LAVESE BIEN LAS MANOS.

¡EVITE ENFERMEDADES!

(Wash your hands thoroughly. Avoid illness!)

9 Fine Art Injekt Posterpapier
42 x 29 cm, 2016

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The work shows bottles and objects arranged in various ways, which appear like whimsically staged model buildings, experimental arrangements, or provisionally draped still lifes made from found materials. What the photographer has captured here are her observations of the implementation of the following instructions: “All public places must set up three bottles, one filled with water, one with chlorine, and one with soap, as well as a container in which the liquids can be collected.”

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This is a preventive measure that has been officially decreed by the government in Santiago de Cuba to prevent and contain the spread of the cholera virus (This measure has been used for a long time before the coronavirus pandemic hit the world.)

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The photographs reveal subtle nuances in the differences in how the instructions imposed on Cuba's secular reality and everyday life are handled. A discrepancy between the intentions of the regulation, its purpose, and its implementation becomes apparent.

The photographs are thus small analogies for a social condition that, based on observation, can be described as improvised, contradictory, arranged, provisional, and somehow, even in a very sympathetic way, nevertheless good-natured.

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Sandra Hampe

Art historian

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