Lidzie Alvisa

Estado de archivo, 2009

Installation, 36 x 200 cm.


  • Resultado de una madurez artística incuestionable, esta gran artista canaliza sus habilidades en propuestas que, muy bien emplazadas, operan con los resortes del arte contemporáneo y se traducen en proposiciones caprichosamente sólidas.
  • Lidzie Alvisa’s masterpiece entitled Estado de archivo was presented in the Havana Art Biennial exhibition.
  • Among the issues of Lidzie Alvisa’s work appears the anguish caused by memory, and the marks that individual history left. It is that living beings nourishes with personal events, finally conforming its social conscience.
  • Estado de archivo, presented for the 11th Havana Biennial, constitutes the most compact series in Lidzie Alvisa’s artistic career up to the present.

[…] Very close to the body as accomplice of the passing of time is memory. The purpose of preserving the latter has created new restlessness in Lidzie Alvisa, since we deposit in it everything we know and its loss would imply a totally schizophrenic condition. In connection with this matter, her work has made a turn, particularly in the visual order, leaving aside the representation of the body– which she never forsakes completely– and pointing toward new supports formed, in turn, by the appropriation of elements of reality as main resource. At one point the body became their suitable receptacle; now she replaces it by new information reservoirs in which traces and temporary accidents are likewise recorded.

I refer to her series Estado de archivo and Estado de ánimo (2009-2010), after which she has changed, from the creator who granted great relevance to the work of art as artifact and to its making as essential requirement, to choose selection as first creative exercise. Diskettes, CDs, flash memories, Beta cassettes, VHS, cell phones and other objects that have made it possible to save, circulate and visualize information, began to be part of Alvisa’s installations in a series about memory, information and the need to preserve them as basic instinct. In said installations of sculptural breadth she offers us solidly executed and above all evocative pieces where she understands space as leading experience because of the technological presence in them and of time as the line along which said transformations occur.

In these works of minimalist appearance, presented as electrocardiograms, she describes individuals with unfavorable diagnoses. Information circulates through them schizophrenically, goes through dissimilar supports, codified in indecipherable codes, filed in superimposed layers, heaped like syntaxes with no relations among themselves. We certainly do not know what information is contained in the storage devices forming the pieces; we can only venture suppositions. But we do know that said information produces tensions, ups and downs, since each electrocardiogram shows irregularities that doctors would read as valvulopaties or auricle-ventricular blockings.

Starting from this concern, the creator analyses an entire information era and the way in which the individual has created instruments to preserve it in his urge to preserve the required gigabytes. In the era when the digital image has flooded our most intimate spaces, it becomes necessary to preserve those images that make up our family memories or simply the personal ones.

Meanwhile, in Estados de ánimo she again appeals to the electrocardiogram as dominant visuality to penetrate the human beings’ groups of problems and their daily existence, which fluctuates according to the emerging situations. Lidzie displays detectors that discover our most intense sensations; she appeals to the thermometer as detector of body temperature, to effervescent water and dominoes as elements of disturbing instability, translated into strokes as unsteady as our states of mind […]. 1

 

1. Julienne López, “Speaking of Intimacy… A Circumnavigation of Lidzie Alvisa’s Work,” Artecubano, no. 1, 2015.