Tania Bruguera

0:06Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures reveal the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the Cuban-born performance and conceptual artist Tania Bruguera. Her work explores freedom of speech, political oppression and social justice, often encouraging her audiences to become active participants in her performances, blurring the boundaries between art and viewer. Bruguera has exhibited at international museums, including MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, and at Tate Modern in London, where she made a major work for the annual Turbine Hall Commission.

0:46A new artwork of hers is currently on show in the inaugural exhibition at V &A East. Throughout her career in her homeland, Tanya Bruguera has been repeatedly censored, arrested and detained by the Cuban authorities because of her political activism. She now lives in the US where she's a senior lecturer at Harvard University. Tanya Bruguera, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you so much for inviting me. You are a Cuban artist, of course, and so much of your work is about your homeland. And yet you're talking to us today from Boston in the US where you live and work. I think you left Cuba in 2021.

1:26What is your current relationship with Cuba? Are you in enforced exile, in effect? Yes, I am indeed. Cuba has a long tradition, even before the revolution of 59, of censorship and dictators. We are like 120 years old country and we had already four dictators. We barely know democracy, I can say. So, yes, I came here in 2021 after being one of the leaders, I don't know how to call it, who put together a group of more than 500 artists to go and demand in front of the Ministry of Culture the liberation of some of our colleagues. Well, I'll be exploring your political situation later in the programme.

2:13But let's start by retracing your artistic life and journey. You were born in Havana in 1968, a very turbulent time in Cuban history. Beautiful year also in the world. Your first choice of creative influence that you've chosen for this cultural life is the Cuban Revolution, which happened over several years and, as you say, culminated in 1959 in a new revolutionary government. Joyous followers of Fidel Castro sweep triumphantly through the Cuban capital hours after their rebellion had toppled the regime of Fulgencio Batista. The 26th of July refers to that day in 1953 when Castro began his long struggle to overthrow the dictator Batista with an abortive armed attack.

2:54Tell me about the family that you were born into. I was born the year after Che Guevara died, so this is why I'm called Tania. A lot of people born in 68 were either called Ernesto for Che Guevara or Tania for Tania, the guerrilla girl who accompanied him. And my father was part of the government. He was at some point an ambassador to the Middle East, Lebanon, Jordan and Kuwait. And then he was an ambassador in Panama and then in Argentina. So he was very close to the government. And you traveled with him. You were traveling around the world as a child. Yes. And actually that defined my work because I lived until I was 11 years old outside of Cuba in this kind of fantastic image of what Cuba and the revolution was.

3:45And then as a teenager, I come back to Cuba and realize things are quite different from what I heard. I think you returned to Cuba in 1979. How different was the country to the one that you had, I suppose, imagined it to be from afar? It was quite different because I encountered students in my class that were extremely poor, living, let's say, a family of 10 or 9 people in one room with very difficult access to absolutely everything from clothing to food. And of course, my life was different because I lived in a good apartment, didn't have that much scarcity at that point. And it was very disturbing to me also because one of my best friends at the school, their family decided to leave the country and they obliged us, the student at the school, we were like 11, some were 10 or 9, to go in front of this person's house who was my best friend and throw stones and eggs into their house and shout horrible slogans.

5:00to him and his family. And this had a very big impact and I came back home and could not understand what just happened. And it was a very long conversation with my mom. At that point, they were divorced, so my father was not there. You were being forced to denounce him. That must have hurt you personally very deeply if you were that close to this boy. Up to today, I cannot shout in public. This is how much it is. it's very difficult because we were kids. Like it just brought us there, tell us what to shout. And they gave us the stone, they gave us the eggs. And I had no idea why I was doing that.

