The title of this piece is ‘Globalisation Bridge’, and it’s a video projection of the CD that is changing the whole time, including the first world CD and third world CDs; all these cars are going back and forth, but each car represents a big corporation.
This is an installation view. I did this aeroplane carrier, and the aeroplane carrier is taking care of the oil tower. This piece was dedicated to the victims of September 11; it is in an exhibition in a museum in Florida right now. Of course in Cuba we had a couple of these kind of devices to spy on the United States. This is very similar to a Russian antenna used to spy on the US.
This last series I’m doing is my last production of ‘Mango-Tech’. I am working right now on border frontiers, and this is one of the borders, the airports. In this case I am using engines with a mechanism; the passport and the stamp date never get close to each other. In this case, behind the fence is the first world with the big buildings, and I made a mechanism that opens just one door a little; the mechanism opens and closes the door just a little. This is an international airport, this has crawled behind the windows, it’s not in the picture but I made this sign behind the windows, that reads ‘we are all made the same’. This is a border patrol, in this case I have an engine, I moved the charts like dolphins. This is a factory of the globalisation, here coming out from the factory, you can see computers, TVs and different things made in the third world with the advertisement that was made in the third world country.

Question
Why did you feel the need to make these objects, when you could have quite easily drawn them in two dimensions? Was there something about the physicality of it that you were interested in as well?

Abel
When I began my presentation, I was telling a little bit about how my stories are based on printmaking, but I was tired of doing printmaking, a bi-dimensional thing, I always wanted to be a father, getting close to the three-dimensional with the sculpture, because I felt like I needed the three-dimensional way to expand the meanings of my work in a way that people can see in the three-dimensional way in my constructions. They can take more meanings from my work, and if they move, it will be even better, they will come closer to the way I want them to understand my work.

Question
The style of the printmaking that you use, does that have a particular source, I’m thinking of the c. nineteenth-century tradition in printmaking… I’m just wondering whether that’s totally you, or whether there’s a kind of historical background to that.

Abel
I think living in the Caribbean, in a way we have all this tradition of printmaking, because what we get at school is a result of the mix of the culture and all the influence that we had of the printmaking of Latin America, and the influence of the first prints made in Latin America explaining about the new continent or using this as a way of information about a new place. I think I have all these, I have it myself, a cultural process in my work.

Question
You mentioned that one of the inspirations for the ‘Third World Internet Café’ is that access to the internet and this kind of technology isn’t widely available in Cuba, but you’ve also shown that piece in New York, in Texas, in Tokyo, and I was just wondering if you felt that it was necessary for the different audiences that have a different experience of and relationship to technology when you show in those places, is it important for them to understand the current conditions in Cuba when they’re looking at your work?

Abel
Yes, I think that was part of my idea or my version of the Internet Café, and when they see my objects and they look like stone age computers, they will take the irony very fast. Just reading my name, seeing that I live in Cuba, they will understand it.

Transcribed by Jackie Howson and edited by Marion Endt.