"In Cuba 60"

c-print on aluminum on acrylic glass (Diasec)

A Mute Apostrophe¹
History includes a wealth of cities that have disappeared: cities that were engulfed like the legendary Ys, buried like Pompeii and Herculaneum, or destroyed like Hiroshima and Nagasaki. More rare are those that become dormant, cities frozen in history which decay steadily. Havana is such a city, and nothing more appropriate than the sharp eye of a photographer who is at same time an archaeologist and an artist, to seize forever on film the traces of this fascinating paralysis. For fifty years Havana has been standing still, and Angel Marcos, like Marville or Atget, presents us through a series of dazzling images the architecture of a city whose façades, like a theatre set, are evocative of a ghost city. Who is to blame? The United States, with its determination to look after its economic interests? Or a regime that has not been capable of providing a human face to its, nonetheless, necessary socialism? The photographer avoids judgment; he simply records as faithfully as possible the reality of things, leaving to each one of us the task of bestowing meaning on them.
In the well-known book by American journalist Carlton Beals, entitled The Crime of Cuba (published in 1933), Walker Evans also set his gaze on this island, which at the time was under the iron rule of dictator Gerardo Machado. Without any sympathy toward the regime, although always trying to keep his distance, Walker Evans went through the streets of Havana looking for an urban and social typology. He mixed portraits taken on the street with photographs of architecture, always within a meaningful context. Adverts, signs and graffiti naturally found a proper place in his field of vision. By accumulating signs, Evans strived to overcome the visible surface of planes and to go beyond "what they show and what they stand for"². More than sixty years later, Angel Marcos pursues the same insight. But he substitutes the neutrality of Evans frontal taxonomical inventory with a poetic and political inventory. In his large colour ‘canvases’, two discourses are juxtaposed: the historical one from before Castro's revolution and the ensuing one, now outdated. Unlike the urban utopias carried out by socialist governments in certain central and eastern European countries, in Havana Castro did not try to make a clean sweep of its architectural heritage, as happened in Bratislava or in Bucharest. On the contrary, this heritage has been preserved, or rather abandoned. What has been constructed is a discourse based on an ubiquitous ideology. The shock of formulas and slogans has been added to the weight of buildings. By forcing us, through his large formats, to a reading of the detail, Ángel Marcos exposes the unique insularity of a Cuba that stands outside of time and now also outside of History. The interest of this work lies precisely in this mute confrontation. Real life seems to have deserted these streets and houses. They no longer seem to reverberate with the laughter of its inhabitants: "death captures life". Therefore, and herein lies all the strange beauty of Ángel Marcos' work, each image is like a Fayum portrait, and each one of them calls out to us in silence ...
(Jean-Luc Monterosso, Director of the Maison Europeénne de la Photographie)

(1) The title A Mute Apostrophe is inspired by Jean-Christophe Bailly's book on the Fayum portraits (Une apostrophe muette)
(2) Gilles Mora, Walker Evans: Habana 1933, Contrejour, Paris 1989, p22.