Marco A. Castillo
CASA NEGRA
17 Mar - 15 Apr 2023
Marco Castillo and his family have lived in exile in Mexico from Cuba since 2019. His new exhibition at KOW turns the spotlight on the censorship and repression regime in Cuba, which has grown more severe in recent years. What sets it apart from the exertion and impact of violence in some other autocracies is its—well, we might say: more participatory nature. It isthe expression of a “good,” left-wing government and its dedicated citizens, whose joint measures of coercive domestic political violence have drawn little international attention.
Casa Negra, 2022
Casa Negra, Castillo’s new film, illustrates a practice of the collective branding of “deviationists”—critical thinkers, dissenters of any kind, those who are enemies of the revolution in the eyes of the regime and some of their fellow citizens—that has been commonplace since its implementation by Fidel Castro in the 1960s. Be they artists, intellectuals, liberals, or bourgeois: an outraged mob besets a home, raising a ruckus and noisily debating with the residents, and paints the windows and doors, the façade and the front yard, even the plants and tubs pitch-black. In this instance, a woman and child are inside the house; they are berated for the way they live their lives. The scenes recall zombie movies in which the monsters try to storm a worldthat is to all appearances perfectly normal.
Yet these are not monsters; they are colleagues and neighbors. And the scenes are not fictional but a kind of reenactment. Marco Castillo collected information and then reconstructed on film what many victims of such actions in Cuba have documented in footage streamed live on social media. All dialogues in the film are collages based on heated arguments and insults captured on video. On the phone with KOW, Castillo explains that these abuses are punishments for an alleged lack of solidarity with the Cuban people and its socialist revolution, instigated by the secret service and police and carried out by friends and acquaintances of the victims; some of the perpetrators are pressured into participating, while others are motivated by genuine conviction.
Castillo also mentions that he himself was involved in similar actions as a child; the memory has been a lasting source of shame. He has first-hand experience of these situations. So do the performers in his film: Cuban exiles living, like Castillo, in Merida, Mexico, a city that bears some resemblance to Havana and has long been a destination for émigrés from the island. Shooting the film there, he says, “I didn’t even need to tell them what to do. They were all familiar with these brutal rituals and knew exactly how they work. It’s a kind of tradition, a piece of folklore. Repression in Cuba is a collective business in which we have all taken part at one point or another. Virtually no one, myself included, is free of personal guilt.”
Water Paintings, 2018
A new law passed in Cuba in 2018 requires artists to obtain advance authorization from the government before engaging in any kind of artistic activity. The Decree 349 scrupulously lists what artists are and are not allowed to do if they want to obtain a permit. It is forbidden, for example, to depict members of the political class in works of art, except in complimentary fashion. Without authorization, artists are not only barred from making or selling art. They are prohibited from engaging in any kind of artistic activity, whether in public or privately.
Marco Castillo and some of his allies sought to renegotiate the law with the government, but in vain. It came into force. During those days and weeks, Castillo painted the series of white paintings that are now making their debut outside Cuba at KOW. The government’s art inspectors monitored him closely to make sure he did not make any work that was not according to their standards. At night, he would stretch canvases over frames, prime them, and paint on them with water, whose traces soon vanished. What we now see are not blank canvases but impossible pictures executed with painstaking care and perhaps to brilliant effect. Just without paint. Witnesses to, manifestos from, an imposed silence. Muzzled art.
Black Paintings, 2023
Over the past several months, Castillo has made another series of works. This time around, the pictures are black, a response to the windows smeared with black paint from the public excommunications shown in the film. Castillo’s media are flat wall-mounted acrylic glass boxes: painting-size abstract representations of the window motif. They are covered with the traces of hands covered in black paint—traces that expressively convey the emotional, social, and political drama of the assaults. At the same time, there is no genuine expression in these works, no drama, no accusation, not even actual subjectivity.
Castillo merely treated the media the way supplies are handled in the normal operation of an artist’s studio. Assistants—their hands blackened—helped him lift the objects from crates, carry them through the studio, mount them on a wall, take them down again, and put them back in the crates. No more, and no less. Only they did exactly what was declared illegal in Cuba: things that artists do every day, maybe hanging something here and unhanging something there, touching things and turning them around, without regard for the political and ideological line with which a finished work might be thought to be aligned.