5:40And to somebody I knew and liked and he was a nice person, you know. You mentioned that your parents had divorced by then. I've read that they split up due to political differences. How did that inform your own outlook on life growing up? It was basically because in Panama, I don't know if it's very well known, but Panama at that point was the place where the Cuban government opened ghost enterprises and they used people from other countries to do business, to go against the embargo, whatever. And I remember very clearly one day that my mother was shouting at my father because a big airplane came to Panama and it was filled with furniture, Chanel perfumes, fashion clothing.

6:37Yeah, and this was to be given to the wife of Raul Castro. And my mother was very idealistic. She did a lot of the revolution things. She went to teach people in the countryside. for free. She did a lot of altruistic stuff. And she was kind of disgusted. So she was a revolutionary and she felt she could see that in that moment the revolution was being betrayed by those in power. Is that the way she saw it? Absolutely. And this is why our father put us in a plane the next day without a bag, without nothing, without time to pick up nothing. And he sent us back to Cuba. Sorry, you were in Panama at this time then, were you?

7:21Were you living in Panama? This is how you knew about this plane with this secret cargo of luxury goods heading to Raul Castro's wife's apartment or wherever it was. My mother was responsible because she's the wife of the ambassador. That was her role, like helping these kind of domestic things. I remember her starting questioning stuff in public about the revolution. And I think my father, now that I'm grown up, I understand that he's a diplomat. Of course, that was not something that would look good on him. So we were sent back. We're talking about a political education at a young age. What about the artistic education that you were receiving as a child?

8:00I mean, did you have sort of artistic, creative ambitions at an early age? Actually, especially in Lebanon, because we couldn't go out so much, I was all the time in my room or my father's office drawing and writing stories about this character that I invented. Who was the character? Yeah, because it was a little girl with her cat, like saving things in the world or whatever, having these adventures in the world. When we came back to Cuba, my mother, she put me in the art school because I like painting, I like drawing, but also it was for her to make sure I was somewhere and not in the street, you know.

8:39She was very artistic and she brought me, when we lived in Paris, she brought me to the Louvre and I was always in museums because of her. That's a unique perspective that you had as a child then, being the daughter of this diplomat who was traveling the world. You were seeing things that most young Cubans would just absolutely have no idea about. And were you aware of that privilege, do you think, at the time? Absolutely not. I was not aware of the privilege until I went back to Cuba. And I started having friends in my classroom and going to their houses. But also, I remember very distinctively one day when I was 11, they said, OK, do drawings, garden or whatever.

9:21And I draw blue flowers. And the teacher was like, this is wrong, painted red. I said, what do you mean? It's like there exists no blue flowers in the world. It doesn't exist. You create it and this is not realistic. And I said, I've seen blue flowers. You know, so I think these little things were like, what's going on here? Like, why are there two different worlds? Why is it so limited and so rigid about what you have to think? For example, I had a lot of difficulty with exams because they gave you, let's say, 15 questions with the answers, from which five will be on the exam. And you have to learn by heart.

10:05And I don't have good memory like that. So I had to understand in order to answer the question. And it was very hard. And I started having these small micro doubts. Also the freedom my mom had with me. The freedom and the love for freedom of expression and to develop yourself as much as you can. And all the people were predisposed to a ceiling that was done for them and didn't dare to go beyond that. They accepted that. But that story about the flower, drawing the blue flower is really interesting because it suggests that your imagination, your creativity was being denied there. They were very strict about realism.

10:51Imagination is not a place to go because imagination is very dangerous in a dictatorship. And they teach you this since you are kids, you know. When you were a teenager, you changed your surname. Why did you change it? I know it's not that radical, it's a little gesture, but I wanted to distance myself from my father and what that meant. Not him as a person, as a father figure, but what he meant. And he was very mad because he understood as a good politician, he understood what was behind that gesture. Your relationship with your father was further strained when he was involved in your interrogation by the secret police.

