This is a series photographs taken in Havana, Matanzas and Villa Clara, Cuba, in April and May 2006. I lived in Havana for 10 months in 1999 and 2000, and hadn’t returned there for 6 years. I went back, revisited places and people important to me, and came to know more. It made me think about what having been there had become to me – distance, time, politics, these all alter relationships, and the series of photographs I took during my first time there, and anecdotes about them, had perhaps distorted my memory, or at least confidence in it. Arriving in El Vedado, walking down Calle San Lázaro, I was shocked again by the place itself, dropping into the same slow war of attrition between time and neglect and its bodies and stones. What shocked me fresher though was how I’d forgotten.
In the end this work became a reflection on passing time, possibilities of the memory of self and other, and an equivocal document of attachment to a place and a people.
When I lived there, in 1999-2000, I was struck by the normalisation of euphemism, the continuity of signs in language above the inconstancy of daily life. Words seemed ‘other’ to their meaning to me as an outsider whether they were used to reinforce the structures of revolution, or to satirise or evade them. The titles of the images are presented on the images themselves as a reflection of this.
The work is, of course, autobiographical. In mapping a return, it reflects upon the distortions and enhancements of photographs upon memory. It is also a record of identification and aspiration, attempting to weave together a making, a local agency, with grander movements in time.
