By Maribel Acosta Damas on November 13, 2024, from the 15th Havana Biennial
In 1961, while Operation Peter Pan was bleeding the Cuban nation of its children and their families, while the country had just fought off the Bay of Pigs invasion, the nascent Revolution – as a counter current to its destiny – was proposing what today can be called great foundational epics: the Literacy Campaign and the Cultural Crusade.The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) had already been founded in 1959. A year later, the Cinemateca de Cuba was established under the direction of Héctor García Mesa, and at his proposal, at the end of 1961, the first mobile cinema truck was created, which began to operate in the former province of Havana.
To everyone’s surprise, it turned out to be a real success and demand grew for other regions of the country. Then, in March 1962, the Department of Cinematographic Divulgation of the ICAIC was constituted and forty young people from the former six Cuban provinces were trained to learn how to drive the truck, operate the projection equipment and its attachments; in addition to preparing themselves to take the cinema to schools, communities, camps and isolated places.
Thus, the mobile cinema became an extraordinary socio-communicational experience that operated for more than 20 years. Unfortunately, by 1988 the last copies of films in this format were received, and by 1991, already in the so-called Special Period, the mobile cinema disappeared due to fuel restrictions for the transports in charge of its management.
Today the Cuban province of Camagüey treasures the last mobile cinema truck on the island. Its projectionist and driver, Alberto Cedeño, started working in that job when he was 22 years old and it continued. In that truck are preserved, by Cedeño himself, the dreams of a time and a utopia. And when Sonia Cunliffe discovered it, an exchange of affections, astonishment and certainties begins, which gave definitive form to this work.
Hence, Peruvian artist Sonia Cunliffe’s project Operation Peter Peter: from absence to absence, conceived from the horizon of Cuban mobile cinema, expresses the will to compose affective networks between creators and audiences, in order to build collaborative projects “beyond the limits of their respective disciplines,” and to develop “actions that allow mediating between all strata and facets of society and culture.” An itinerant Peter Pan is proposed (also as a symbolic remake of the event and the legend of the animated character) to rethink the historical story from the present experience and creative memory.
The artist, video and “projector” in the old Camagüey mobile cinema truck that travels to Havana -as a mobile cinema- takes her screen to different scenarios of the city, generates reciprocities and offers the audiovisual material to be copied, intervened and socialized in the multiple screens of the audiences she comes in contact with.
The work is an affront to the impossible. In this Sonia Cunliffe is a master with a capital “Maestra” because that old driver from the small Camagüey town of Lugareño, who is still alive and who has taken care of his truck all his life, was found by the artist and allowed her to immerse herself in a “small event” of the 1960s in Cuba. And Cunliffe, as she does with every stretch of memory turns it into a journey through the veins of the island.
Appeals, Impulsa… Rediscovers Cuban audiences from its legacy of mobile cinema and social mobilization, and counts on forging – as a whole – logics of inverse technological ecology in multi-screen time: that is, socio-cultural and emotional sustainability for the 21st century.
OPERATION PETER PAN: From Absence to Absence
Cine móvil presents OPERACION PETER PAN DE AUSENCIA EN AUSENCIA, by Peruvian artist Sonia Cunliffe as part of the opening day of the Havana Biennial, Friday, November 15 at 10 am at the Wifredo Lam Contemporary Art Center.
The video artwork gathers, as an emotional and tense intervention, the result of an arduous investigation of the historical event in which 14,000 Cuban children were sent by their parents to the United States in the 1960s in the face of the propaganda that they were going to lose their parental rights with the Revolution. Life proved that many of them were never reunited with their families, and for those who did, the experience was a deep wound that never healed.
In turn, this eight-minute video art will be screened in the last mobile cinema truck, which, preserved in Camaguey and in collaboration with the ICAIC and the film department of that province, is already in Havana to be part of the visual arts event on the island. The truck, prepared to project inside it, will function as a mobile movie theater that will travel around different parts of the city so that audiences can get on it, watch, listen and reflect on the events, as a memory re-signified for these times and the future.
Before arriving in Havana, the Peruvian artist traveled to the Camagüey town of Lugareño, where the projectionist and driver of this truck lives. There, a tribute was paid to Alberto Sedeño, surrounded by his neighbors, and the documentary Por primera vez (For the First Time) by Octavio Cortázar, another great Cuban filmmaker who recorded the arrival of cinema to previously forgotten communities for the first time in the 1960s, was shown there.
Sonia Cunliffe is a renowned artist of archival art and the commitment to the validity of memory and humanism. Her works Documentos extraviados. Children of Chernobyl in Cuba and The Crossroads of the New Man, a Utopia Seen in Time, both about events and imaginary memories of the Cuban Revolution, have had great repercussions inside and outside the island.
Source: Cuba en Resumen