WORK OF THE WEEK VIII

Lázaro Saavedra (1964)

Site Specific

6th Havana Biennial, La Cabaña

The subject of this Biennial was The Individual and Their Memory.  Lazaro laid out a cemetery where the headstones had no inscriptions, which makes you think of an individual in the abstract, forgotten; or gives the work of art the quality of a mausoleum. In reference to this particular work of art, critic Ruben de la Nuez wrote: “….the possibility of reproducing values from the memory of the I with arguments of others leads to autocratic practices”.  This is the conceptual underlying of Sepultados por el Olvido (Buried by Being Forgotten), the installation by Lazaro Saavedra… To unearth the artistic practices buried by an absolutely hegemonic establishment was the motivation that gave origin to the Biennials in Havana”.

At the end in a footnote he continues: “Saavedra’s graveyard is placed in a spot that in different times of our history was the site of executions by firing squad. This charged this piece of art with complimentary significances that gave it complexity and the power to communicate beyond the action it represented.”