11:30I think it was in 1993. Could you just explain what happened there? I did this artwork in the shape of a newspaper. They didn't like it. The government didn't like it. They called me first at the Ministry of Culture to reprimand me and to say, don't do this anymore. You broke the law. You're going to have 15 years in jail because you broke the law. And something that really interested to me, because one of the law I broke is to use the resources of the state. and that included the people who printed the newspaper. For me, that was like, what people belong to the state? What is that, no? And then I say, okay, okay, fine.

12:14And then I run to the printer because I was doing the second issue of the newspaper. And I was like, we need to finish this right now, you know. And then we finish it, I distribute it, and then my father was called to reprimand me. He said, come with me. We went to this house and there were two guys and they were asking me so many questions and accusing me of stuff I didn't do. Something that I always have problem with other interrogations is the fact that you are fighting for your story because many times it's them imposing a story they have created for you that suits them. I mean, I always laugh now, but it was not funny at the time.

13:03But they asked me, who told you to do the newspaper? Who's paying you? And I was offended because I'm an artist, so it's my idea. How do you mean I'm doing somebody else's idea? It's my idea. Were you scared during that interrogation? To be honest, that one, I was confused because your parents are supposed to defend you. And then he's bringing me there. I didn't dare to speak with anybody about what happened because I was embarrassed of this situation. I felt very vulnerable. But the worst part is after that, my father talked to me because he wanted me to join the secret police. And then I say, no, I'm not going.

13:50He said, you have to go. And then he brought me to a second one and he left me there and left. A second interrogation. Yes, but this was more like they wanted to know what happened in the art world and then me to become a snitch. They wanted you also to use your skills, yes, because you proved that you had independent thought, that you were industrious, you produced this newspaper. You were somebody that they could use. Yeah. And it was kind of sad because I started not going to the parties with my friend. I started not going to the openings. I started like recruiting myself. So I didn't have nothing to tell them if they call me back.

14:26You know, I have no witness, nothing. I haven't heard anything. So I'm not good for you, you know. And then immediately I start looking to leave the country. For me, it was a big shock. I couldn't talk about that until 2004. Then I went to a therapy session and that came out. And that defined my relationship with the so-called revolution with art. It also defined your relationship with your father, I guess, didn't it? As well, as well. It took you a long time to come to terms with that, to even deal with it. Was that because... Well, yeah, but it was also because he did something that kind of saved my life in a way, because in 2000, he saw one of my performances, the one when I was eating dirt, and he was so mad at me.

15:17He came after me and started telling me, like, you know what you're doing, you know what you're doing. I said, yes, I know what I'm doing. and then a few years later he was out of his job so he was a normal person kind of you have seen the reality of the Cuba where he if you don't have dollars you couldn't buy his heart medicine you know and he actually drunken because many of them ending up drinking a lot he one day came to visit me in my house in old Havana and he was drunk. He brought a bottle. I don't drink. And he said, we didn't fight for this. We didn't fight for a kid without shoes in the street.

15:59We didn't fight for the prostitute in the corner. That's not what I fought for. And I think that for me was great moment. And also he told me that he was proud of what I was doing because when I believe in something, I go against anybody, even him. And he laughed and he died like a week later. So I think that was a very nice ending of that story. You felt like you were reconciled with him at the end. Yeah, too late, but yeah. Your work has frequently referenced the Cuban Revolution. For example, in 1998, there's a performance art piece called Desitiero, meaning displacement, in which you walk through the streets of Havana dressed as an African sculpture in order to draw attention to the empty promises that the Cuban government made to its people during the revolution.

16:51Can you just explain a bit more about that piece and what you were trying to represent there? I used the Nkisi Konde, which is an icon from Congo. And this is an icon that you promise things in exchange for them to give you what you want. If you don't accomplish your promise to them, they will go after you. The spirit will wake up and go after you for the unfulfilled promises. And that's what I did. I represented that and I went out in the streets. Funny thing, it was the day of Fidel Castro's birthday. So it was full of police. And it was beautiful because slowly the Cubans in the street, who might not understood what art was, understood what the message was.

