Tania Candiani

As a sonata in its different movements, El sonido de la labor integrates into its structure four pieces that could function with relative autonomy but reach their highest poetic-symbolic dimension in the condition of a single work. Candiani insists on that particular orientation of her artistic work, which emerges as a result of successful research around the possibilities of encounter and interrelationship between the visual arts and the sonic elements associated with the universe of labor.

In the same way that other elements have motivated and materialized previous works from the artist as the sound of the grana cochinilla, the vendor’s loudspeaker or the magic and expertise deployed for the conversion of a loom into a musical instrument. This time the artist was inspired by the chants intoned by the slaves in the cane plantations of the region of Trinidad. The office of cigar reader that was proclaimed Cultural Patrimony of the Cuban Nation and the discreet rattle of the bolillos used by our artisans in the manual tissue, on this occasion, partially replaced by pencils.
Considered in all its extension, this project reveals multiple purposes and meanings. It grants distinction to the traditions of a territory in its particularities and moves them towards the domains of the contemporary, either through collaborative and interdisciplinary practices, the insertion of the performative spirit in its dynamics, or its reworking in the audiovisual language would not suffice to grant the degree of aesthetic and intellectual forcefulness that this work achieves. Candiani can ponder the tradition and at the same time disturbs it, as well as contaminates it with themes and reflections of current interest. Thus, for example, it captures in the most delicate lace contents of the feminist agenda related to care chains and migrant women and nourishes with texts associated with problems of the feminine condition. The literary repertoire was chosen to be heard through the voice of a reader to an audience of seamstresses (not for torcedores), while they work in her workshop.
In the same way, and keeping the sound of the work as a point of connection, she turns her gaze towards the history of the Island in the colonial period and insists on recalling the songs coming from the barracks and cane fields. Tunes that were once heard where the blood and sweat of the slaves produced the substantial surplus value that strengthened the power of the Cuban “sacarocracy.” They were determined to raise “castles of sugar on the burnt floors of Cuba,” as expressed by the Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano.
This introduction is a prior note to the presentation of this work. I appeal to the sensitivity and essential support of all involved so that the sound of labor comes to be heard in all its dimensions.
So be it!

Ibis Hernández Abascal
Curator. XII Havana Biennial