Having studied art in Cuba, Rivalta—whose career in the 1990s was launched with the support and mentorship of the late Kevin Power, deputy director of the Reina Sofía museum (2003–2005)—works in series over years, sometimes decades. She regularly inflicts her obsession, wit, and perspicacity upon history, especially driven by issues related to race, gender, and class. Unconvinced by conventional linearity, Rivalta's paintings, dioramas, drawings, photography, and performances oblige us to question any representation of tradition and modernity. Not surprisingly, a Black matryoshka doll that never actually existed in her youth is one of her most frequently seen incarnations.
Despite our ceaseless correspondence, it remains difficult for me to portray Gertrudis. Thankfully, her own words provide clues.
—Jacqueline Loss
The act of narrating is very much associated with written expression, but undoubtedly your work takes hold of the word in a very particular way, leading us to psychological and affective nooks and crannies that are part of the collective. I’m thinking about magazine titles, slogans, headlines, dialogues among characters in your dioramas. Could you explain what some of the most important intertexts for you are, and the relationship you have with the written word?
Narrating is sharing knowledge and the way you know. By creating works that function as “narrative objects,” I try to give form to the experience of the Cuban context. It is marvelous to be able to narrate what makes a nation tick in its different stages, especially in its most controversial moments, through the language of the image, or the combination of image and text. The creative process of narrating by ordering the chaos of information and contextualizing what seduces us, helps us build a truthful story, resolve doubts, and give meaning to the whole. Often spectators, critics, and even artists are looking for veracity in what is narrated, or we question the veracity of the creative process, but we should carry out such a reading cautiously, because when the artist narrates, there is no mistake; it is a sacred moment, an act of freedom of expression, and with their interpretation, they seek to provide accurate answers, even if that seems to be a contradiction. As I understand this process, in my work the answers and conclusions on the same subject can be multiple and all valid. There is no true or false. It’s not realism, nor false realism, but it isn’t science fiction either. To narrate creatively is to offer alternative visions to other vital possibilities.
How can a reality as complex as the Cuban one be narrated only through these images? It’s essential to combine them with the written word. What is fundamental is the critical vision that takes hold of the act of narrating. It is the hidden mystery, especially when you take risks and try to imitate and show through your work that kind of silence, the sinister game of destruction and self-destruction that spirals upwards, the stifled scream, the sadness, the bizarre solutions, that very rare sensation that nothing is happening, immobility, fear, despair; the passing of hours, months, days, and years upon the health and the will of the people, the “good old collective.”
On the other hand, countries in the Socialist Bloc used both written expression and image—very powerful phrases and images—in the process of implementing classical socialism. If you play with them and investigate them more closely, you can enter complex linguistic territories of domination and notice the high doses of neuropsychological manipulation. In the text “Marxism and the Problem of Linguistics,” supposedly written by Stalin, a linguistic polemic between Soviet analysts is hypothetically settled. As soon as you start reading the prologue, your hair stands on end; you feel the threat. This text analyzes issues such as language as the superstructure of the base, understood as society's economic system. Stalin makes it clear that language is not part of the superstructure, but that it helps enrich it through incorporating new terms invented by the new socialist state. What he does not talk about is how other terms are suppressed and buried. For example, in Cuba señor, señora, were eliminated to make way for compañero, compañera, and the adoption of the rare word, camarada. My God! My piece, Quinceañera con Kremlin, references this (01, 2004). In short, written expression is a kind of expression of the word that, in my work, together with the appropriate image narrates a feeling, a struggle, oblivion. This can be seen in the recreation of the titles of the magazines Mujeres and Muchacha, or the pieces that make up my most recent solo show Selected Pages that you curated for Thomas Nickles Project in New York City.
Yes, the language of media (in the case of Cuba this is largely state-run) is very close to your multi-generic work—painting, drawing, photography, performance, installations and the infinite combinations among them. This language is pervasive in magazines, but also television, cinema and the Internet, whose access (as many know) is still difficult for Cubans on the island on account of ideological limits. Could you reflect on the way your work contemplates this theme?
