Diango Hernández’s artistic practice and sculptural constructions are directly related to his biography, upbringing, and socialization. Born in 1970 in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba, Hernández lived in the Caribbean island nation until 2003. He maintains his Cuban citizenship and still regularly visits the country. From 1988 until 1993, he studied industrial design in Havana.
For Cuba, the dissolution of communism in Eastern Europe meant the end of economic subsidies and trading partners, resulting in severe shortages of material and consumer goods. These events had a profound effect on Hernández’s practice. Through experimentation and juxtaposition, he repurposes and transforms discarded, obsolescent debris into new objects and spatial installations. Since this time, found objects have formed the basis of his works, which are frequently marked by the imaginary world of socialist ideology. Their original purposes are lost as far as possible, while the half-life of their ideological re-packaging remains intact.
Over breakfast on a cloudy spring day earlier this year, Alfredo Cramerotti and Diango Hernández exchanged thoughts on the artist’s approach and methodology. The conversation carried over into lunchtime, and eventually into a visit to see some art—as if they were incapable of letting each other go. Below are five distilled questions from that exchange.
Alfredo Cramerotti:
Let’s start with the main ideas behind your work. I realize this is a big question, and of course I have my own reading of it, but it may not be the same as what you consider the guiding principles of what you do. How do you “read” your own work? Can you step outside Diango for a moment and tell me what you see?
Diango Hernández:
I know how hard it is to be ourselves—or perhaps it is better to say to perform ourselves. Probably the hardest thing, at least for me. But I can happily “jump” out of myself and see my own “game” from a different place.
I still remember the first time I had a kaleidoscope in my hands; I was genuinely in love with the object. I used to look through it everywhere. People thought I was using a spyglass, looking at something far away. How could something so simple transform my ordinary view into something so complex and extraordinary?
In the fragmentary lens of the kaleidoscope resides an aspect I still consider very important. I do not see my work organized by “series,” “themes,” or “periods,” but rather as an articulation of fragments—incomplete, shattered pieces that I carefully arrange and place. I hope one day all these disconnected pieces will come together in a clearer way.
I love to read my art, or any art, under the influence of emotions. I trust them and often think they are both physical and material, and in that sense, real—sometimes even more real than us.
Here I am where you asked me to be: in front of one of Diango’s works. As a visitor, a random viewer, what I see has the power of reminding me of something, maybe a place. I cannot precisely tell you what or where, but I can tell you that I would love to be there, and not here.
AC:
Did you find any particular source of inspiration for the visual styles of your recent series (the waves, the fruits, the sunsets), or did they materialize in relation to the nature of the materials you used?
DH:
I grew up very close to waves, fruits, and sunsets—that is what you do when you are born on a Caribbean island. For obvious reasons, Cuba is a particular case, at least the Cuba of my generation.
I come from a generation educated in the belief of the future; this concept was our only religion, at least the official one. The good thing about “worshipping” the future is that you can become a pure optimist—or, as I discovered later, a dreamer. The bad thing comes when the future stops—literally stops—and does not return, at least not for your generation or your island.
When someone has kidnapped the future of generations, and of an entire country, what do you do? I decided to go back to my waves, fruits, and sunsets. They give me timeless emotions—the same invariable emotions that landscapes offered to the Romantics, a view in which you can accommodate atemporal feelings.
The full meaning behind these works can only be understood by my friends, who now live all over the world. These works are literally encryptions, and it is through reading their hidden and scrambled messages that they can be fully deciphered.
AC:
Can you dive into the technical aspects of the works—the gathering of raw material, the software or hardware used, the selection and editing process, or particular challenges you and your team faced in realizing them?
DH:
As you know, I am permanently collecting things of all sorts—books, objects, paper. Generally speaking, I collect whatever could trigger a special thought in me. Building hierarchies and finally deciding what to do with all this material for a specific occasion is usually complex and difficult.
Over the years, I realized that artistic ideas are very fragile—they appear, and if you are not fully prepared, they vanish. The way an idea becomes stronger is really beautiful for me, and that process is the one I enjoy most. Crafting ideas is, first of all, an internal fight that can only be visualized by writing; repeatedly writing a word or short sentence usually helps.
Once ideas are clear, I fully commit to them. I learned that the process of thinking must be as complete as the process of making. If not, I know I will not be happy, and last-minute changes could easily destroy months of work.
For every exhibition, I develop different sets of techniques, and consequently, different advisors and producers guide me through production. For instance, the making of the wave paintings was the result of a long process involving digital, mechanical, and handcrafted skills. The biggest challenge for me, and for the valuable team that accompanied me, was to blur every single non-desired trace of production, so that something complete could be achieved—a kind of total object, where idea and material become a unity.
AC:
I saw a recent installation of the Waves piece in the Unlimited section of Art Basel, where it was given a prominent position at the entrance of Hall 1. It consisted of two rows of billboard-sized structures, supported at the height of actual roadside billboards, so that visitors would walk underneath, beside, or between them—but could not really face them frontally. You chose not to have an “in-your-face” type of installation. What was the underlying approach?
DH:
A billboard is an outdoor object, usually installed in distant, unreachable zones. We rarely see it close enough to realize its actual size. Bringing an outdoor, public object into an indoor, private space was very important for this work.
You may remember other works of mine where I included electric poles, highway lamps, and TV antennas. Bringing such objects indoors allows me to show how their content and connotations can deeply affect private life. I look forward to showing this installation in a smaller, more intimate space, where we can better see how difficult it is to have the “sea” inside your house.
AC:
Tell me a secret about your work. Even a small one.
DH:
Secrets? I read this sentence every day:
Ah, que tú escapes en el instante
en el que ya habías alcanzado tu definición mejor.
Ah, that you escape in the flash
when you had come upon your best definition. [1]
Cuban-born and Düsseldorf-based artist Diango Hernández is one of the foremost conceptual artists from Central and South America working today. His work has been exhibited at major international art centers and biennials, including MoMA, New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich; the Hayward Gallery, London; the 2005 Venice Biennale; the 2006 São Paulo and Sydney Biennales; and the 2010 Liverpool Biennial. Major solo exhibitions have been held at Kunsthalle Münster and MART Rovereto. In November 2015, a new exhibition will open at MOSTYN, Wales.
[1] José Lezama Lima (1910–1976), Cuban writer and poet, considered one of the most influential figures in Latin American literature.