{"id":19444,"date":"2025-10-23T12:51:59","date_gmt":"2025-10-23T12:51:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/artjournalstg.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=19444"},"modified":"2025-10-23T15:09:07","modified_gmt":"2025-10-23T15:09:07","slug":"sweet-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/artjournal.collegeart.org\/?p=19444","title":{"rendered":"Sweet Thing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Contemporary Projects<\/a>\u202f features original projects driven by artists, designers, or curators, highlighting diverse, critical forms of knowledge directly produced by art and design practices.\u202f <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sweet Thing No. 94<\/em>, 2025, photography, variable dimensions <\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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In Sweet Thing, I use sugar as a symbolic thread to weave a fragmented family album. Combining archival images of my Cuban ancestors with contemporary photographs taken on visits to their former homes, I create blurred visuals that echo the elusive nature of memory. As a repeated symbol in this project, sugar functions as a form of visual cacophony.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The series gathers family portraits, archival material, soundscapes, and interviews with my parents, alongside images of meaningful locations. From the remnants of my great-grandparents\u2019 home in\u202fMatanzas, near the\u202fTriunvirato sugar plantation, where they were once enslaved\u2014and now part of UNESCO\u2019s Routes of Enslaved Peoples\u2014to the rural settlements of\u202fHolgu\u00edn\u202fand\u202fLas Tunas and the spiritual landscape of\u202fHavana\u2019s Church of Our Lady of Regla,<\/strong> each site is both personal and historical. These are places marked by sugarcane and survival, where the soil itself carries the residue of bondage, devotion, and inheritance. Each piece reconstructs an uncertain past. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In this excerpt from the series, I focus on the women who anchor these histories\u2014those whose strength and silence form the emotional and spiritual core of\u202fSweet Thing. Their lives, marked by endurance and devotion, trace the contours of the island itself. Unlike traditional genealogical records, my process is nonlinear. Missing documents and eroded narratives force me to construct memory through place and imagery.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sweet Thing\u202fexplores displacement, survival, and the fragile nature of inherited memory. The title draws from a phrase once used in Cuba to describe the sugar harvest: \u201cThe excess of sugar produces bitterness.\u201d A reminder that sweetness and suffering have always been intertwined. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sweet Thing No. 17<\/em>, 2024, photography\/variable dimensions<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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I can picture my grandmother, born in 1898, as the proud yet humble daughter of former slaves, her tiny frame already brimming with quiet strength. From dawn until dusk, she moved between the kitchen hearth and the sunbaked fields. She raised ten children through sheer perseverance\u2014though words on a page may have eluded her, her story was written in the lives she shaped and the legacy she passed on. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sweet Thing No. 7<\/em>, 2025, photography\/variable dimensions<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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My late mother was born in a tiny settlement of fewer than ten houses in the eastern part of Cuba, surrounded by sugarcane. She was barely eight when her mother packed her off to Holgu\u00edn\u2019s grand townhouses, sent to polish silver and scrub floors so the family could survive. She stayed with those wealthy families until the world itself seemed to pivot in 1959, and then\u2014like so many\u2014she set her sights on Havana. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sweet Thing No. 15<\/em>, 2025, photography, variable dimensions<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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According to my mother\u2019s stories, in one of the houses she worked, the mistress would go to the extreme of using a white glove to check that the dishware was spotless, even though the butler had already supervised. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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