“Multidisciplinarity”—the different facets of the work and media with which I work—forms part of my process of providing answers to my doubts, showing the diverse interests of the society I grew up in, and highlighting realities. I am not so concerned about directly addressing the issue of institutions and their power, but rather in analyzing how this whole exercise has had a direct impact on people and especially on Afro-descendant collectives. My goal is also to discuss the reprocessing of old problems—such as poverty, segregation, racism—topics which unfortunately were silenced by the state-run media, under the pretense that the new regime eliminated them from society.
The Cuban people manifest themselves through poetry, art, philosophy, music, dance and even a good conga; it’s an ecosystem of signs used by the population to express themselves and communicate. Then we have the language of the media and propaganda that, during all these years, has been the element that has tied together, knot by knot, all these unique expressions, that cultural, social, economic and political language.
There’s a piece of mine that I’ve never been able to show on account of censorship and self-censorship. It consists of reproducing in a loop on a television set the image of José Antonio Cepero Brito, a famous and now-deceased television announcer, who delivered the news before and after the triumph of the revolution in such a way that the difference is imperceptible. The idea of this piece, entitled Cepero Brito (02, 2017), alludes to the link between ideological rupture and the voluntary acceptance of the new system. It was a kind of replacement.
Of course, what’s broadcasted on the television is in black and white, since it speaks to a period in time, despite the set being super modern. In this outline for the installation that has yet to take place, there's important text that reads: “A video from newscast from the ICAIC (the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry) or Channel 6, where they talk about the achievements of the revolution, the day to day, and then intersperse it with real images of what’s happening. The most important thing there is the fiction, the government’s fiction of the benefits to the population that are NOT REAL, AND EVERYBODY KNOWS IT. It is like the self-styled prophet who rapes the faithful’s wives and takes their husbands’ money and, to top it off, people continue to believe him. I find no explanation for this behavior. An idea for Galería Habana in 2018. In the roof. On the roof. What are we talking about?” and “One of these super cool and modern TVs, in contrast to what is broadcast. A video of Cepero Brito and, in front of it, a wooden shelf (I have to think about the material) full of glass vases.” Most of my early works are in black and white, with charcoal, since in the humblest of Cuban homes, the vast majority of us, had a black and white TV and a cold light of very few watts. So all the visual and written information had to be processed on that same scale. My work on this period and also, my conscious appropriation of Walker Evans’s photographs of Havana, constitute an attempt to show and name the different layers that make up the exuberant and intricate language of Cuban identity.
The arrival of the Internet in Cuba has exposed extensive preexisting racial, cultural, and economic gaps. They tried to delay its arrival and restrict access to different content, but one way or another, it made its way into the population. There is a work where I deal with this subject, Tres Tiempos nº III, within the triptych Tres Tiempos (03, 2022). In it I reflect upon the current moment of communications and Internet's irruption in Cuban society, with its precariousness and shortages, represented by a “clothesline” with clothes strung on it that symbolizes “gossip,” the communication of all life, based on shouts, from one courtyard to another in the neighborhoods. In contrast, the multitude of people of all ages and races trying to communicate with friends and family living outside. The unspoken and expressed desire to emigrate and the call for a different life, beyond trauma, sacrifice, and poverty. Internet use in Cuba, despite its restrictions and tight control, means a window to freedoms for the population and, for the first time, access to a vision of the world that is not the one shown by official channels. The internet was crucial within the organization of the first massive dissident act of the population committed to the future of the island, which has not gone unnoticed.
In pieces like Van Van, your approach to music, as Rosa Marquetti has pointed out, provides a very different reading. In what way is your work interdisciplinary, informed by different arts?
Van Van (04, 2004) is a little known but very interesting piece that’s part of a series I made based on information I obtained from reading Mujeres/Muchacha magazines since they brought together a wide range of sources dealing with a variety of topics about different sectors and social actors. These magazines diversified and broadened the material I worked with. In the Van Van stage, I played with information from those magazines, but I also extracted images from Raúl Corrales’s photography and from my own, from what I heard on the radio, from music, and from the theater. It has always seemed to me that visual work is also a mise-en-scène. In the case of Van Van I replace the sun in the original photo with an image of a vinyl record by Los Van Van. The idea comes from the fact that supposedly the musical group, Los Van Van, adopted its name from the old slogan: “Los diez millones, de que van, van” [We'll reach ten million!]. In 1970, Cuba tried to carry out an action that was not at all pragmatic: to cut and grind ten million tons of sugarcane, a titanic task for an impossible harvest. Despite all the effort, the predictable failure came about. Time and resources were wasted.
