Raul Bussot and Kim Hong-Rok "A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Raul Bussot" (Installation View) 2013

Raul Bussot was 5 years old when his family decided to escape Cuba, so he doesn’t remember the details very well.  He remembers his father and two friends assembling a raft in a mangrove forest under the cover of darkness.  He remembers pushing the raft to the beach while keeping an eye out for the Cuban Coast Guard.  He remembers huddling together for warmth out on the ocean.  He also remembers being most excited about watching cartoons without power interruptions.  However, shortly after leaving they got caught in a torrential storm and blown off course into the open ocean.  They drifted for days, not knowing their location, not knowing if they would survive.  On the fifth day, running low on provisions as well as strength, they saw lights in the distance and were eventually rescued by the US Coast Guard.  Now twenty years later, Raul is an artist living in Seoul, South Korea and along fellow artist Kim Hong-Rok sought to recreate that experience in a collaborative piece called A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Bussot, Raul, which ran for five days at Khalifa Gallery in Cheongdam, Seoul.

Raul Bussot and Kim Hong-Rok "A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Raul Bussot" (Performance View) 2013

In preparation of the piece, Bussot and Kim built a replica of the small, aluminum raft that his father had built back in Cuba and installed it in the gallery.  They then “sailed” the raft for five days, living and sleeping on it for the entire duration, eating and drinking only the same provisions that the Bussot family had on their original journey: Spam, chocolate, and water.

On its surface, this work is an endurance piece, reminiscent of Tehching Hsieh’s Cage Piece (1978-79) or Chris Burden’s White Light/White Heat (1974), where the artists lived in isolation with little or no food.  However, this work departs from those others in a significant way.  Russot and Kim actively engaged the audience, sharing both the original experience as well as their current one.  In this way, the interactions of the audience became as much a part of the piece as the performance itself.

Raul Bussot and Kim Hong-Rok "A Clue to the Recovery of Authenticity: Raul Bussot" (Performance View) 2013

The timing and location of the work is meaningful as well.  The relationship between the US and Cuba has, in the past, shown many similarities to the relationship between North and South Korea.  Because of the tension between the two countries, South Korea often struggles with how deal with North Korean refugees that make similarly harrowing journeys to freedom.  Despite a common language, refugees often feel isolated, and fall into the nation’s underclass. Although Bussot’s story is one of a Cuban refugee, through the relational aesthetics of art, the refugee experience becomes universal.

Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, Gal-La, sun stencil, courtesy of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada

I had a college geology professor who would pace the front of the classroom, frantically zipping and unzipping her Patagonia puff jacket (color: fog) asking us if we really knew how old four and a half billion years is? Did we really have any concept about how briefly mankind and mammals and reptiles and even little parasitic cells have been around?  This monologue on the insignificance of our short banal little lives was actually a preface to her views on the fuss around climate change which were, of course, that while humans have really messed stuff up, once we die out, the earth will probably recover in a few short couple of millions of years.  Problem solved. For those of us with a more human-centric take on reality, inspiration might well be the perfect incentive for trying to clean up some our mess and it’s artists like Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada who are here to provide it.

Rodriguez-Gerada’s work is grand in scale and execution but with content that is driven by genuine empathy for the individual. His huge charcoal portraits on the sides of buildings are of people selected from the community—a move that not only recognizes the power of the individual but also validates their relevance in the creation of self and communal identities and culture.  Rodriguez-Gerada has most recently teamed with 350.org—an organization dedicated to inspiring the world to rise to the challenge of the climate crisis—to create a piece in their series, 350 Earth, a set of works created around the world that are large enough to be seen from space.  Rodriguez-Gerada’s piece entitled Gal-La is in Delta del Ebro, Spain, and depicts a young girl who hopes to see the Delta survive the threats posed to it by climate change. Again, it’s the selection of the subject that makes the piece so moving and the work of Rodriguez-Gerada has a powerful impact on the viewer.  In his artists statement he says, “’Terrorist’ manipulation has at its base the premise of the individual being considered dispensable in order to change the thinking of the larger group. By giving importance to each life I want to give importance to empathy.” Perhaps counter intuitively, by doing just that, Rodriguez-Gerada has in fact found a commanding tool for changing the thinking of the larger group.

Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada, Gal-La, sun stencil, courtesy of Jorge Rodriguez-Gerada

Jorge Rodriguez Gerada was born in Santa Clara, Cuba in 1966. His family immigrated to the US in 1970 and relocated to New Jersey. While in college Jorge became a founding member of Artfux. Later, he worked with the splinter group of Artfux, Cicada Corps of Artsist. His most well known works are probably that of his Identities series, which he began working on in 2002 and his project EXPECTATION, a sand painting made in the likeness of Barack Obama that cover 2 1/2 acres. Rodriguez-Gerada now lives between New York City and Barcelona.

Using unwanted garments as an unyielding source of material, the artist duo Guerra de la Paz creates a multitude of sculptures and installations. Guerra de la Paz is the collaborative efforts of Cuban artists Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz. The two artists met in 1996 and have since been creating work that references contemporary culture with the use of found objects. In recent works, Guerra de la Paz has investigated cycles of consumption by reinventing discarded cloths as room-sized landscapes. Alain Guerra attended the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and Nedaldo de la Paz is a graduate of Northern Illinois University. In 2006, the artists exhibited “Oasis” at the Chicago Cultural Center and new works with Jack the Pelican Presents in Brooklyn, N.Y.