The photographic series Pending Memories is inspired by industrial remnants, unfinished construction projects, propaganda billboards, local carnival paraphernalia, all inspiring supposed monuments of social projects related to Cuban contemporary history.

The photographs are a collection of black and white landscapes. The centre of the image is occupied by metallic structures that seem to have been abandoned. The purpose of these installations is unknown; and the camera documents with archaeological interest the sites of their locations. The feeling of abandonment in these scenes is reinforced by the evidence of deterioration and by the way nature has penetrated them. The human subject does not exist; all that remains of him is evidence of his passage in the very structure that he seems to have dispensed with.

The set of images generates a deep sense of strangeness, provoking the emergence of questions and a scrutiny in every detail of the scene. The spectator questions the reality that is photographed, the veracity of its existence and the reason that gave rise to it.

All this happens because we are facing a simulacrum. Pending Memories consists of a group of photographs that have been constructed, not taken. The structures that appear as the protagonists of these images are created virtually, based on drawings conceived and designed to be inserted later in photographed scenes.

In the process, my intention is to achieve the greatest credibility in a work that is created by combining digital content with direct photography. To make it realistic I approach the creation of these images with the depth of a construction project: I involve technical knowledge about engineering and structural logic considering the physical properties of the different elements that support these constructions.

In my photographs I move from the base of a strong critical component. My vision is not based on regret about the loss, but rather I recognize the fracture in the utopian conception of the social project on which Cuba has been built in the last six decades and the present lack of paradigms that could lead to a future project.

Pending Memories connects with my perception of the Cuban reality and the crisis it has lived through for so long. The collection of similar images generates a reality that piles up structures in disuse, left to time and the laziness of an exhausted territory. The "photographed" constructions function as metaphors for the inert remains of a society that is sustained by the spectral foundation of memory. The residues of the epic past and the current precariousness of the epic of that time appear as ruins of the fiction that still has to be lived.

Snark Production