That is to say that interdisciplinarity helped me obtain the information I needed to transform the original images that narrated the epic of the revolutionary triumph from the beginning into more updated and realistic images. It is absurd to think that a society can be understood by only one aspect. For instance, my own observations, based on my continual reading of scholarly texts from different fields, have led me to see the extent to which Cuban people associate musical taste and consumption on differences in race, social status, level of education, and economics. I remember some expressions on the street uttered mostly by white people when there was a massive concert of these groups: “Look, there goes the ‘negrá’ behind the Van Van.” Even so, it was a time when it was necessary to keep the collective morale high, and music, with all its emotional power, had an essential value. Arts are like a sugar mill; there is popular and more elitist art, which take from what happens around them and return it adding value so that society can reincorporate it —“refined.”
It is undeniable that your work does something else. You revise the way in which historical or remarkable events and news are shown to the population. Could you tell us a little bit about this? I'm also thinking of performances of yours such as Tu cara ante la luz (Your Face in the Light), which also offers a fierce critique of hegemonic representation of the other, on a universal level.
Tu cara ante la luz (05, 2018) is a psychological piece that tries to search for the infinite portrait. At the same time, it's an infinite portrait. That can only happen if one submits any subject to stress and compromises it, because it is from that pressure that different emotions and feelings are uncovered. Tu cara ante la luz consists of reflecting onto spectators a series of images that pass quickly, with an insistent and powerful music, a version of a toque for Ochún (drumming ceremony) composed by the great master Louis Franz Aguirre. These images and sound submerge them into the most intimate part of themselves causing them to react and begin to express their inner selves in the form of gestures. Through their gestures, questions arise: How honest are we with what we say and think? How free are we really? How much falsehood and representationality do we carry? Through the grimaces and movements, we can see the joys, but also the conscious and unconscious resistance to show ourselves with our frustrations, ignorance, and attachments. The viewer can see themself in a mirror, while the video is reflected on their face and listen to the music. Questions arise such as: What am I doing exposing myself like this? How many truths or lies do I carry inside? The participant can freely take pictures of the experience and post them on their social networks.
Tu cara ante la luz delves into the universal nature of human behavior and its multiple readings, meanings, and versatility. It also delves into the portrait/self-portrait binomial to enhance the generation of new meaningful and universal contents. It’s a piece that “works” in any context, in any country, as it appeals to the deepest of inner emotions and thoughts. It’s as if it activates the participants’ subconscious, and they’re surprised by themselves.
My work also presents links between present, past and future, not in a normal evolution, but intermingled, like a standstill in time and development, a stagnation in all areas. The inertias slowed down to a complete stop and inhabit a constant loop.
I remain in awe of the diverse materials you utilize in your work. There seem to be connections between some of the materials you implement and different social sectors. Among them, mosquito netting, charcoal, asphalt, sequins, and, last but not least, sugar and coffee. Has the discourse of the material always been fundamental for you?
The thing is that I studied at the University of the Arts, formerly Instituto Superior de Artes, during the Special Period in the 1990s, and, believe me, obtaining materials was a problem. Maybe that’s where I got the need to experiment with materials—from the simplest and most accessible to the most sophisticated. Anyway, I'd have experimented under any circumstances, because I’m convinced that the effective and intelligent use of material, loading and unloading its intrinsic contents, is quite decisive in how works get interpreted and paves the way for what you wish to say.