17:34And they start following. And it was like a small kind of procession, you know, of people walking behind me. And that was quite powerful, to be honest. And just explain what you look like, because you're sort of representing this African spirit deity. I basically cover myself with mud and nails. Each nail is a promise or a desire. And it was quite bizarre to have this kind of mud figure walking in the streets. But also it was earth. It was Cuba. Afro-Cuban religion is very, very potent. Everybody understands it in Cuba. But this was quite a provocative act with, as you say, a lot of police around.

18:16What was the reaction on the streets? Were you stopped? I was stopped by the police. And it was very funny because they didn't know what to do with me because they were looking at people walking together. That was the fear, potential protest. And I could not speak because I was covered completely. And one of the kids said to the police, like, what's going on? What's going on? and he say, this is art, because the kid was hearing people say this is art, whatever. I could see he was kind of like in shock, like, oh, they didn't prepare me for this answer. And he said, OK, continue. And then I realized that if I wanted to do political work, I needed to talk to people in politics.

18:58Well, you staged another work a couple of years later in 2000 in La Cabana Fortress, which was a military bunker used for torture and execution of political prisoners after the revolution. An installation piece in which I think people walked through a darkened tunnel. There was mashed sugar cane piled up on the floor and a television monitor showing propaganda videos of Fidel Castro delivering speeches. And naked men sort of bowing obsessively in front of the television. This work was shut down by the Cuban government, I think, wasn't it? Can you explain the significance, what you were trying to say with that piece and what it represented?

19:35It was very funny because the censor came before the opening of the show. And the piece was dark because the idea is that you don't see nothing. The floor is very uneven. You have this fear of darkness. And then you see this light at the end, like the salvation or something. And then the sensor comes and the sensor is like, I know your tricks, Tanya. Put the lights on. I want to see everything. I said, OK. I put it up. So it meant nothing. It's sugar cane and a TV. They didn't put electricity on time just a few minutes before the opening, so the sensor could not see the video. And the performers were not there, so only saw the sugar cane.

20:17So yes, there are ways to go around censorship, but as soon as it happened, they closed it. And I was saved by all the artists, actually, because the Biennial had a lot of international artists, and the electricity of my piece was connected to the whole area. So all the artists from other countries, videos were stopped because of me and they protest. So they had to put the piece up again to please the foreigners. So you had an international audience because this was the Havana Biennial then in the year 2000, which I guess gave you an international reputation there at the start. So were you trying to make a name for yourself?

21:00Were you aware of a reputation that you were building outside Havana or was that not important to you at the time? The piece was done specifically for the foreigners. This is one of the first time in my life, my career, in my work that I do a piece, an artwork, thinking of the audience. And I wanted to do a piece for the foreigners who came to Cuba looking at that light, that salvation light, projecting that video with Fidel and didn't see the Cubans around naked and vulnerable.

21:40Your next choice for this cultural life, Tanya Bruguera, is the Colombian-born artist Doris Saucedo, whose work, like yours, often involves communal effort to explore political and social issues, such as migration and human rights. She's best known for Shibboleth, that installation at the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in 2007, a giant crack down the middle of the hall. When did you first come across the work of Doris Salcedo? Well, in Cuba, we were very aware of artists in Latin America. So I knew about her work and I really like the way she used the poetical in the political in a way that is gentle and brutal at the same time.

22:25You know, that crack at the Tate is one of my favorite pieces ever in the history of art. And it's a difficult reference when you are invited to do the Tate turbine. You know, you have to compete with that. And in a way, after many years, I understood that also that crack is a crack on the institution itself. And this is something that had guided me or helped me to think about politics also in institutions, not only political governments or legislation, but also the role of cultural institutions themselves. Doris Salcedo was a guest on This Cultural Life and she talked about installing that giant crack in Tate Modern.

