René Francisco

Transcription

My name is René Francisco Rodríguez. Most of what I do in my life, has a lot to do with art, with the context of art, which has been changing a lot for many years; I’ve spent most of my life trying to balance art and education. Right now we’re in the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), which is like a second home to me, as I started in ’77 and graduated in ’82 from the Escuela Nacional de Arte, then came to the ISA until ‘89, when I started to work here and, I’ve been giving classes here for about 16 or 17 years. I think the way in which I’ve always tried to give classes is to generate a kind of pedagogic thinking, remembering that when I was a student, I would always want to have teachers who understood me better than the ones that I had. So, my form of teaching has always been to try and systemise what students want a little bit. To be a teacher who gives students what they want rather than a teacher who gives out his own ideas. And, another thing I’ve tried to do is spend time out of the classroom. I’ve been doing this for a year now, trying to avoid creating a physical space in which students gain their course content directly. This gives me the opportunity, also from an artist’s perspective, to learn a lot in a Cuban context, trying to give classes, which is also a form of research for my personal work, to the extent where the time comes when I can’t separate one thing from another, I mean, teaching for me has become a way of creating art. We’re in a neighbourhood called Romerillo, which was formed maybe during the 60s, with the same labourers who came to build the school, who came from other provinces, and then later built little houses here. With a grant I received from Berlin, well, this gave me some financial backing, and I wanted to use this to help people in La Habana. And so, I went searching for the kind of people who would deserve such a wonderful gift, you know, and so I made an inquiry here and 3 people came up, 2 of which I've worked with. The first house, that is, in this neighbourhood, the first person the people chose was Rosa, a lady who passed away a year after I completed the project. Rosa was the most well-loved person in the neighbourhood and, well, once I'd started asking around, the people all mentioned Rosa, Rosa, and pretty much everyone, well, most of the people, voted for her. Rosa was a person with a very strong spirituality, who was living in an incredibly unstable situation; they had no bathroom, they had nothing… I mean, people just can’t imagine how they live in these houses. So, with Rosa’s house, our job involved transforming it completely, we removed the entire roof and rebuilt it, the entire patio, where we created a kind of Japanese garden, we rebuilt the kitchen, the bathroom, and then after a few months we started on “Nin”. My work at the Venice Bienniale, “El patio de Nin”, took place in this house. I was working here for 3 months. Part of my work is, during the first period, is the subtlety with which you enter into such privacy, and how they open up their intimate lives to you and allow you into it, and I arrived here at dawn and would feel around and film things, while they were asleep, I mean, within the heart of this family. And through questions and a little encouragement, I would pick out elements of their desire, you know, things connected with that desire which would facilitate the material production of my piece. I’m like a sound box, an instrument they take in their hands and they start to work, and through their efforts, it starts to take shape. I don't impose my subjectivity; as an artist, I'm simply a mediator, I mean, it takes a tremendous effort to understand the job of art as something closely connected to sociology. At this point, I think the artist is taken out of the concept of art but at the same time he comes back to art... ...because I'm not a doctor, nor a sociologist; I'm an artist who’s trying to make sociology, trying to make medicine or to perform some kind of curing somehow, and so this becomes great material, as you’re not only modelling a material that you’re going to exhibit, but a material that comes out of the very life of such people, of their needs, and with which you are also working for the first time. It’s not the same as an artist imagining shapes, as an artist who receives requests and has to make things based on that. This intercommunication in my work fascinates me. Here we are in my studio. This is where I usually... ...generate my ideas and my things, and where I spend part of my day. At the moment I’m preparing a painting exhibition, which I’ve been working on for about a year. They’re paintings, let's say, which each take a lot of time to do, because they require a very specific technique and they talk a bit about my visual work, of representations of the masses, of allusions to political demonstrations. It’s a piece that also speaks of collectivity, although it’s more representational, unlike my social art work, which is more related to interpersonal relations. In this case, they’re more like relations that derive from trying to pair the status of the town, of a town, with a social status, I mean, I think that it’s an area of my work that has a lot to do with my past, let’s say, with my first few years of work. I worked for many years with toothpaste, and used to recycle the empty tube; this was a kind of social work too, because pasta used to be called “masa” (mass), which can also be used as "masa de gente" (mass of people), so I think the relation comes from that, or sometimes when searching, rummaging through the origins of my work, my mother told me that when I was young and I had no white colouring, I’d paint with toothpaste. So, I think that everything in life is at some point connected, you never know where the things you have come from.