaxed celebration. With decorations and cinematography in the style of the 1970s, the film glorifies and idealizes the gathering, only to have it end in the utterly unexpected deaths of the revelers. Artists, photographers, writers, architects, and curators drawn from contemporary Cuba’s intellectual scene appear in the roles of the protagonists, engendering a temporal ellipsis between the utopian past and a frustrating present that has no future.