The least indicated here. After meaningless editions and podcast readings, Osikán and its creation nurseries, the Living away festival and the Open Room, we, the least indicated, are still here. In a long present of fugitive creative projects, mutants, networking, alternative and interdependent production dynamics at the edges of the Cuban scene and its institutions. Of transgressions, impertinences, impurities.
We are still here thinking about how to collaborate together how to build a community, how to care and take care of ourselves, how our gestures and artistic practices can generate links, how to disobey the rules, how to weave bridges between the Cuban inside and outside.
Martha Luisa Hernández Cadenas | Martica Minipunto (Cuba, 1991) is a writer and performer who studied at the Universidad de las Artes, ISA. Her Performing Arts processes enhance transdisciplinary and experimental collaborations. Some of her recent creations are: Una ópera china (2018), Las fundadoras (2019) and No soy unicornio (2019-201). She has published Días de hormigas (Ediciones Unión, 2018), Los vegueros (Colección Sureditores, 2019) and La puta y el hurón (Éditions Fra, 2020). She has participated in international programs as Experimenta Sur (Colombia, 2019), Panorama Sur (Argentina, 2019), Festival Sâlmon (Barcelona, 2020), Festival Poesía en Voz Alta, UNAM (México, 2021), Festival Santiago a Mil (Chile, 2021), Festival de las Letras de Bilbao (Bilbao, 2021), La Serre Art-Vivans (Montreal, 2018), Young Curators Academy (Herbstsalon, Maxim Gorki, Berlin, 2019) and Watch and Talk (Zürcher Theater Spektakel, 2020), among others. She is founder of the independent editorial „ediciones sinsentido“ and coordinated a scenic laboratory called Laboratorio Escénico de Experimentación Social, LEES from 2016-2020.
William Ruiz Morales is a Cuban artistic director and dramaturg based in Miami. He graduated from Theater Sciences at the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana in 2007 and in 2016 completed the Research Cycle at P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels. In recent years, his main interest is starting conversations with artists from different practices and disciplines to search ways of collaboration. As a result, William has developed creative partnerships with composers, choreographers, and theater-makers. Among some of the pieces that resulted from those exchanges are Nina Fukuoka’s Still Life #31 (2019), ∑2n Ensayo de Duración (2017), an immersive durational event with Gabriela Burdsall, and Sharing Home (2016), a cross-disciplinary installation with Naïma Mazic. William has created platforms for nurturing and presenting the work of other artists. Some of those are: Living Away (2018-2021), tubo de ensayo/Laboratorio Ibsen in collaboration with Yohayna Hernández and Espacios Ibsen, a festival whose last editions were co-directed with Martha Luisa Hernández. William has taught workshops and presented his work in Cuba, France, Mexico, Norway, Belgium and the US.
Yohayna Hernández González is a dramaturg at Osikán – vivero de creación (a nursery of creation) and interested in the relationship between experience and language. Her work moves between research, creation and thought. She is co-coordinator of the networks for research-creation Tubo de Ensayo (2006-2012) and Laboratorio Escénico de Experimentación Social LEES (2012-2020). In Cuba, her practice moved between teaching (University of the Arts of Cuba and International School of Film and Television of San Antonio de los Baños, Cuba) and editing (editor-in-chief of Tablas, a specialized magazine for Performing Arts, 2010-2017, and member of the Tablas-Alarcos Publishing House, 2004-2018). Since her arrival in Montreal in 2019, she has participated in the Dramaturgical Clinics of the TransAmériques festival (FTA 2019 and 2021) and has worked as a dramaturgy assistant at LA SERRE-arts vivants (2019-2020). As dramaturg, she is interested in the multiple crosses between reality and fiction and has accompanied several creations of documentary theater and Performing Arts (Luz:terre by choreographer Sonia Busto, Montreal, 2021; Granma, Trombones de La Habana by Rimini Protokoll, Berlin, 2019; I love Madrid by Osikán, Madrid, 2019; BaqueStriBois by Osikán, Havana, 2015). Currently, she works as editor of the critical notebooks dedicated to the Performing Arts in the art and politics magazine Liberté and as co-coordinator of the Dramaturgical Clinics of the FTA 2022.
José Ramón Hernández, Afro-Cuban indiscipline creator, curator and cultural agent. Artistic director of Osikán – vivero de creación (creation nursery). His creative research explores Afro-descendant rituality, personal and collective memory, peripheral bodies and the construction of living cartographies; in working with non-fictional documents, in the borders between reality and fiction and in the strategies of the sensitive to stimulate and mediate social processes and communities. He has received important awards including the Villanueva Award 2016 of the National Union of Artists of Cuba UNEAC and International Association of Theater Critics and the Cold Air Award 2016 of the Association of young writers and artists of Cuba for the work BaqueStriBois. His work has been shown, among others, at deSingel, Antwerp (2020), Pumpenhaus Münster (2020), Naves Matadero Centro Internacional de Artes Vivas, Madrid (2019), Museo del Chopo of UNAM, México (2018), Festival Santiago a Mil, Santiago de Chile (2018), Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro Adelante, Heidelberg (2017), Maxim Gorki Theater Berlín (2019), Monument Montreal (2018) and in New York (2014 - 2016).