While it is perhaps inevitable when talking about art to also talk about beauty, Marco Castillo finds this problematic in this context. If there is a certain appeal in these works, we note, it might lie in the conceptual approach of using simple gestures of art handling to create the impression of strong expression and emotion that may very well represent experiences of violence, but without ever making a gesture of subjective expressive articulation. This is interesting for the complicated discussions about good and problematic forms of artistic criticism and representation of violence.
Casa Negra, 2022
Casa Negra, Castillo’s new film, illustrates a practice of the collective branding of “deviationists”—critical thinkers, dissenters of any kind, those who are enemies of the revolution in the eyes of the regime and some of their fellow citizens—that has been commonplace since its implementation by Fidel Castro in the 1960s. Be they artists, intellectuals, liberals, or bourgeois: an outraged mob besets a home, raising a ruckus and noisily debating with the residents, and paints the windows and doors, the façade and the front yard, even the plants and tubs pitch-black. In this instance, a woman and child are inside the house; they are berated for the way they live their lives. The scenes recall zombie movies in which the monsters try to storm a worldthat is to all appearances perfectly normal.
Yet these are not monsters; they are colleagues and neighbors. And the scenes are not fictional but a kind of reenactment. Marco Castillo collected information and then reconstructed on film what many victims of such actions in Cuba have documented in footage streamed live on social media. All dialogues in the film are collages based on heated arguments and insults captured on video. On the phone with KOW, Castillo explains that these abuses are punishments for an alleged lack of solidarity with the Cuban people and its socialist revolution, instigated by the secret service and police and carried out by friends and acquaintances of the victims; some of the perpetrators are pressured into participating, while others are motivated by genuine conviction.
Castillo also mentions that he himself was involved in similar actions as a child; the memory has been a lasting source of shame. He has first-hand experience of these situations. So do the performers in his film: Cuban exiles living, like Castillo, in Merida, Mexico, a city that bears some resemblance to Havana and has long been a destination for émigrés from the island. Shooting the film there, he says, “I didn’t even need to tell them what to do. They were all familiar with these brutal rituals and knew exactly how they work. It’s a kind of tradition, a piece of folklore. Repression in Cuba is a collective business in which we have all taken part at one point or another. Virtually no one, myself included, is free of personal guilt.”
Water Paintings, 2018
A new law passed in Cuba in 2018 requires artists to obtain advance authorization from the government before engaging in any kind of artistic activity. The Decree 349 scrupulously lists what artists are and are not allowed to do if they want to obtain a permit. It is forbidden, for example, to depict members of the political class in works of art, except in complimentary fashion. Without authorization, artists are not only barred from making or selling art. They are prohibited from engaging in any kind of artistic activity, whether in public or privately.
Marco Castillo and some of his allies sought to renegotiate the law with the government, but in vain. It came into force. During those days and weeks, Castillo painted the series of white paintings that are now making their debut outside Cuba at KOW. The government’s art inspectors monitored him closely to make sure he did not make any work that was not according to their standards. At night, he would stretch canvases over frames, prime them, and paint on them with water, whose traces soon vanished. What we now see are not blank canvases but impossible pictures executed with painstaking care and perhaps to brilliant effect. Just without paint. Witnesses to, manifestos from, an imposed silence. Muzzled art.
Black Paintings, 2023
Over the past several months, Castillo has made another series of works. This time around, the pictures are black, a response to the windows smeared with black paint from the public excommunications shown in the film. Castillo’s media are flat wall-mounted acrylic glass boxes: painting-size abstract representations of the window motif. They are covered with the traces of hands covered in black paint—traces that expressively convey the emotional, social, and political drama of the assaults. At the same time, there is no genuine expression in these works, no drama, no accusation, not even actual subjectivity.
Castillo merely treated the media the way supplies are handled in the normal operation of an artist’s studio. Assistants—their hands blackened—helped him lift the objects from crates, carry them through the studio, mount them on a wall, take them down again, and put them back in the crates. No more, and no less. Only they did exactly what was declared illegal in Cuba: things that artists do every day, maybe hanging something here and unhanging something there, touching things and turning them around, without regard for the political and ideological line with which a finished work might be thought to be aligned.
While it is perhaps inevitable when talking about art to also talk about beauty, Marco Castillo finds this problematic in this context. If there is a certain appeal in these works, we note, it might lie in the conceptual approach of using simple gestures of art handling to create the impression of strong expression and emotion that may very well represent experiences of violence, but without ever making a gesture of subjective expressive articulation. This is interesting for the complicated discussions about good and problematic forms of artistic criticism and representation of violence.