The Cuban photographer Damaris Betancourt sheds light these days on the difficult food situation in Cuba. The artist exhibits in the Lenzburg Photofestival, Switzerlanda series born from one of his visits to the Island.
Yahíma’s kitchen revisited focuses on the rationing system implemented in Cuba for 62 years and shows the products sold in the month of August 2023 to a person through the ration book.
“The crisis in Cuba covers all spheresbut in terms of food the seriousness of the situation is unusual,” Betancourt said in statements to DIARIO DE CUBA.
The photographer said that on one of her trips to Cuba she visited her cousin Yahíma. “Then I lived in an old house. We had just finished sharing a family lunch when I noticed an intense green light shining at the end of the hallway. I followed the flash until I reached a ramshackle recess, on whose plateau lay glasses, plates, empty bottles, old pots and a gas stove: it was the kitchen. The scene was completed by “a fluorescent lamp leaning against a penetrating emerald wall,” which “was the source of the irradiation.”
“That glow gave a poetic aura to the corner, as if it were that beautiful image, ‘Green Still Life’, painted by Picasso in 1914. I took a snapshot: ‘Yahíma’s Kitchen,'” he explained.
Betancourt says that, 15 years later, Yahíma’s kitchen revisited It is an interpretation of that photograph. “It has been projected on curtains in order to recreate the three-dimensionality of the original space, and completed with the image of a small table, which, impassive to any idea of redemption, stands out in the darkness, and shows the food allocated in Cuba in the month of August 2023 per person through the ‘supply system’“, details the photographer on her official website.
Thus, the series is made up of photographs of seven pounds of rice, two pounds of white sugar, two pounds of brown sugar, one pound of beans, one pound of peas, one pound of chicken, half a pound of mixed beef mince. with soybeans, half a pound of soybean oil, four ounces of coffee mixed with some beans, 130 grams of salt, one white bread and five eggs.
On impact of his photographs on the publicBetancourt declared to DIARIO DE CUBA: “I have been to the exhibition three times introducing the series. People always react with great amazement, they almost can’t believe this is true.. After my words there is a very awkward silence, until then someone breaks loose and asks something. With eggs the reaction is extreme. “Some do not dare to refute it because it is impossible, since I speak from my personal experience.”
According to the artist, she has similarly heard “two or three times quietly the word ’embargo'” and has “chose not to enter into a dispute, but to let the images argue for themselves.”
Regarding the foods in the focus of his camera, he specified that they are a graphic and approximate reproduction. “In the absence of being able to get an 80-gram piece of bread here, and due to the difficulty of photographing 31 loaves at once, I chose to use this bread, which was the cheapest I could find. But the shape is not that of the bread you receive the people in Cuba”.
“The same thing happens with the photo of the hash or coffee, it is impossible to know what these foods are mixed with. and cumbersome for me to try to imitate those blends here in Switzerland,” he said.
Betancourt’s images are exhibited at the Lenzburg PhotoFestival, which is celebrated from May 25 to June 23.. The works of the Cuban artist and 19 other photographers have been articulated under the motto of “Synthesis”, and many of them have been described as “challenging.”
This six-year-old photography festival transforms the host city, in the heart of Switzerland, into an open-air photography gallery, with photo books in bars and a rich program of events that includes portfolio presentations, workshops and talks with authors and experts.
Damaris Betancourt, resident in Switzerland, published the series in 2021 Ten days in Mazorraby the Rialta publishing house, with images he made in the psychiatric hospital in 1998. In 2021 he also participated in the Venice Architecture Biennale with an excerpt from “La Espera”, a series from his Havana Siglo XXI project.
