Juan-Si González: Looking for Cuba Inside

Years ago, Cuban-born artist Juan-Si González traveled through Missouri and stumbled on a sign: “Burger King, Cuba, 3 Miles.” The ironic juxtaposition led him to investigate. He later found 16 small towns called Cuba in the United States, most founded around the time of the Spanish-American War. Born out of that surprising discovery, Looking for Cuba Inside is a multimedia installation that moves like a travel diary along the walls of the gallery. It is a montage of documentary images and an absurd chronicle, oscillating constantly between memory, reality, reportage, and fiction.

The installation includes archival photographs taken of the island nation, and documentary photographs from González’s visits to the American towns, as well as the intervals between, fragments of road maps, images extracted from Google satellite, climate records, built objects, and videos and texts from his navigation diary. The result is a visual narrative of the artist’s search for Cuba within his adopted country and himself. His obsession with visiting and documenting these towns is a practice of self- healing and a way to recuperate a sense of place through the creation of a new imaginary, psychological territory.