Tatlin's Whisper #6 (Havana Version)
Decontextualization of an action: stage, podium, microphones, one loudspeaker inside and one loudspeaker outside of the building, two persons dressed in military outfits, white dove, one minute free of censorship per speaker, 200 disposable cameras with flash; dimensions variable. Performance view: Tenth Havana Biennial, Central Patio of the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center, Havana, Cuba. Video documentation of performance: HD video; 40 minutes 30 seconds; edition of 5 (+ 1 AP). Courtesy Studio Bruguera. © Tania Bruguera
Artist statement: ”This is the sixth piece of the series Tatlin's Whisper which examines the relationship between apathy and anaesthetization of the images in the mass media. This series intends to activate images, well-known because of having been repeatedly seen in the press, but are here decontextualized from the original event that gave way to the news and staged as realistically as possible in an art institution. The most important element in this series is the participation of spectators who may determine the course the piece will take. The idea is that next time spectators face a piece of news using similar images to those they experienced, they may feel an individual empathy with that distant event towards which they will normally have an attitude of emotional disconnection or informative saturation. The experience of the audience within the piece may allow them to understand information in a different way and appropriate it because of having lived through it.
On the other hand, the title of the series, Tatlin's Whisper, evokes the present weakening of the impact a moment of Western history in which great transformations took place as the result of social revolutions originally had. A symbolic reference is made to Russian artist and architect Vladimir Tatlin, who created the Tower Monument, foreseen as the seat for the Third Communist International, an icon of the enthusiasm and grandiosity of the Bolshevik Revolution. The intensity, credibility and exaltation of socialist revolutions, just as Tatlin's Tower, which was never built, were frustrated and utopia is rethought with the effort implied in a weak whisper. This series reevaluates the desire for moments of active citizenry commiment in the construction of a political reality, while ideologies transform and circulate today as pieces of news.
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The audience was handed two hundred disposable cameras with flash to document the performance and told that they could freely express their thoughts for a minute through the microphone in the podium. There was a long silence. The first person took the podium guarded by two persons in military uniform (a woman and a man). They put a white dove on the speaker’s shoulder, an allusion to the emblematic image of Fidel Castro when delivering his first speech on January 8th in Havana after the Triumph of the Revolution, an image that ratified his absolute leadership in a generalized consensus which worked for those who wanted to see in this image either the peace guaranteed in the lives of the citizens, the Messiah or the aesthetics of the future to be built.
In Tatlin’s Whisper # 6 (Havana version) there is no censorship during the minute a member of the audience is at the mike. When the time assigned for freedom of expression ends, the persons in military uniform that until then had been at each side of the speakers – to defend their right to talk or to control it – take the dove from their shoulder making them leave the podium and the dais and they become once more part of the audience. This action was repeated with each speaker. They were all treated in the same way. A total of 39 persons made use of the mike to express their affinity with the Cuban political system or criticize it in the 41 minutes the work lasted, after which Tania Brugera took the podium to thank the Cubans for their courage and their exercise of freedom of expression."
