The works of the Cuban artist Ricardo Miguel Hernández do not contain self-produced photographs, but they are collages containing a myriad of old pictures, all memories of a past that have been forgotten and ask for new reconstructions. His works are enigmatic and provoke an active role of the spectator. Hernández uses different shapes, styles and colours, creating a testament of the past. His project When the memory turns to dust is a puzzle of memories of the very eventful Cuban past.

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For more than two years, Ricardo Miguel Hernández worked on his series When the memory turns to dust. He felt the need to collect and archive vernacular photographs of Cuba, mostly dated between the 20s and 80s. He wanted to make symbolic and semiotic reconstructions from the collections, creating different scenarios that project possible realities of Cuban and international history. Hernández: “It is a story built from the assembly of the different micro-stories that each image presents. The selection between these two decades lies in looking for two opposite temporal poles where different generations are contrasted. Historically, Cuba has been a Caribbean country with a rich and varied cultural diversity, so it is very common to find photographic archives from anywhere in the world. In a collage, there can be two or more photographs of different temporalities and geographical latitudes, creating contrasts between the five continents.”

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Old Photographs

A group of very damaged old photographs Hernández kept at home was the organic starting point. “They were not part of my photographic collection but were purchases that I made some time ago for the work Discontinuous Room, which I made together with the artistic duo Celia and Yúnior, which included five types of collections, from the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. Along with other documents that were of interest to me at that time. In the end, I did not include these photos in the project. They were all in a drawer full of dust. Forgotten. One day, without thinking about it, I cut out one of these and pasted it on top of another. It was something extremely organic. The result was fascinating to me. This is how my work on collage began. After that, I have not been able to stop.”

Memory as fiction
The Spanish writer Alfons Cervera once said: "History is built on the inescapable basis of the truth of the events it relates. But sometimes, history is also built with the additions of memory. And memory, we also know, is the sum of the accuracy and inaccuracy of memories". In the inaccuracy of memory, Ricardo Miguel Hernández started to construct new narratives. “For a while, there is a literary construction in vogue of "historical memory". Each term has different meanings, but together it takes on a strong weight to analyse historical phenomena and the discourse of the consensus inherited from the historical transition. Memory is a container of memories, more or less organised. We forget or keep our memories according to our priorities and desires. Memory is a human-made fiction, with recesses full of real and unreal situations, which we are nesting according to the life story we build. However, the story should not be fiction; there is a rigour that solves it and that, depending on how you look at it and explores it, reveals real events that set guidelines and offer real data from a time already past. In my projects, I work from that flexibility between history and memory, in that swing that moves between a real, verifiable event, a family memory or a social scene, and the new historical construction that I give to that rescued memory. I try to create an atmosphere where reality and fiction complement each other, rather than tense.”

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Symbolic Constructions
The symbolic constructions of Hernández sometimes have a strictly historical context, but often they have a cultural connection. “Many times, I create scenographic situations that respond more to political, historical and cultural problems of other nations and that also refer largely to my country. An example of this is the collage The Venus of the harvest, a black woman without arms and with some fragments of the royal palm (Roystonea Regia) behind her head, perched on clouds, in a swimsuit, looks at the viewer with complicity. Beneath the clouds, there is a French text on the paper stating the date of the first restoration to the Venus de Milo, which was discovered during a trip to Japan in recent times. It is evident that the pose of the woman and the text refer directly to the famous Greek statue, but it also refers to the Cuban woman who has "left" her arms in the harvest for the production of sugar. Cuba is a country with a strong history in the sugar industry since colonial times. And if we pay more attention, that Venus of the harvest can also be a deity of the Yoruba religion: Yemayá, who, even when she is the orisha of the sea, is offered among many things, gofio crowns with cane syrup or black sugar; or it could also be Oyá, who is represented as the goddess of storms and atmospheric changes and also uses the spear as a symbol, represented perhaps in the sugar canes on the wooden carts.”

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Drawers and antique markets
Hernández does not conceptualise his style; it grows by working on the project. “I have always felt that it is a process that evolves in terms of form and content. The first collages I made looked like everyday scenes from anywhere. I focused on portraits, alternating them with other collages, with diverse situations and a historical, social and political background. While shaping the scene within the play, I also discovered ways to put them together.” While it is an elaborate job for him to build a montage from the collected photos, more important is the process of searching for those photos. “I have spent days rummaging through drawers of people from whom I have bought photographs, although I have also bought them in antique markets in Havana. Other times I have found them lying on the street or in a trash can.”

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No camera but scissors
To make his collages, Hernández uses the very basics: scissors, a jig, double stickers and a ruler.  “They are all analogue collages, unique and unrepeatable. Once finished, I scan them to be shown on social networks and, at this moment, due to the situation of Covid-19, they are printed to be exhibited in a photographic event. For now, the originals are only shown in some exhibitions in galleries.”

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Connected with the past
Ricardo Miguel Hernández has a long list of artists that inspired him. “Inspiration and influence in my work have been constant throughout my career and life. We are all in some way connected with the past and with people who influence the way we plan our lives. Almost everything that I observe around me on a day-to-day basis helps me connect with work. I would have to write an entire book to illustrate everything that has influenced and inspired me.” Hernández mentions painters such as Francisco de Goya and artistic avant-garde styles like Dadaism and Surrealism. From the field of contemporary art and photography, Sophie Calle, Joseph Cornell, Christian Boltanski influenced him among many others. But he also draws his inspiration from poetry like that of Jim Morrison.

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Ricardo Miguel Hernández, 1984, Havana, Cuba. Education: 2007 - 2009 Arte de Conducta, created and directed by Tania Bruguera. Higher Institute of Arts (ISA). Havana, Cuba. 2004 - 2005 Black and White Photography Course. Centro de Estudios Martianos.Havana, Cuba. 2003 Graduated from Pablo de la Torriente Brau Craftsmanship College. Havana,Cuba.

www.ricardomiguelhernandez.com

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