Alexander Beaton Galano

Alexander Beaton Galano is a visual artist born in Guantánamo, Cuba in 1968. Self-taught since the 1990s, he has developed a discourse focused on identity within contemporary Cuban art.

In his works identity is nothing more than the context of inevitable relationships a concept – space in perpetual analysis and redefinition.

In the multimedia installation exhibited at the X Biennial of Havana 2009, “La raza permanente”, Beatón builds a geological and multicultural landscape where he tries to deconstruct through dialogue, images and testimonies a possible sediment of the cultural, social and political identity of his environment marked by the strong demands of fiction that contemporaneity imposes as consciousness.

Beatón takes advantage of his own experiences and sensations as a creative method, assuming art as a universal fact of consciousness, as a sociological tool for exploration in reality and the concepts that illustrate it. Many of the works of this artist are characterized by the interaction between different genres and forms of expression, sculpture, photography and video, action that involves everyday objects of a domestic nature.

“El camino de la estrategia” (working project) is a work he has been performing with filmmaker Pedro Gutiérrez since (2009) The artists explore the consequences generated by the existence of a US naval base in a context such as Guantánamo Cuba. It is an investigation about the dimensions of culture in the context of local redefinitions, where the problem of identity is subscribed to a circumstance. “Mnemotecnia” (2016) and “Susurros” (2021) are two projects that are within this dynamic productive.

In his most recent production “Some considerations about pain, art, the artist and me” Beatón and Gutiérrez share their experience with the book of poetry entitled “Poems from Guantánamo”. The detainees speak, the only prison poetry that has been written and published from the Guantánamo naval base.

The project is an audiovisual work in which sculpture and performance are combined. The intention is to constitute a dialogue between the poetry of some detainees who appear in the anthology and the poetry of José Ramón Sánchez Guerra, one of the most significant contemporary poets of Cuba residing in Guantánamo. A dialogue that extends to the context as part of the landscape revealing sentimental points in common.

Many of the poems were first written in vernacular Arabic then translated into classical Arabic, others a combination of both including some local dialects and so on; to be extracted from the base were translated into English by Pentagon specialists and finally into Spanish which is the version I am working with. I think that throughout this course the original lyrical image has been distorted a little even mutated its poetic form, more, not so, its meaning, I want to explore in an artistic way the same route, but conversely with the tool (AI) google translator to share the political space that separates the words from one translation to another and occupy with the work that historical gap that distances and unites horror and poetry.