René Francisco. Cuba. June, 2007

The project Buena Vista Interchange goes on with my series of works I devoted to myself as an artist in poor neighborhoods of Havana city. From several years ago I have developed social projects as an important zone of my work. I began working with this as part of a pedagogical work that I named From a Pedagogical Pragmatic, in which my students and I went to share experiences with the inhabitants of an old building in Old Havana. We ask them to tell us their wishes concerning housing improvements and for free I tried to make it real. Several years ago, in 2003, going on with that social work that my students of the Instituto Superior de Arte and I have done in 1990, began working at a depressing neighborhood of Havana called El Romerillo. With the fee of an artistic residence, (I use the founding of artistic residences not to generate artistic objects but instead to create collective situations and works) I pretended to help some of the poorest people of the place. In those works I shared with people of these communities as an attempt of relieving their precarious life. My idea was to satisfy each person’s needs; by ennobling their domestic environment, to offer them the chance to see a dream come true. I was a neutral mediator between those people’s demands and its achievement: everything made and designed in those works was decided according every individual’s wishes and view.

This new social project came to life when I knew two persons who live in a house next to collapse in this quarter named Buena Vista. I want to fix the damage of a house that was constructed in 1918. I interviewed the inhabitants, whom have lived in the house since they were born. I inquired into the building’s deterioration, into the reason of its destruction, in order to be sensible to its history and so to be able of modifying it consistently. Due to the several processes of destruction the house has suffered, it has been transformed in a small space which a prominent inclination in the frontal part. In the present the plan has been reduced to a single room without any division. The circumstances in which the inhabitants survive are pitiful. The lack of a bathroom, force them to make their physiological needs in bags and to throw it away after that. The house does not have a kitchen either. It has a small artifact, a kind of oven and bonfire used at the same time for cooking and for warming and polishing smutty pots (with this work they earn living). The smoke of the oven remains in the room, something really harmful for their health.

I will attempt to distribute the available space of the house in a functional way, according to the mobility and immediate needs of the inhabitants. This project has a double goal. The first one is artistic (Since I am an artist I expect to make a physical piece of art that became an architectural work and also as I have done several times in my previous work I will be filming so at the end I will have a documentary with the memories of the process of repairing the house. But fundamentally my aim is human, to solve a profound problem in the life of the owners. The present condition of house is precarious and really dangerous for their life and as time goes by is getting worse. So I am calling anyone who had the chance of reading this and is willing to help us. If you can contribute with a modest fund or you want to give you material support, does not matter the amount, we’ll appreciate to contact us.