untitled series

printed photographs, painted signs, video documentation with sound, 2021

Repudiation acts have been a habitual practice in Cuba since the 1960's. They consist of groups of citizens, orchestrated by the Department of State Security or organizations subordinate to the Communist Party, partaking in verbal abuse, physical attack or vandalization of the property of those who disagree with the government. These acts constitute an authorized show of violence, seeking to prove popular support of the system from the side of the public, at once functioning as a warning to anyone who opposes the state, and establishing the obligatory nature of ideological obedience in the collective imagination of Cuban people. In these Repudiation acts and rallies, political slogans, offenses, threats and provocative language are often used as a call for the social expulsion of those who are unfaithful to the government.

For the artist, this work is a personal gesture, almost a ritual of transforming and detaching oneself from violence. The artist herself suffered 5 acts of repudiation from 2020 to 2021, and these paintings reproduce some of the offensive and threatening phrases that were spoken against her. These words, now painted and fixed on a material support, are abandoned in the place where they were first issued, restoring to the social space the immediate memory of their own political violence—the obligation to digest.

Camila Ramírez Lobón (b. 1995, Camagüey, Cuba) is an independent artist. Her work focuses on the storytelling and documentation of social, historical and political imaginaries that subvert totalitarian narratives through individual memory. Lobón graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts of Camagüey in 2014, and received her BFA in 2019 from the University of Arts (ISA) in Havana. Currently, Lobón works as the coordinator of the Institute of Artivism Hannah Arendt (INSTAR) in Havana. Lobón’s recent exhibitions include From a Rockefeller Fan to a Kruschev Follower, Havana, Cuba (2019); A qui de troi, La Centrale Galerie Powerhouse, Montreal, Canada (2019); The Lost Country, Sometimes Art Space, Havana, Cuba (2019); Anima, Espacio Centeya, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2019); Long-eared Character, Center for the Development of Visual Arts (2018); and Another Sunrise on the Tropic, Reinbeckhallen, Berlin, Germany (2018), among others.

Artist A4