Jorge Rodríguez Diez (R10)

[…] In this series R10 projects the horizon of the past on the horizon of the future, creating representation shams which put in a critical state our capacity to establish correlations between these visual texts and the present reality. It is a complicated semiotic operation in which real images of social archetypes that today are symbols of the early decades of the Revolution (the rebels in the Sierra, the militia girls, the peasants, the workers, the pioneers) are digitally manipulated by Jorge and inserted in environments he creates, most of them urban. Now well, in these urban environments high buildings predominate and we experience the scale of a big city, a growing city, a highly developed city we dream with and we could have had, or that perhaps my children will have in a given moment. And those bearded men and peasants, those children with uniforms and berets of the sixties, those humble bricklayers, are like ghosts, anachronistic presences, or the ideological imaginary of a past still unable to find an arrangement in the demands of the present and the immediate future. What does a country do to conciliate the gulf that has been slowly opening under its feet, between the beautiful utopia of the glorious times of foundation and the deep crisis of the present that makes the future increasingly uncertain? How to guard, protect, maintain the achievements reached by a costly social process, without continuing mortgaging the welfare of the future generations of Cubans? Before an enemy as diffuse as development, these Guardians will have to drastically change their strategies or will be buried in their ancient trenches… ¹

1. Hamlet Fernández, “Notes about R10’s Visual Archeology,” Art Oncuba, no. 04, 2014.