23:10How has her work inspired you or how do we see her influence in some of the pieces that you've done? You can see it in pieces about institutional critique. Every time I try to work with the subject of the art institution, I think about that piece in a way, you know, how can I create a crack? Well, in 2018, you were commissioned to create another work for the Turbine Hall. And like Doris Alcedo, you also used the floor of that cavernous space. And you covered a large area of the floor of the Turbine Hall, that concrete floor. You covered it with heat-sensitive pads that needed communal effort to create the work.

23:53Just explain what people saw when people walked across those heat-sensitive pads. People saw nothing, which is the contrary of what they're supposed to see. Because I think this piece was about invisibility and the invisibility of immigrants and the invisibility of the accomplishment of immigrants. So they saw a very shiny floor. They felt sound that is an infrasound. You can feel it in your body, but you cannot hear it. It's like subsonic bass, wasn't it, that was booming out in the Turbine Hall. And also you enter to a small room and you start crying for no reason. We should just unpack what you've said there, because when you enter the exhibition, you cry for no reason.

24:39Well, there was a reason because you were funneling visitors through a small room in which there was a sort of a kind of a noxious substance being pumped into the room, which made you involuntarily weep. and then into the turbine hall where there are these heat-sensitive pads. Can you just explain? You say people saw nothing. I thought the idea was that when people walked across the heat-sensitive pads, it sort of almost illuminated from above the face of a Syrian migrant to Britain. The work can only be seen through the behavior of the audience. The audience needed to do their part. They needed to go touch the floor, put their body against the floor to hit the floor to discover the image.

25:24And I think for me that was very important because I was thinking about only together we can make things happen. And it was at the same time an effort, a collective effort to see the immigrant. But I think for me that project was about the responsibility of people, what is happening. The piece about crying, supposedly with nothing provoking that but a chemical, was actually my response to back then people on Facebook saying like, like, like and doing victual signaling to things happening in the world. But what else are you doing other than putting like? Virtue signaling, showing that they care about issues.

26:12You say that that piece was challenging for the audience. It was challenging in that they had to do the work themselves. They had to join in. They were collaborators in a Tania Bruguera piece. Can you see why some people were disappointed with the work as well? Because they thought, well, there's nothing happening. There's nothing to see. And why should I be doing the work when somebody has been commissioned in the name of art to entertain us, to illuminate us? Absolutely. I think in a way museums more and more are seeing audience as clients. instead of guests to their world. And in that sense, that project had another element, which is normally the turbine hall usually is one big project everybody can focus on, and this is it.

27:00You look at it, you like it, you don't like it, you interact or not. And in my case, it was, it's not about me, it's about you doing the work. And I think that was a little adjustment for the audience. and then once they get it, they start playing with it. But this was the second time that you had done a work in the Turbine Hall ten years earlier in 2008, which was the year after Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth. You staged a performance piece in the Turbine Hall which involved metropolitan police officers on horses forcing visitors to create a space. They were being moved back by the police horses.

27:36Ladies and gentlemen, can you please move away from this area? That white horse, please. That white place.

27:46Ladies and gentlemen, can you move, please? Was that a work about institutional power and control? It talks at so many layers. It talks, as you said, about the institutional power, but mainly it was a reference to the news because it was about seeing things in the news happening somewhere else and try to understand what people feel in front of that aggression, in front of that power being imposed on you, where you can rehearse your reaction towards that event happening to you. And maybe next time you sit on your TV and you look at somebody, I don't know, in another country being forced by horses to be controlled, you know what that means.

28:33You know how it feels. So it was a reference to control by police, riot police in situations which are often tense and dangerous and violent. But in your case, it was these police horses which were sort of gently coercing the visitors back because obviously health and safety played a part. Also, the other question, which I remember seeing that piece and being so confused as to what was going on. But my other thought was, are these real police officers? Are these real police horses? How did you manage to persuade the Metropolitan Police to get involved in such a conceptual work of art? There were actual Metropolitan Police and I was very lucky because somebody working in the Tate worked before in the police and knew somebody and he loved the idea.