For example, the works I made in 1995 from Walker Evans’s photography were intentionally created on the sheets we actually used at home instead of canvas. I sought to use material stained by my family's body fluids. That’s why these works are full of DNA underneath the charcoal and varnish! I wanted to emphasize the difficulty of the moment, the fragility of what sustained life, the ideology in doubt, the precariousness, and the ever increasing instability. I made these works with charcoal, a modest material, a bar of charcoal, fixing it with varnish imitating the way my grandfather used to in his carpentry. Mulata Tropical (Tropical Mulatta) (06, 1996), El Gallero (The Cockfighting Fan), and two or three other pieces are made on mosquito netting which always represent life at my grandparents’ house, and the simplicity of feeling protected, without sophistication, but honest and efficient. Mosquito netting also represents beliefs and translucent ideology. You look through them and see the other side, but in a very confusing way, and that leads to mirages. Later, my works about sugar mills were made on canvases prepared with sugar and coffee—two key elements in the Cuban economy, and with blood, because that economy speaks to people and their sacrifices. And, in my latest works, I’ve incorporated sequins that symbolize the artifice of solemnity, and at the same time, technically speaking, the infinite number of colors with which an idea can be represented. In short, they’re elements that allow me to connect in a more complete and empathetic way with the subject I am dealing with and that strengthen my bond with it.
Intersectionality is an essential term to begin to conceptualize your work. Could you go deeper into these themes and their relationship with race, gender, and class (a topic with a very particular value in Cuba)? How far does the autobiographical character of your work go?
Of course, being a woman who is Black, Cuban, an artist, poor, and not-so-young makes me and women like me a crossroads. The more intersectional you are, the worse it gets. I have no doubt about it. I live it every day. Here I turn again to Patricia Hill Collins and her theory of the “controlling image”; that is, if you fit the profile of certain prefabricated images, you are lost, whatever you do, it will be bad for you.
In Keloids I (1997), one of the first exhibitions that dared to openly address the issue of race in Cuba (and that itself had a slew of obstacles), I was the only woman participating, the rest were male visions. By this I mean that when we approach a subject from a single point of view, we leave out many truly relevant perspectives.
For example, in general, when talking about feminism in Europe today, there’s a tendency to talk about it from the perspective of the middle-class European woman, forgetting the Afro-descendant woman, who, in addition to the situations that said feminism addresses, has to face ultra-sexualization; we do not exist for them, and the worst thing is that they deny this issue. At the same time, I live the stigmatization of a foreigner who’s relegated to precarious jobs, and that brings us closer to the danger of social exclusion, with less of a family network. How can an Afro-descendant woman feel identified with this feminism that excludes us?
In Cuba, it is more or less the same, the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas (Federation of Cuban Women) did not solve basic problems of equality, nor did it solve male violence. Instead, it hid these problems, it silenced them, because everything had to be perfect, to give the appearance of being so. As a result, many women have undergone stressful and violent situations, and we are portrayed as the only ones responsible for them. That experience appears in Mulata tropical and in some drawings and photographic works, as well.
I would be incapable of making a work on subjects that are alien to me or that provoke some degree of indifference in me. I am a family person, someone for whom family has an enormous weight, perhaps because I had to leave Santa Clara at the age of thirteen to enter the art school system in Havana. My relatives are the protagonists of this story I have known and, apart from books, I learned from them how to look at the world.
I agree that my work is very psychological in nature and, although one might think it is historicist or social, my analysis focuses on individuals and they have reflected those realities they’ve had to live. In that reflection, the psychological dimension has an enormous weight.
I also take distance from events to be able to narrate them as a kind of film, and in some works, I strategically use a certain criticism to open up the terrain for situations that I want to be very exposed, as for example in the diptych, Valentinas Tereshkovas (07, 2004) or in the work Frida tu dolor no tiene más valor porque al mercado no lo comprende (Frida your pain has no more value, because the market doesn't understand it) (08, 2003). However, in the whole intellectual process of my creation, there is a fundamental phase of interiorization that, once complete, provides a more objective or more personal work, like the ones you describe.
Then, real elements, interpreted elements, and invented elements come together; they intermingle. For example, those magazine covers that never existed, except in my works, that birthday that existed in another way, but that I reconstruct to explain the history of my country (Happy Birthday, 09, 1996). However, the sense of this reality/fiction game is to provide truth, because my work is always generated from sincerity with myself and with the viewer.
