WORK OF THE WEEK I

Alejandro Figueredo (b. 1991).  Lives and Works in Los Angeles

Dissonance, 2015

Materials: TV monitors, headphones, kneeling pads

In this two-channel video and audio work, the voices of Assata Shakur and Tania Bruguera reveal how activists are implicated in the complexity of Cuba’s new situation after the announcement on December, 2014 of the normalization of relations with the USA.

Bruguera is a Cuban performance artist whose works challenge the Cuban government. This has caused her activity within her home country to be strictly limited. Shakur was leader of the Black Liberation Army and a member of the former Black Panther Party. She fled the U.S. in 1984 to live in political asylum in Cuba. Shakur embraces the freedom that she finds in Cuba, a freedom that is now threatened by the new relations between the countries. Conversely, Bruguera exposes the inequities and lack of freedom in Cuba. 

Dissonance incorporates audio from two sources: a phone call Bruguera made to her sister in January 2015, after Bruguera was arrested and banned from performing a piece where she intended to place a microphone in Havana’s Revolutionary Square; and Shakur’s reading of her letter written to the Pope in 1998.

In May 2013, the F.B.I. made Shakur the first woman on its list of Most Wanted Terrorists, causing her to “drop out of sight” in Cuba since then. Both Bruguera and Shakur have been hailed as freedom fighters but, by their respective country’s definition, they are political dissidents. 

Dissonance ​ invites the audience to be a participant in the conversation of these two activists and simultaneously attempts to involve the viewer in unraveling the political contradictions buried between the lines of both statements against a “certain power.”

Besides, the piece works by involving the spectator not only on a conceptual but also on a physical level: in order to listen to the work the viewer must kneel.