Today in Havana, Cuba President Fidel Castro led a massive demonstration against new US sanctions. Official figures say that 1.2 million citizens joined Castro to march along Malecon Boulevard, chanting anti-US slogans. It's just one more notch on that country's long history of resistance against US embargo. Over the years and particularly since the collapse of the Soviet Union, that embargo has created shortages in Cuba milking it difficult if not impossible hard to get many things we take for granted.
For artists those shortages extend to paint, striping them of their most fundamental tool. But two Cuban artists have found an ingenious and inventive way around that and in the process they've come up with a whole new style of art. They will put it on display tonight at the Image Factory and here's what it looks like.
Jules Vasquez Reporting,
To most of us, these images look like neatly rendered drawings of birds, and intriguing poetic tropes. But despite their fastidiously neat and actually quite pretty appearance these may be the dirtiest, bloodiest drawings you've ever seen. They're not colored with paint or pigment of any kind, neither are they sketched with lead or charcoal; they are produced from the entrails and legs and wings of the common housefly, what you'd call 'concas.' Don't believe? Well, look closely at this flock of geese tracking across this frame almost perfect right? But look closer…every millimeter of their body is created by with the collected entrails and parts of flies - these are the wings, a few legs, and lots of guts, and of course, blood for the beak.
It's almost unimaginable the work that goes into it: gathering thousands of flies, picking them apart, crushing them into a paste and then arranging them into these densely composed, perfectly rendered images. The artists are Cubans Fabian and Elsoca two of the most avant-garde artists in that country. They explain that to do this one must be completely obsessed.
Fabian Pena & Adrian Soca, Cuban Artists
"Well the paintings are very easy and the pictures are usually more difficult. It is a very obsessive system of work. We are crazy."
And indeed the artists explained that it takes them hours, even days to cobble together all the parts to render it with such a pristine precision. But for these young artists time isn't even a consideration.
Adrian Soca,
"For us it is not important how much time we spent making a painting, it is more important the final work."
And the final work is stunning: flawlessly rendered images drawn from the ugliness and what some would call just plain nastiness of houseflies. Proof that when properly arranged even Cuban houseflies can sell for over US $1,000 each…
Fabian and Elsoca recently returned form Merida where they displayed an intriguing pattern of roach's wings alongside Belizean artists, this show at the Image Factory funs for two weeks.
7NEWS produced for broadcast by News Director Jules Vasquez
Edited for the internet by Keith Swift